Business Tech

Earlier in November, Firefox surpassed 25 percent usage share of Web browsers, according to Net Applications.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Mozilla released a third beta of Firefox 3.6 on Wednesday, adding stability and performance features, and said it hopes to lock down the code soon for its first release candidate.

The new beta, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, includes a component directory lockdown that makes it harder for other software to meddle with the open-source browser's state by preventing that software from sidling into the same folder as the browser's own components. The result should be fewer crashes, said Mozilla's Johnathan Nightingale in a blog post, and Firefox still is open to third-party extensions via its official add-on mechanism.

The change should improve security, too, added another Mozilla programmer, Vladimir Vukecevic, who wrote in his own blog post that Mozilla is considering bringing the change to Firefox 3.5, too.

"Creating binary components to interface with the operating system or with other applications is fairly straightforward, though ultimately dangerous. Binary components have full access to the application and OS, and so can impact stability, security, and performance," Vukecevic said.

Also in the latest beta of 3.6 is a feature that lets the browser run some Web-based JavaScript programs asynchronously, which is to say without being so picky about the order the scripts run. This can improve the speed that Web pages load, Mozilla said.

The biggest Firefox 3.6 feature most folks will notice is Personas, the reskinning add-on that's now being built in. More than 10 million Personas have been downloaded so far, Suneel Gupta and Myk Melez of the Personas team said Wednesday.

Mozilla is working to release a final version of Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, and one sign the project is wrapping up is that the developers are locking down the features and changes that can be added into the release candidate 1. Code freeze for RC1 is scheduled for Wednesday but might be at risk, a Mozilla planning site said this week.

Firefox is steadily gaining in use. Last week, Web traffic monitoring firm Net Applications announced Firefox cleared 25 percent share of those using browsers worldwide--not dethroning Internet Explorer by any means but still winning over new users. Mozilla estimates there are more than 300 million Firefox users total, and this week said there are more than 300,000 testers using the Firefox 3.6 beta

Google's Chrome, meanwhile, is appealing to some of the same browser enthusiasts who were Firefox's first users. One of its big selling points is speed, and Google is working on other ways to make the Web faster, too. Chrome gives it a vehicle to test such ideas out in the real world, a strategy that Apple, Opera, and Firefox have employed to advance the Web state of the art.

One Mozilla programmer, Alexander Limi, revealed a speedup technology called Resource Package for Mozilla, too, on Tuesday. His proposal calls for bundling many Web page elements up into a single compressed file that can be retrieved in a single Web-page request action. Browsers are limited in the number of such actions they can take in parallel, so consolidating the interactions can make pages load faster. The approach is backwards compatible with existing browsers that don't support the feature, he added.

"If the feedback is good we're likely to try and get this implemented for Firefox 3.7," said Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard in a blog post Tuesday.

Google's Chrome is still the fourth-place browser in terms of usage, but it gained more than others in October when it comes to stealing usage away from the dominant Internet Explorer.

According to Net Applications' browser usage share statistics, Chrome gained from 3.2 percent to 3.6 percent from September 2009 to October. The company bases its statistics on visits to a global network of 40,000 Web sites, dusted with some statistical processing.

Next was Mozilla's Firefox, which rose from 23.8 percent to 24.1 percent. Apple's Safari rose from 4.2 percent to 4.4 percent. Opera was essentially flat at 2.2 percent.

The big loser was IE, which dropped from 65.7 percent to 64.6 percent, according to the statistics.

Buoyed by Netbook sales, shipments of Intel graphics chips surged and Advanced Micro Devices gained on Nvidia in the third quarter.

Third-quarter shipments of graphics processors jumped 21.2 percent over the second quarter, according to market researcher Jon Peddie Research. Graphics chips drive the images produced on PC users' screens.

A total of 119.45 million units were shipped in the third quarter, exceeding the record 111 million units that shipped in the third quarter of 2008, according to Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "So the market has caught up with, and exceeded, last year's highs. The crash of fall 2008 is now behind us," he said in a statement.

The third quarter exceeded a robust second quarter. "Q2 was already a great quarter clearly signaling the holidays will be robust for PCs and the industry in general," Peddie said.

AMD gained on discrete graphics chip leader Nvidia in quarter-to-quarter growth.

