Admit it, you have an iPad! And you lug it around with you in the data focal point, when checking your servers, when troubleshooting, and all the time, really.

Simply place, we know many sysadmins use iPads (and additional types of tablets as well) in their daily work. So, to inspire you, we have tested a bunch of apps for iPad that we reckon you will find fascinating.

After a rigorous selection-process (and input from our Chirrup followers), we can now present to you 10 fantastic iPad apps for sysadmins.

1Password

The best solution for storing and managing all your logins, passwords, and additional things you want to keep for yourself is 1Password ($14.99). It is available for iOS (both iPad and iPhone), Android, as well as Mac and Windows. And the best thing is that it syncs between platforms.

Yes, we know, the screenshot doesn’t say much, but it’s a bit hard taking a screenshot of an app full of secrets

Database Pro

In many situations when you need access to a database, you could probably use a web browser and PHPMyAdmin or similar, but an app makes the work a bit quicker and simpler. We reckon the makers of Database Pro ($4.99) could work on the interface a bit, but there’s not too much to complain in this area. The app supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL, so you have a choice. It also supports SSH tunneling, which we obviously reckon is fantastic.

Dropbox

Of course, there’s Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, Box, and many additional similar services but we really like Dropbox the best. And with the iPad app installed you have access to no matter what is stored in your Dropbox, you can download files from the online account, as well as upload new files. It just makes you so much more mobile, and even if the iPad’s storage is limited, with access to Dropbox your storage is virtually limitless.

Depending on what you need to store in your online box, EverNote may be an option for you.

FTP On The Go

For many of us, FTP is something we use on a daily basis and, although there are many FTP apps for iPad, we really like FTP On The Go ($6.99). It has a pleasant interface and advanced functionality, all rolled into one app. The built-in text editor is not much to boast in this area, but for a instant edit of a configuration file or script, it’ll do.

iSSH

An SSH client is a must-have, and we reckon the best one for iPad is iSSH ($9.99). You can save profiles for different connections, it supports VT100 emulation, configurable macros, programmable gestures, and more. It can also function as a tunneled VNC client for remote control.

IT Tools

IT Tools ($4.99) is certainly not the prettiest app to look at, but it does the trick. You get tools for continuous traceroute, DNS lookup, whois, ping, routing tables, and more.

Mercury web browser

It may seem weird that we include a web browser in our iPad toolkit but the fact is that you can do so much better than movable Safari. With Mercury Web Browser Pro ($0.99), you get improved tabbed browsing, download manager, sync with Firefox, Dropbox integration, themes, and much more. In small, it makes your web browsing experience much more productive and enjoyable.

Remoter Pro

Remote control apps is a category full of fantastic options in the App Store, but our pick is Remoter Pro ($10.99). It is a VNC client, but also supports RDP, SSH, Telnet, and more. Basically, nearly no matter what you’d want to control remotely, you can do with this app.

Textastic

If coding is your thing, whether it is config files, scripts or something else, Textastic ($9.99) is a fantastic app. There’s highlighting for nearly any language you can imagine, and all sorts of options and settings for getting just the right look and feel. Throw in support for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and Dropbox, and you’ve got one fantastic text editor.

Special mention: Diet Coda

Although this app is not available until tomorrow (24th of May), we felt it deserved a mention here. Not just because the cool guys at Panic made it, but because it genuinely looks pretty darn cool.

Diet Coda ($9.99) promises to be a world-class web code editing app, with syntax highlighting, remote-only editing, contextual keyboard, and built-in SSH terminal. Perhaps it’s the all-in-one iPad app we’ve been waiting for.

So we’ll stab our necks out and included it in our list even though we’ve not tried it yet.

Wait, sysadmins, there’s more

We posted a question on Chirrup asking what apps sysadmins could urge and we got a lot of fantastic answers. Here’s a list of what Pingdom’s Chirrup followers urge:

• BugBox (Free)
• Excellent example ($2.99)
• Cisco AnyConnect (Free)
• Jump Desktop ($14.99)
• OPS1 (Free)
• Prompt ($7.99)
• Prowl ($2.99)
• Screens ($19.99)
• Server Admin Remote ($9.99)
• Workgroup Manager Remote ($7.99)
• Wunderkit (Free)

What’s your favorite iPad app?

