pingdom - ReadWriteWeb

Report: 71% of Internet Users Run Latest Version of Their Browsers. Do You?

Frederic Lardinois — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:52:11 -0800

Web apps that rely on features that only modern browsers can offer are becoming a standard feature on the Internet. Sadly, though, the fact that a lot of users don't regularly upgrade their browsers (or that their IT departments don't allow them to upgrade) complicates matters greatly for those developers who want to use the latest and greatest features of modern browser technologies like HTML5. The latest data from Pingdom and StatCounter, however, notes that a surprisingly large number of users (71%) already run the latest official versions of their browser.

]]> Thanks to Chrome's built-in update mechanism, the latest stable version of Google's browser (Chrome 7) now powers 90.6% of all Chrome users' Internet experience. Given Chrome's fast release cycles and the wide availability of beta and developer builds, chances are that a large number of those who don't run Chrome 7 actually run even more up-to-date releases of it.

It doesn't come as a surprise that users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer haven't upgraded to the latest version of their browser yet. Only 60.2% of IE users are running version 8 yet. The total number of IE users has been dropping for a while now and has recently dipped under 50%, but IE remains the most often used browser on the Web (we hesitate to call it the most "popular" browser). The upcoming release of IE9, though, could prove to be a turning point, as it is faster and far more standards compliant than previous versions. For the time being, 14% of Internet users are still running IE6, which was released on August 27, 2001.

Do You Run the Latest Version of Your Browser?

Are you using the latest and greatest version of your browser of choice? Do you use Google Chrome's canary builds and the latest beta version of Firefox 4 to stay on top of things? Or are you still stuck on IE6 at work because your admin locked down your machine and your company's internal Web apps still only run on IE6? Let us know in the comments. ]]> Discuss

Pingdom Now Offers Free Website Monitoring

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:31:02 -0800

Over the last few years, Pingdom has established itself as a well-regarded uptime monitoring service, but until now, its services were only available to paying customers. Today, however, Pingdom launched a free version of its service. The free service offers all the features of Pingdom's paid accounts, though users are limited to monitoring just one website or server. This free account also comes with up to 20 SMS alerts per months, which is a nice perk, given that you probably want to know that your site or server is down as soon as possible.

]]> Pingdom gives users a large number of options. You can, for example, choose to have it ping your server anywhere between once per minute or once per hour. Pingdom is also flexible enough to be able to ping specific ports on your server and also check the state of your SMPT, POP3, or IMAP email server - though with the free account, you can obviously only choose one of these.

In addition to its free service, Pingdom also offers a basic account for $9.95 per month, which allows users to monitor up to 5 sites. The company also offers a business account for $39.95 per month, which can check up to 30 sites. The basic account also comes with 20 free SMS alerts, while business account users can receive up to 200 alerts by text message.

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Social Network Downtime in 2008: LinkedIn Up - Twitter Down

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:25:25 -0800

According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.

]]> Out of the 15 major social networks in Pingdom's study, only five achieved an uptime of 99.9% or better: Facebook (99.92%), MySpace (99.94%), Classmates.com (99.95%), Xanga (99.95%), and Imeem (99.95%).

Twitter and LinkedIn

Twitter saw 84% of its downtime in the first half of 2008 and suffered no major outages in the second half of the year. Even though Twitter continues its rapid growth, it has clearly managed to gets its infrastructure under control.

The reliability of LinkedIn, however, is slipping. With every new quarter, LinkedIn's downtime increased. Clearly, LinkedIn's continuous growth is responsible for some of these outages. In terms of total hours of downtime , LinkedIn's 45.8 hours were only trumped by Twitter's 84 hours, though Friendster (43.8 hours) and Reunion.com (41.9 hours) were only marginally better off in 2008.

Other Stats

According to Pingdom, Reunion.com suffered the longest continuous outage, with close to 10 hours on March 29. Facebook's longest continuous outage only lasted for less than half an hour.

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Two-Way Web joins Web 2.0 Workgroup - spicy noodles celebration follows

Richard MacManus — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:05:39 -0800

The Web 2.0 Workgroup has expanded to 4 blogs (and more to come!), with the addition of Dave Winer's Two-Way Web blog. This is awesome news, because the Two-Way Web site was a defining influence on me when I first started blogging.

Dave was around at the TechCrunch house later in the day and then we all went out for spicy noodles, a famous Scripting News dinner. And boy were those spicy noodles nice! My Silicon Valley initiation is now complete :-) Here's a picture of all the Web 2.0 Workgroup members, plus Gabe from memeorandum, at Jing Jing:

From left to right: Gabe, Dave, me, Mike, Fred

Web 2.0: Land of Opportunity, or Land of Absurdity?

Richard MacManus — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 00:09:45 -0800

I'm sensing a backlash about the rising VC interest in Web 2.0. Mike Rundle takes aim at Flock in his post subtitled "The Leaning Tower of Buzz". He thinks Flock is only useful to the blog crowd and doesn't have a viable business model. Bart from Flock disagrees, saying in the comments that they do have a plan to make money and the market will decide. Then I went and read Kevin Burton's post, entitled Dot Bomb All Over Again?. Kevin blames "tech reliance on Venture Capital" for what he thinks is too much hype and too little value. Om Malik specifically references YouTube, a video-sharing service that got $5 million in funding, and says the "Web 2.0 funding frenzy is in full effect."

Ben Barren (in between subtle mocking of my paper-based millionaire status) calls all of this an "emerging land of absurdity where a live prototype that can be replicated in 90 days, that has no business model or revenue is considered a business."

So what's my opinion on all this? Well I'm right in the middle of Silicon Valley as I write this post. I've had a great time over here and I've felt lots of energy and enthusiasm from all the Web people I've met here. I've seen a Flock employee sleeping on the floor of the garage-office Flock occupies in Palo Alto, in mid-afternoon, due to overwork no doubt. People are putting in a lot of effort to build new Web-based businesses. It's OK to be slightly skeptical about the long-term value, but I have to say I still think it's a land of opportunity rather than absurdity. Admittedly I'm a pretty naive person when it comes down to it - or maybe just happy (as the Nirvana song goes).

OK so there's a lot of hype. So the VCs are throwing money around. So get to work. Build something Web-based that mainstream people will need and want. Now's the time to do it.