(Credit: Jon Peddie Research)

AMD showed the biggest jump in quarter-to-quarter growth at 30 percent, followed by Intel at 21 percent. But Intel dominates raw shipments. "Intel shipped the most parts at 63 million, over twice as many as its nearest competitor Nvidia," according to Peddie, who said Intel had a 53 percent share of the market in the third quarter. Nvidia was second with 24.9 percent, followed by AMD with 19.8 percent.

Surging Netbook shipments are behind the big Intel numbers. Integrated graphics in notebooks, which includes Netbooks, increased 27 percent over the second quarter. Integrated graphics are built into supporting Intel silicon called chipsets.

"Netbooks will remain popular but they will not have the high market share they had during the recession when they were just introduced. Rather, consumers are expected to 'buy up' in the next quarter," according to Peddie.

Fourth-quarter shipments may not be as strong as the third quarter, however. "The channel is full...That suggests that while Q4 is typically a good quarter for PCs, the quarter-to-quarter growth in Q4 may not be as robust as Q3. Graphics are a great leading indicator. The graphics go in before the PC is built or shipped," Peddie said.

Internet Explorer rivals generally gained market share in figures from July, shown at top, and August.

(Credit: Net Applications)

After resetting its methodology to better account for global variations, Net Applications' browser usage statistics have resumed an earlier trend in which Internet Explorer's main rivals edged ahead.

Mozilla's Firefox had the most notable gain, from 22.5 percent to 23 percent, while Google's Chrome rose from 2.6 percent to 2.8 percent. Apple's Safari was flat at 4.1 percent, and IE dipped from 67.7 percent to 67 percent. Opera, in fifth place just before this week's release of Opera 10, was essentially flat at 2 percent.

The browser wars are back in full swing. Though IE remains dominant, rivals are racing to build in new features to make the Web a better foundation for applications--the vision Netscape had back in the first generation of browser wars of the 1990s. Only recently has Microsoft joined the HTML 5 discussion in earnest.

This time profitable powerhouses such as Google are pushing this Web applications facet of cloud computing, and even Microsoft is embracing the trend with an online version of Office en route. Using the browser and the Web to run applications has a lot more meat on its bones after a decade of work.

Microsoft is working to wean the world from IE 6, the version of the browser that shipped with Windows XP, and has made some progress, according to Net Applications' statistics.

Version 6 still rules the IE roost, but it's dropping in usage.

(Credit: Net Applications)

IE 8 usage increased from 12.5 percent to 15.1 percent usage from July to August, while IE 6 dropped from 27.2 percent to 25.3 percent. IE 7 decreased from 23.1 percent to 21.1 percent.

Mozilla's newer version 3.5 of Firefox, released in June, also made gains from 4.5 percent to 8.9 percent. Firefox 3.0 dropped from 16.2 percent to 12.5 percent.

Using a modern browser is important when it comes to bringing the Web application technology to fruition. Older browsers lack support for advancements in page layout and graphics, HTML features such as built-in video, and perhaps most crucially, fast execution of Web-based JavaScript programs.

Net Applications changed its methodology, with Apple faring worse in the new statistics and Opera and Chrome getting a boost. These figures are for July.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Apple's share of the installed base of Web browsers has plunged in half--but because of a methodology at a firm that produces the statistics rather than anything Apple or computer users did.

Net Applications, which compiles statistics based on the 160 million unique visits to a network of 40,000 Web sites using its analytics service, dramatically lowered Apple's browser share when the firm concluded its methodology needed refining. Specifically, the company concluded that there was a disconnect between visits to its site network and actual Web use in some areas such as China, said Vincent Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing.

To try to better reflect reality, the company adjusted its statistics through use of the CIA's estimates of Internet population, according to its explanation. Consequently the company took a month to change course then released updated statistics from May and earlier that dramatically changed some figures.

There are more encouraging signs that the worst might be over for the PC industry.

For the second straight quarter, PC shipments worldwide were better than expected. Desktop and notebook shipments for the second quarter of 2009 decreased 3.1 percent from the same time a year ago, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, released Wednesday. Though it's still negative growth, it's being read as a positive sign since analysts were expecting a 6.3 percent drop.

Combined with Intel's better than expected earnings Tuesday, and Dell's pronouncement that demand for computers is stabilizing, the industry looks ripe for a turnaround soon.

"I think we're moving out of it," said Loren Loverde, director of IDC's PC Tracker study. "We're still in negative growth, but we saw better growth than we did in the first quarter. That bodes pretty well for growth going forward."