Of course, for many of these apps there is an iPhone as well as an iPad version. We have though not picked any apps that only exist for iPhone. And we know there are lots of you using Android and Windows tablets as well, and we’ll get back to you with some suggested apps in a future article.

But for now, if you’re a sysadmin and use an iPad in your work, what apps do you depend on? Share with us in the comments not more than.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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10 fantastic iPad apps for sysadmins

We’re going to show you a chart that confirms what some of you by now suspected, and Microsoft probably isn’t too pleased in this area. A lot of public only use Internet Explorer because they have to at the office, but at home they use a different web browser.

On workdays around 35.1% of all web browsing is done with IE. On weekends that number consistently drops to around 32.8%.

So if IE usage dips every weekend, which browsers do public use instead? For the most part, Google’s Chrome. On weekends, IE and Chrome usage is pretty much neck and neck these days. You could say that for home use, they are now on equal terms.

There are also noticeable increases for Apple’s Safari during weekends, presumably made up of public who use Macs at home and PCs at work. Opera also sees an increase on weekends. We couldn’t find a clear pattern for Mozilla’s Firefox.

The above chart shows daily usage, which was the most detailed measurement we could get our hands on.

Worth noting is that if anyone were to make an even more detailed chart completely isolating office hours and at-home hours, the differences seen above would be even more pronounced. As it is now, some home usage is naturally included in the weekday stats.

Still, just dividing weekdays and weekends, we get a clear pattern. Averaging the weekdays and weekends for the period Development 1 – April 26 (same as for the initially chart), we get the following:

So how in this area individual countries? As you can imagine, in some countries the pattern is very pronounced, even more so than what you can see here, while in some it’s not quite as noticeable. And in some countries this pattern doesn’t show at all.

The trend when you view the world as a whole, though, is impossible to ignore. If IE’s hold on the workplace were to lessen, it would be in honest distress. It’s by now lost a lot of ground.

Final note: Since this article shows web browser “market share,” some of the increase shown for additional browsers is simply an effect of less IE usage.

Data source: StatCounter, based on visitor stats from 3+ million websites.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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IE, the office browser – Used significantly less at home

There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most well loved browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser data from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to realize more than 50% market share.

Chrome is still on the rise, IE is still shrinking

The web browser market, spanning January 2011 to January 2012, looked like this:

The clear trend during 2011 was that IE was shedding users, as was Firefox. Chrome was gaining users, as was Safari. But with the very small market shares for Safari and Opera, the changes for those browsers aren’t really visible in the chart.

Chrome by now passed Firefox in November last year, just as our prediction from July 2011 said it would.

When will Chrome topple IE?

Then there are two fascinating questions we face:

1. When will Chrome overtake IE to be the number 1 used web browser worldwide? Our prediction made in July 2011 was that it would happen in June 2012.
2. When will Chrome rise above 50% usage worldwide?

To answer these questions we look a year into the future, to January 2013, and predict how each of the browsers will fare. We based this prediction on the average monthly change in market share each browser had during January 2011 to January 2012, which was:

• +5.08% – Chrome
• +2.27% – Safari
• -0.13% – Opera
• -1.69% – IE
• -1.75% – Firefox

As you can see, this means IE, Firefox, and Opera will keep slipping, and Chrome and Safari will keep increasing. As with any similar prediction, there is a huge element of uncertainty here, especially given how quick moving the web browser market is. Also, we don’t take into significance whether the usage for each month equals 100%, because the change is calculated for each browser unconnectedly.

When we add our prediction to the actual numbers up until this point, we get this chart:

If our prediction comes right, Chrome will by May 2012 be neck and neck with IE, and by June, it will have full the lead. Note that this would be right on footstep with our prediction from last year.

Even more fascinating, by the end of the year, Chrome will be approaching the 50% mark and by early next year, it will have passed it. It’s very likely that, at some point, the increase for Chrome will level off, but we reckon this will not affect it reaching over 50% market share. At worst (for Google), a leveling off in the popularity will only delay what is all but inevitable at this point.

