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I tend to use Chrome a lot more, but I always keep Firefox installed and updated as well.

We’re very excited to report that 85% of Firefox 4 users have chosen to install an add-on — that’s more than 60 million users every day! This number doesn’t include Personas, and even excludes popular add-ons bundled with other software that the user hasn’t actively agreed to install.

Firefox 4 desktop add-on usage from March 22 through June 19, 2011, excluding Personas and several commonly-bundled add-ons

When we first saw this number, we expected it to drop as more and more users upgraded to Firefox 4; remarkably, it has stayed between 89% and 85% since launch in March. It’s also interesting to note that on the weekends when Firefox (and Internet) usage slumps, the percentage of users with add-ons increases, indicating those who browse on weekends are more likely to have customized Firefox.

We’ve also learned that on average, users have 5 add-ons installed, with the following distribution:

Firefox 4 desktop add-on distribution from June 19, 2011, excluding Personas and several commonly-bundled add-ons

With more than 2.5 billion downloads and 580 million add-ons in use every day in Firefox 4 alone, there’s no better time to browse our gallery and make Firefox your own.

The study, conducted in April 2011, found that on smartphones, apps were used 85% of the time, but the Web browser was used just 15% of the time. On tablets, apps were still popular, but were used just 61% of the time as compared with Web browsing, which was used 39% of the time.

Says Jing Wu, from Zokem's research team, "it can be speculated that for tablets, the bigger screen and the better overall user experience in browsing contribute to the relatively higher face time for Web browsing. On smartphones, on the other hand, a smaller screen and of course, better availability of apps, contribute to the apps' dominance."

Air Horn is the name of the free app and was developed in less than 3 hours. Alex knows the app is gimmicky and is not going to stand the test of time. This is a good example of a random app catapulting through the app rankings for no particular reason and actually making the developer some money. Here’s what we learned:

- It took 188,310 daily downloads to reach #1 on Monday, 5/31.
 - As of Monday, 6/7, it was still #1 with 129,286 daily downloads.
 - Daily ad impressions on Air Horn increased from 160,000/day to more than 2,000,000/day at peak.
 - As of 6/7, Air Horn served a total of 4 million 3rd party ad network impressions since 5/31.
 - Over that same time, 4 million cross promotion impressions were served to promote Annoying Sounds.
 - Annoying Sounds shot all the way to the #5 overall app.
 - Before the cross-promotion, Annoying Sounds wasn’t even a top 1000 app.
 - Daily ad impressions on Annoying Sounds jumped from 35,000/day to more than 1,000,000/day at peak.

Today, the iPhone’s mobile Web browsing share is back up to 48.6 percent, while the iPad’s is down to 2.6 percent. That two-point difference could very well be because people are leaving those iPads at home, and going back to their iPhones as they start the work week.

If we keep seeing this pattern, with iPad usage spiking during the weekends, then that means people aren’t really taking it with them, but rather leaving it at home. Once the 3G version comes out, this pattern will likely change.

Clicky runs Web analytics across 200,000 Websites visited by 100 million people a month, which is where these numbers come from.

Granted, I was searching for Erlang and Perl stuff, but that's still a change vs. two months ago. Average users, which I will define as "Googlers", will probably get there soon.

(I'm assuming you're not talking about "my grandmother", who will never know what Stack Overflow is. But that would be a very silly standard to apply, so I'm assuming that's not what you're getting at.)

It's so short term focused it makes me want to puke my guts out. People with no vision create products for people with no vision and then people with vision get harmed by it. The future of the internet is getting harmed by it.

URL Shorteners should be outlawed for the sake of humanity.

Short urls = short focus, while the Internet = vision

I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. Shortened urls reduce future generations' ability to find information. Information and access to it will simply Vaporize!

This is dangerous territory we're veering into now, as Joshua Schachter explains. 

 So there are clear benefits for both the service (low cost of entry, potentially easy profit) and the linker (the quick rush of popularity). But URL shorteners are bad for the rest of us. 

 The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher's DNS server, and the publisher's website. With a shortening service, you're adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel.