Happy Birthday - Firefox turns five!

In case you missed it, Mozilla Firefox turned five years old yesterday, which is nearly a lifetime in Internet years.




I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how browser usage has changed on our site over the last couple of years. We started using Google Analytics back in May 2007, and Firefox usage has been steadily on the increase since then, rising from 11% to 21% of our traffic:



Over that same time period we've seen Internet Explorer usage drop from 86% to 66%, and Safari and Chrome on the rise, with 8% and 3% shares respectively.

Browser	Percentage of traffic, October 2009	Percentage of traffic, May 2007
1. Internet Explorer	66.32%	86.24%
2. Firefox	21.29%	11.18%
3. Safari	7.75%	1.77%
4. Chrome	3.30%	0.00%
5. Opera	0.64%	0.24%

And amazingly, Netscape is still lurking in the top ten, with 832 visitors (0.10%) last month, who must still think it's 2002.

How to quickly search the University Directory from the Firefox address bar

Is the way that you search the University Directory something like this?

1. Go to the University homepage
2. Click on Contacting People
3. Click on Directory
4. Type in the name of the person you're looking for
5. Click Search

Well, using Firefox's Smart Keywords functionality, you can do this a whole lot quicker, without even taking your hands off the keyboard. Here's how you set it up:

1. Navigate to the University Directory

2. Right click in the Surname field, and select Add a Keyword for this Search...

3. In the Add Bookmark dialog box that appears, give the bookmark a name and a short keyword. I've used "d" (for "directory").

4. Now, whenever that you want to search the directory, just go to the address bar (which you quickly do by pressing CTRL + L) and type "d" followed by the surname of the person you are looking for. Eg to search for someone with the surname Kelly, you'd type d kelly.

You can expand on this further and create keywords for the different types of searches that are possible with the directory - for example I also have a "de" keyword that searches the directory by email address.