The web browser war continues

Any which way you turn this, it’s clear that Google Chrome is on a roll and that it’s set to overtake IE after just having conquered Firefox. When it will happen is just a matter of time, and we look forward to seeing how the web browser war will develop. Obviously the progression for the browsers we have predicted cannot continue forever, as it’s regular each month. There will be events experience and new products introduced – both hardware and software – that will affect the usage.

But nonetheless, we’re of course chuffed that our prediction from last year in this area when Chrome would pass Firefox turned out to be right. Now we’ll just have to wait and see how our predictions in this area Chrome’s total dominance, reaching 50%, will turn out.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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Google Chrome could exceed 50% market share by end of 2012 (study)

Do you have an itch when it comes to how your web browser works? Perhaps there’s some functionality you want from the browser that it doesn’t support, or it does something in a particular way that drives you nuts.

Probability are there is an extension to remedy that situation.

We have gone over most of the extensions available for Apple’s Safari web browser and come up with recommendations for 15 extensions that we reckon you should try.

You find all the extensions in Apple’s Safari Extension Gallery. We can’t link to each individual extension, unfortunately, because the way Apple has built the site, so you have to go to the gallery and click your way to the extension you want.

Firebug Lite

The must-have extension for anyone doing web development and design is now available for Safari. FireBug sits as a button in the toolbar and with one click it opens up a panel at the bottom of the Safari dialogue box. In that panel, you can inspect the page’s HTML and CSS code, any script that is running, and the DOM.

MLB

If you are a baseball fan, this is the extension for you. It sits as a toolbar at the top of your Safari page, which displays the latest scores from sports meeting in progress as well as recently completed sports meeting.

BuiltWith

This is another one for the developers and anyone feeling the need to find out how a site is place together. On the page you want to investigate, just click the BuiltWith button in the toolbar and it will show you a small dialogue box with in rank in this area what technologies that site is running on.

GCalNoScroll

Are you tired of Google Calendar scrolling all over the house when you access it with Safari? Then get GCalNoScroll and see scrolling no more. If you work with Google Calendar a lot, this will save your sanity.

Stop/Top off toolbar button

If you don’t like clicking the stop/top off function in the address bar, this will give you a proper button in the toolbar instead.

ClickToFlash

ClickToFlash can preclude Safari from automatically launching plugins for media playback, like Adobe Flash. Instead of the Flash movie you get a placeholder you can click on if you want to load that particular content. ClickToFlash can also replace Flash with HTML5 alternatives in many places.

JavaScript Blacklist

You may be able to protect your privacy a bit better and minimize redirect hell if you preclude some JavaScripts from loading. This plugin gives you the ability to check scripts from loading from certain domains. You can add and edit the list of domains in the plugin’s settings.

Tasty Safari

If you’re a Tasty user, click the button in the toolbar and you can save the URL to your account: simple peasy.

EverNote

EverNote is our favorite digital shoebox service. With this plugin you’re just a right-click away from capturing a full web page, URL, a selection of text, or a picture, all going straight into your EverNote account.

Validator

As many excellent extensions, Validator is a one-trick pony. Just browse to the page you want to check and click the button in the toolbar. Validator then feeds the URL to the W3C’s XHTML and CSS validator, which parses the code, and displays any errors and warnings it finds.

Rotten Tomatoes

If you find time to mind movies then Rotten Tomatoes is the house to check out what others reckon of the movie you plot to mind. With this extension you get a toolbar with a dedicated Rotten Tomatoes search box and some of the latest news from the site.

Ghostery

Want to keep at least some sense of privacy when browsing the web? If so, install Ghostery, which helps you check scripts, metaphors and iframes on sites you browse to.

Google Toolbar

No, it’s not an official Google product but it might as well be. You get a new toolbar with one-click access to most of Google’s services. If you live in Google, get this extension.

OmniBar

With this extension installed you can search from the address bar. Just type in what you want to search for and hit enter. This means you don’t have to specifically click in the search box anymore.

Add to Amazon Wish List

It may be too late to populate your Amazon.com wish list for the coming holidays but it’s never too late to wish for things, right? If you see something you want on a web page, click the Add to Amazon Wish List button in the toolbar, type in some more info, and it’s saved to your wish list.

Selection desires to grow

So there you have 15 of our suggestions for Safari extensions you should try. For Safari, there’s not as much to choose from as there is for Firefox and Chrome, but we hope that Apple will keep adding to the selection.