The improvement was felt worldwide, with each region meeting or surpassing industry analysts' expectations. Though those expectations were indeed fairly low to start with, the fact that all of the regions performed adequately is a good sign, Loverde noted.

Acer continued to outpace the field, growing its shipments worldwide 23.7 percent. It's now right on Dell's tail, competing for second-largest PC maker with 12.7 percent of the overall market.

Dell is hanging in there with 13.7 percent of all computers shipped, and did make some progress with new notebook designs and Netbooks during the quarter. But as it slips farther behind perennial leader Hewlett-Packard (with 19.8 percent of PCs shipped) and tries to stay ahead of Acer, its weakness in those areas are coming into focus. Acer has been able to exploit an area Dell has not paid much attention to until recently.

"It's really evidence of growth the of consumer portables, which has not been a Dell focus or strength, and it has been an Acer focus and strength," noted Loverde. "Combined with Acer's much broader distribution, particularly in Europe, and also their fairly rapid expansion and much smaller focus on the US., Acer will continue to grow faster than the market."

But there are still challenges for Acer, who is much smaller than Dell or HP, and tends to focus on lower-priced notebooks, which means it could have trouble moving into higher-margin products later.

Lenovo continues to be in fourth place, with 8.7 percent of PCs shipped, followed by Toshiba, with 5.3 percent of the market. Toshiba experienced the next-best growth after Acer (10.5 percent for the second quarter) on the strength of its move into Netbooks, which are selling particularly well in Japan.

TV makers worldwide saw their revenues slide 12 percent in the last year, according to a report set to be released Tuesday by DisplaySearch.

A total of 43.3 million TVs were sold worldwide in the first quarter of this year, a 6 percent drop compared to the same quarter a year ago, and prices dropped 6 percent, too, according to the Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report.

Even Samsung, which collects more money in its coffers for TVs than any company in the world for the past 13 straight quarters, saw its revenues drop 8 percent since the same time last year. But it still held its lead in the industry, maintaining a 21.5 percent share of dollars spent on TVs worldwide.

The biggest shake-up in the last quarter came from LG Electronics which, at 2 percent growth from a year ago, was the only one of the top five manufacturers to see an uptick in revenues. It was able to leapfrog Sony into second place, claiming 13.3 percent of the TV market. Sony garnered 13.1 percent, followed by Sharp with 7.2 percent, and Panasonic with 6.1 percent.

Panasonic appeared to have the most trouble in the most recent quarter. It saw revenues from TV sales drop 22 percent over the last year.

These kinds of slumping progress reports from all sectors of the technology industry have become practically commonplace. Declining revenues are particularly a problem in consumer electronics as shoppers are finding themselves with less discretionary income.

The PC market shrunk during the first part of 2009, but not as badly as expected.

Shipments of PCs during the first quarter were down 7.1 percent from a year ago, to 63.5 million units, according to IDC, which released its Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker on Wednesday. That's an improvement from the 8.2 percent decline that IDC had projected.

It's a "good sign" for PCs, said Loren Loverde, the program director for the PC Tracker at IDC. Loverde says the better-than-expected results were aided by falling prices of PCs and more new PC buyers around the world.

It's telling of the depth of fear the economy is stirring up when these numbers are considered a positive sign, especially when placed in context: a continually volatile world economy, accompanying high rates of unemployment, and companies that continue to hold off on technology spending.

But it's not the only sign that things might be turning around for technology companies. Intel CEO Paul Otellini was surprisingly bullish on the market for PCs Tuesday during his company's earnings call, saying, "We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns...I believe the worst is now behind us from an inventory correction and demand level adjustment perspective."

It may not be totally behind us: IDC is predicting roughly 8 percent declines in growth for the second quarter. But there are several things to consider. Though consumer confidence is low, there are increasingly more PCs with lower prices to match available. Low-cost portables, like Netbooks, continue to be the bright spot for many PC makers, especially Acer and Asus, and helped to stem the overall decline worldwide.

And some regions are faring better than others. In the U.S., considered a saturated market for PCs, declines were kept to just 3 percent. Last month, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell told an audience during a speech in China that the worldwide demand for PCs was "steady," and echoed IDC's assessment of U.S. consumers' continuing appetite. But of the top five PC vendors in the U.S., only Dell and Apple saw overall shipment declines when compared to the same quarter a year ago. Apple dipped slightly at 1.2 percent, but Dell's drop was more drastic at 16.2 percent.

