Internet Explorer use collapsed on TechCrunch web site

TechCrunch computing technology news blog web site published usage statistics for various web browsers today.

IE has plunged to the number 4 position, coming in behind even Safari now.  Yes, fewer people visit the site with IE than Safari.

Here are the ranksings, from most frequently used to least.

1. Firefox (2-in-5)
2. Chrome (1-in-5)
3. Safari (1-in-5)
4. Internet Explorer (1-in-5)

The Firefox, Chrome, and Safari web browsers share a high degree of compatibility because they all strive to adhere to W3 standards for HTML, CSS, SVG, etc.  Microsoft does not, as its very low Acid3 compatibility score shows.

The lack of support for things like SVG and so on is starting to take its toll.  The other 3 browser makers will likely introduce WebGL 3D graphics API support next year.  Microsoft does not have a road map announced yet for WebGL or SVG.

No TABLE support in Google Wave yet

Google Wave seems like a pretty nice little service.

So far, it has not exactly rocked my world.  I use it a little for brainstorming and organizing.

I usually hit a wall when I try to be really detail-oriented with it.  I have been using HTML for over a decade and a half to do that.  I am frustrated by Wave in that it cannot do things that are pretty simple in HTML:  tables, numbered lists, and so forth.

Not being able to do tables is particularly bad.  Outlines are okay for simple stuff.  However, when you are dealing with rich information, you need tables.

I understand it is probably possible to do this by programming a Java gadget.  However, this is not super appealing for several reasons.

It adds an extra dependency, making it somewhat brittle in a couple of ways.
It will be obsolete and difficult to convert from when Google finally adds table support.
It is an extra program to have to write and maintain.

Another thing I discovered recently has to do with tags in Google Wave.  You cannot edit them!  As far as I can tell, once you tag a wave you have no way to edit or delete tags.  It just supports adding more tags.  Tags are not delimited by commas when you enter them either.  The data entry field asks for tags, but assumes you will only put one tag in that field at a time.  Tags are not well-implemented at all at the moment.

Google wave still needs more work to make it a super useful tool in my opinion.  You get out of it what you put into it, so long as you do not put very much into it.  This contrasts sharply to other technologies:  word processing, databases, spreadsheets, email, etc.

Google introducing a new, open source web browser

Google has announced a new web browser called Google Chrome.

The browser is open source and borrows code from 2 other popular, successful web browsers: Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox.

First impressions on Open Social API from Google

I was going to take a pass on looking at the new Open Social API from Google for a couple of weeks.

I changed my mind this weekend and decided to at least find the Open Social home page at Google. If you have not looked into Open Social yet, you might want to read this post just to set your expectations,

It is very different than I expected. It is a Javascript API. You do all of your application development using whatever standard web technologies you want.

The programming itself you do in Javascript.

The UI your application targets is HTML.

I had expected a UI API but apparently you directly program your open social app to hammer out its own HTML.

Watch the video on the Open Social API home page.

The Google Spokesman introduces the API by showing you actual code. The image is too small to read the letters but if you know the Javascript syntax you can get a general feel for the API. The documentation lets you see the details anyway.

The three API modules are:

1. people - friends, etc.
   
2. activities
3. persistence
   

Next comes the meat of the presentation. Representatives from Ning, Flickster, Sales.com, and many other social network service & software companies are are featured. They each describe and demo a brand new feature for their site that they created with the Open Social API.

An interesting surprise at the end was find that MySpace is participating in Open Social.