If none of the 15 extensions we picked out can help you with that particular web browser itch you have, probability are there is another one that can do the trick.

To paraphrase a well-known expression, there’s an extension for that.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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15 fantastic Safari extensions: from blocking ads to hacking web code

Two web browsers currently use a rapid release schedule collective with automated updates. Chrome has had it from the start, and Firefox started using it this summer with the initiation of Firefox 5. Both Google and Mozilla release new versions every six weeks.

There are some differences between Chrome and Firefox as to how these automated updates work, but essentially the thought is that the browser should be updated to new versions automatically without bothering the user, and ensure that as many users as possible are running the very latest version. There are plenty of benefits to this approach.

Though, we’ve noticed that this process seems less successful for Firefox than it is for Chrome. We pointed this out a while ago, noting that Firefox now leaves a excellent number of users behind with every new version.

That said, exactly how much more efficient is Google Chrome’s update process than the one Mozilla is using for Firefox? This is what we’re going to find out in this article.

Initially, some perspective

Initially, let’s give this all some perspective by showing you how the various Firefox and Chrome versions have trended this year. We’ll base it on their overall share of the browser market, using data from StatCounter. We’re counting this since we can’t really assume that all of you will be intimately familiar with how the browser versions are spread out.

We start with how the various Firefox versions are doing (their share of the entire browser market).

On the surface, it all looks excellent for Firefox. You can clearly see how the behavior changed after Firefox 4 was introduced this year, and the rapid releases that started with Firefox 5 in June. Though, looks can deceive, as you will see shortly in this article. These are weekly stats, in case you were wondering.

The same time period for Chrome looks like this:

These charts give us an thought of how efficiently users are being updated (or upgraded, no matter what wording you prefer), as each new version comes along. In the case of Chrome, we can also clearly see how its market share is on the rise for each new version.

Although fascinating, looking at Firefox and Chrome usage this way makes it hard to directly compare the two. Remember, the point of this article is to examine how efficient the new Firefox release schedule and update process is compared to the pioneer in that field, Chrome.

Comparing update efficiency, Chrome vs. Firefox

We essentially want to find out how much of the user base each new browser version manages to reach. If that is dropping, it’s a sign that some users are not being upgraded.

To do this, we have to look at each browser unconnectedly from the rest of the market, unaffected by any market share fluctuations. That way we’ll get a much clearer picture of how successful these automated updates are.

For Chrome, we can include all versions since the automated updates have been present from the start. For Firefox, we’ll only include Firefox 5 and shortly. This so we can compare apples to apples.

Initially, let’s look at Chrome:

As you can see, Google’s update process is very effective. Each new version quickly replaces the version before it (thanks to the automatic updates). Even after 15 iterations since its launch, this process remains steady. Each new version reaches around 90% of Chrome’s total user base.

Where that remaining 10% is, it’s hard to say. Some of those users will be on the beta and developer versions of upcoming Chrome versions. Some may also be business users who have chosen to control the update process. The vital point here, though, is that there is no degradation from version to version. They reach the same kind of penetration. It’s as excellent as exact.

Now let’s have a look at the same chart for Firefox:

The main thing to note here is that each new Firefox version fails to reach the height of the version before it. A number of users are clearly not being upgraded from version to version. Note the difference compared with the chart for Chrome.

Note once again that this chart only counts Firefox versions 5 and shortly. In reality, users manually upgrading from older Firefox versions (like 3.6) are currently keeping the user base penetration of the newer versions from dropping, but that’s hardly a testament to how well the update procedure works. Hence the reason why we isolated the Firefox sample to version 5 and shortly.

Together with only Firefox 5 and shortly we get the following peaks for each version:

• Firefox 5: 100% (obviously, since it was initially in this new rapid release cycle)
• Firefox 6: 88.3%
• Firefox 7: 83.6%
• Firefox 8: We won’t know until version 9 is launched.

Clearly Google’s process is significantly more effective. Granted, Mozilla has perhaps not had time to exact its process yet. On the additional hand, Chrome has gone a full 15 iterations and still 90% of its users run the latest version (a small more if you also count the beta for the next version). Firefox has by now dropped not more than this, just four versions into this new cycle. Perhaps it will stabilize, but the current trend is not promising.