"The U.S. PC market proved to be surprisingly resilient this quarter as notebooks were still seen as important purchases by many U.S. consumers," said Bob O'Donnell, vice president of clients and displays research for IDC in the report. And the gap between the world's largest PC maker, Hewlett-Packard, and the rest of the field is growing. HP actually saw its overall shipments increase and finally overtook Dell as the leading PC vendor in the U.S.

HP's shipments outside the U.S. increased 2.9 percent, but its shipments to U.S. retailers and consumers was up 12.2 percent. Dell's shipments worldwide declined 16.7 percent worldwide, and 16.2 percent here in the U.S. Though the Texas-based PC maker has done a lot of work to improve its business over the past two years, the first quarter of 2009 was particularly difficult for the company.

"Dell is still largely a commercial company," said Loverde. Less than 30 percent of its sales come from consumer PCs worldwide and the most growth in the market is coming in the consumer category, like Netbooks, and Dell hasn't been as aggressive as the likes of Asus and Acer there, he noted. "But I think we have a combination of Dell tentatively going after this growth segment combined with the challenge of executing with channel partners in a really volatile environment. Obviously the economic crisis is affecting products and consumer demand."

The top five PC makers worldwide stayed basically the same: HP holding 20.5 percent of the market, followed by Dell (13.6 percent), Acer (11.6 percent), Lenovo (7 percent), and Toshiba (5.4 percent), according to IDC's numbers.

In the U.S. only, HP led with a 27.6 percent share, just beating out Dell's 25.3 percent, followed by Acer at 10.5 percent, Apple at 7.6 percent, and Toshiba at 6.6 percent.

After several years of seemingly tireless 15 percent quarterly growth, the PC industry hit a wall at the end of 2008.

Overall PC shipments worldwide dropped 0.4 percent to 77.3 million units during the fourth quarter, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker study released Wednesday. The results are more alarming for the embattled industry considering that the quarter--the worst in several years--wasn't helped out more by the holiday shopping season. There hasn't been an overall drop in shipments since the second quarter of 2001, after the last recession.

"We had projected growth of about 6.5 percent (for the fourth) quarter. To come in basically at zero shows how fast the market has deteriorated. We were just at 14 percent in third quarter," said Loren Loverde, PC market analyst for IDC.

At the end of the third quarter of 2008, IDC was still projecting a small amount of growth (less than 3 percent) for most quarters of 2009, but so many factors have changed since then, Loverde said.

"We've had basically lower GDP projections, questions about how U.S. bailout money is going to be spent... The momentum of deteriorating economic conditions is going to continue," he said. "So it's safe to say 2009 will come in below expectations."

While worldwide market leader Hewlett-Packard managed to eke out 3.1 percent growth in shipments, second-place Dell saw a 6.3 percent decrease. Lenovo also saw its global shipments drop almost 5 percent.

There were a few bright spots in the midst of the economic gloom. Acer, Apple, and Toshiba, all heavily invested in notebooks and therefore more insulated from the long-declining desktop market, saw high rates of growth.

Acer's momentum in Europe continued, but the Taiwanese manufacturer also made significant headway in the U.S. during the quarter while expanding its presence at retail. "Acer really went after low-cost portables and they shipped significant volume through Best Buy," said Loverde.

Specifically the PC maker has found success with its Acer One Netbook, where it's been incredibly aggressive on price compared to market leader HP.

Apple's done well for opposite reasons, growing 7.5 percent despite refusing to offer a computer for less than $999. The Mac maker's market share expanded again in the U.S., reaching 7.2 percent, the highest in at least a decade.

And while the emerging Netbook category will continue to expand, it hasn't proved itself as a significant help to the industry's growth as of yet. Almost 5 million Netbooks shipped in the fourth quarter, doubling the total for all of 2008. That brings Netbooks' share of the portable PC market to 7 percent, an impressive start for a category that essentially didn't exist until a little over a year ago. IDC expects Netbook volumes to double in 2009.

Update 2:27 p.m. PST: Gartner has also released its results for the fourth quarter. It recorded essentially similar results as IDC, but slightly higher volumes at 78.1 million PCs shipped for the quarter. That resulted in 1.1 percent growth from the same quarter a year ago.