On Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:15:05 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > 4) Assumes people aren't deliberately fiddling the figures. Yeah, that > would be correct. We're in the realm of conspiracy theories here... does > anyone seriously think that browser stats are THAT important that they'd > go to multiple web servers with deceitful hits?
Back in the day, not that many years ago, when it looked like Internet Explorer would never dip below 90% market share and web developers coded for IE quirks instead of standards as a matter of course, I used to fantasize of writing a Windows virus that (apart from propagating) did nothing but change the user-agent string on IE. It would have been awesome to witness the consternation among web developers. But thanks to the EU doing what the US DOJ refused to do, and the grass- roots popularity of Firefox (plus a fewer well-known even if not often used browsers like Safari and Opera), and then Google's scarily efficient way they can capture hearts and minds on the Internet, IE's market share has been whittled away to the point that there are places in the world where IE is a minority browser. A large minority, it is true, but still a minority. Now, if only we could convince web users that having your browser execute untrusted code downloaded from the Internet is not such a good idea, supposed sandbox or not. What the world needs is a virus that silently removes Javascript and Flash from browsers... -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