Why are new Firefox versions leaving users behind?

Last time we wrote in this area this, several commenters mentioned that they had disabled updates in Firefox to keep their browser plugins from breaking. This really seems to be a pretty major thing to a lot of public. With the rapid release schedule, many extension and plugin creators simply can’t keep up.

Regardless of why this is experience, there are some long-term implications that could verify rather problematic to Firefox, for example increased version disintegration. We have to assume that the Firefox developer team at Mozilla is aware of this, and hopefully they’ll manage to turn this unenthusiastic trend around.

To Google we can only say: well done. Chrome’s automated updates clearly work extremely well. We suspect this is has been a major factor to its success to far.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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Comparing the efficiency of Chrome’s and Firefox’s automated updates (study)

It’s fascinating how quickly we humans start taking things for granted. In a quick-moving landscape like technology, especially IT, this becomes all the more obvious.

When you start thinking back to how things were just a few years ago, it’s incredible how different things were. So many of the gadgets, services and sites we all take for granted today simply weren’t around.

In that spirit, let’s take a few steps back in time and look what you DIDN’T have a few years ago. We’ll jump back five years at a time.

Five years ago (2006)

• No Facebook, unless you were a student in the United States. The site opened “for the rest of us” in late 2006.
• No Chirrup. It launched mid 2006 but hadn’t yet caught on.
• No iPhone or Android smartphones. The pinnacle of smartphones came from the likes of Nokia (Symbian-based smartphones), RIM (excellent ancient Blackberry) and companies like HTC (with Windows movable).
• No mobile app ecosystem. Ok, third-party mobile apps technically did exist at this time, but it wasn’t until Apple opened up the iPhone for developers that mobile apps as we know them today really took off. The iPhone SDK wasn’t released until Development 2008.
• No iPad.
• No Google Chrome. The vast majority of all web surfing was done using Internet Explorer 6. Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 were released late in 2006.

Ten years ago (2001)

• No YouTube. It didn’t launch until 2005.
• No Google Docs. It wasn’t launched until 2006.
• No Wikipedia. Well, ok, it launched this year, but remember, it had not yet to the top up with in rank and become the resource we take for granted today.
• No Gmail, which didn’t show up until 2004.
• No Blackberries. RiM introduced its smartphone in 2003.
• Online social networks as we know them today were just starting to show up, but none of the services that are huge and well loved today existed.
• No WordPress. It was forked from the b2 blog software in 2003.
• No Firefox, which wasn’t launched until 2004. IE completely dominated the browser market at this point, reaching version 6.0 in August 2001.
• Smartphones were exceedingly rare and exceedingly expensive. Nearly everyone had “dumbphones.”
• movable Internet access was a nightmare. Remember WAP…?

Fifteen years ago (1996)

• The Web was something very new to most public, and the majority didn’t use it at all.
• None of today’s web browsers were in well loved use. Internet Explorer existed, but wasn’t widely used. If you surfed the Web, you probably did it on Variety or Netscape Navigator.
• No Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were tinkering with something they called “Backrub” at Stanford University, which would shortly become Google. It was the era of Altavista.
• No Blogger. The blogging service didn’t show up until 1999.
• The whole “blog” concept had barely begun to take root. There wasn’t even a word for it yet.
• No iPod. In fact, no portable MP3 players at all.
• Many public didn’t own a basic cell phone, and pretty much no one had anything qualifying as a smartphone.

We could go on and on and on…

This was just a small leap back in time, but it does make you realize how massively our world has changed in a relatively small time period. Yet we take these things utterly for granted today.

It nearly gets ridiculous when you continue looking farther back in time. For example, another five years back (in 1991) Tim Berners-Lee had only just invented what would become the World Wide Web.

We haven’t even gone into the general boost personal computing has received in everything from performance and screen pledge to features and form factor. Compare today’s computers to those of ten years ago. Look at your sleek, high-performance laptop and compare it with those of yesteryear. In small, sitting down with a computer from ten years ago would quickly verify a frustrating experience for nearly anyone.

