TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Some site updates for a change... the other night I spent some time optimizing a few things in the site layout, changed some of the background colors for better readability/looks, also the thin yellow line around the white content area is gone, you may need to clear your browser's cache to see the changes correctly, next on my list is making the site a bit more 800x600 compatible specially the frontpage, I know things have been a bit messed up for 800 users for a while now.

Another change is that pops around TS should be pretty much gone with just a very small percentage of users getting them, for example: let's imagine we serve ~15,000 unique users on a given day, approximately only 500 of all those users will get one pop under, not that bad IMHO.

Looking at TS stats, I must say I'm very impressed with the adoption of Mozilla, until a couple of months ago usage numbers for the two major alternative browsers, Mozilla/Netscape and Opera were pretty low among TS visitors, usually IE was leading with a stunning 95% however Mozilla seems to have gained a few points with some 9-10%, Opera 4% and the rest going to IE.

Although some fanatics won't agree, I believe Mozilla has taken the lead against Opera, a few days ago they released the Mozilla Firebird browser with a revamped look and feel, my personal favourite alternative browser although I keep using IE as default.

Since Opera defaults to identify itself as MSIE6.0 I wonder how reliable those numbers are?

And how does an Opera browser is identified as itself then?

With Opera you have the option to choose what it will identify itself as...
By hitting <F12> you get a quick preference menu, from which you can choose, among other things, if it should identify itself as:
Opera, Mozilla 5.0, Mozilla 4.78, Mozilla 3.0 and IE 5.0
This is with the 6.03 (yes I know I should update), so I guess they've updated the choices in 7.01...

Opera, Mozilla 5.0, Mozilla 4.78, Mozilla 3.0, MSIE 6.0 for Opera 7.10 which I bought not long ago.