And how in this area how we all used to connect to the Internet, with those ancient dial-up modems? That used to be the norm not too long ago. Today, most of us have some form of broadband connection to the Internet, and those continue to get quicker every year. Here in Sweden, for example, download speeds exceeding 10 Mbit/s are quite common today. Same thing with how 3G networks have spread across the globe, finally giving reasonable speed for mobile Internet access. That has also happened extremely quick. Look back 10 years and we were firmly in 2G land.

We’re pretty much all tech geeks here at Pingdom, so we’re highly aware of this phenomenon. It’s like a mix of living in the now, “early-adopteritis” and sheer convenience that sets in incredibly quick.

And when we say quick, we mean quick. For example, some public are by now taking Google+ for granted, as if it’s always been there even though it just launched this summer. It’s like our brains simply hit a switch.

What are your recent “for granteds” that you were doing fine without just a few years ago?

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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How amazingly quick our tech lifestyle change

Mozilla’s development pace for Firefox went into overdrive this year, as they adopted a strategy similar to that which Google uses for the Chrome web browser. Mozilla’s new, rapid release schedule for Firefox calls for a new version every six weeks. On Tuesday, November 8, it’s by now time for the release of Firefox 8.

But there are clouds on the horizon. For every new version of Firefox that Mozilla releases, a fraction of users are for no matter what reason not being upgraded. There’s a long tail of older versions starting to form, and over time this may accumulate enough version disintegration that it could become a real problem.

To give you an example, Firefox 5 was the initially version in this rapid release schedule and should be history by now, but it still clings on to nearly 4% of the Firefox user base.

So imagine the effect of this kind of “left-behind” retention in the long run. Remember, at the current pace we’ll see at least eight new Firefox versions per year. Next November, the latest version will be Firefox 16.

The current disintegration of Firefox

Here’s the distribution of Firefox versions for the final week of October 2011, as measured by StatCounter. Note that this is at the shortly part of Firefox 7’s six-week cycle as the latest release version, so browser users should have had plenty of time to upgrade – or rather, be upgraded.

In case you’re wondering, the vast majority of the “3.6 or older” sort is made up of version 3.6.

The excellent news is that the “legacy” versions of Firefox – those being version 3.6 or earlier – represent a rapidly diminishing part. Early in June they accounted for 43% of all Firefox usage. Now, five months shortly, those older versions are down to representing “only” 28%. At the current rate of change, they will be down to around 8% in a year.

The terrible news is that there is now a excellent-sized part of users who are not following along from one version to the next in this new release schedule that Mozilla started with Firefox 5 in June.

Why is this experience?

It could possibly be an effect of the upgrade process not being automated effectively, or perhaps enterprise users are to blame. The typical reluctance of enterprises to upgrade software without ages of testing has been the bane of software progress for quite some time (part of the reason why IE 6 is still alive).

Perhaps those are both factors. We honestly don’t know. Firefox users do have the option to disable automatic updates, but they’re on by defaulting. It’s hard imagining that many public opting out of upgrades.

A silver lining, the saving grace, the Excellent Thing

The saving grace in this whole situation is that at least the share of Firefox users running the very latest versions is not going to drop for a while. It might really grow.

Why? Because public keep upgrading from older versions, like 3.6, filling up the gap that would otherwise be produced. But once the pool of older Firefox versions starts to dry out, Mozilla could be in distress.

Are we facing disintegration hell?

As we mentioned in the initiation, with a new version coming every six weeks, we’re going to get eight new versions of Firefox every year (well, 8.7). If Firefox is going to leave behind a couple of percent of its users or so in every version update, things will quickly become hard even if those shares individually are rather small and will decrease over time.

This is what things could possibly look like just one year from now, unless Mozilla comes up with a more effective upgrade process that doesn’t have users staying behind for every new version that arrives:

Now imagine web developers around the world collectively going bold from tearing their hair trying to test and support that many versions of Firefox. Then add another year on top of that, when we’ll be up to Firefox 24.

Final words

The bottom line is that leaving a chunk of the Firefox user base behind with each new version is not a sustainable situation in the long term, at least not with such a rapid release schedule.

It may well be that the excellent public at Mozilla by now have some awesome plot in house to counter this trend, but if they don’t, it may be time to start thinking of one.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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Firefox version disintegration increasing – is Mozilla in distress?