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I'm not sure how it happened but today is Thursday. If that sounds as though finding that today is Thursday comes as something of a shock to me then I have to tell you that it is.

In fact everyone here in the office is somewhat amazed that today is Thursday ... we've been so busy that we just hadn't noticed the days fly by. I guess being that busy that we haven't noticed the week fly by is a good thing ... but sometimes ... when you get to our age you begin to wish that time would slow down ... just a bit.

But that's not likely to happen so let's jump into the topics I want to talk about today and the first thing is the change is browser usage over the last 12 months.

Browser stats
So many of us fall into mistake of thinking that just because we use a particular browser then everyone must use it ... that's a trait that most people who work on an Apple computer seem to display ... but that's often far from being the case.

In fact when it comes to designers who work in Safari and think that's what the majority of the planet use I've got to tell you that you really are off with the fairies. Sure, in the last 12 months there has been an increase of nearly 2% in the number of people who use Safari but that only takes the number of Safari users to slightly over 8.5% of all web surfers.

However, if you're like my partner Steve you may think that the world relies on Firefox to browse the web and there was a time when the world seemed to be heading in that direction but it never happened. Instead only 21.34% of web surfers currently use Firefox and that's actually a drop of over 3.5% over the last 12 months.

Internet Explorer ... in all its variants ... is also fading away. Currently around 29.82% of web browsing is done using Internet Explorer and that's a drop of almost 6% over the last 12 months.

IE6 and IE7 users account for less than 1% of users but, depending on what industry you're in, there's not much joy in those figures. IE6 is still used by a lot of government departments and big businesses so you really can't forget that horrible browser just yet.

The number of people using Opera is also continuing to decline. Just 1.23% of all users hit the Net using Opera these days and I just can't see that decline in users ever being reversed.

So what was the big winner if all the other browsers were seeing a decline in usage? Chrome of course! Over the last 12 months the number of Chrome users has grown by 7.23% and that takes Chrome to the point where 37.11% of people surfing the Net are doing so using Chrome.

And for Webmasters all that just means that we should continue to test every site we build in every one of those browsers because ... while the percentages may be small ... the real numbers of people are measured in the millions and we're still faced with the problem of what appears to be fine in one browser may look like garbage in another browser.

Only a week ago I was about to release a new website for a client without actually looking at it in Chrome. It looked fine in IE and Firefox but when someone in the office took a quick look at it in Chrome text that was supposed to wrap around some images didn't wrap at all.

So check your work in all the browsers ... you never know when something that should work in all of them actually fails to work at all.

Simple Principles
Last week we took over the management of a new client's website that had been built on the WordPress framework by another web designer. Now you might think that there's not a whole lot of mess you can make if you use WordPress ... I certainly thought that way until I looked in the backend of this site.

It contained some of the most convoluted coding and structures that I have ever come across and we are still tripping over strange issues as we apply a whole bunch of bandaids to a site that is creaking and groaning at just about every joint.

It's almost as if the designer decided that he would not use one single plugin that anyone else had written for WordPress ... instead he would write his own custom plugins and spread the files for the site across several different hosting packages.

Why would you want to do something like that? What is wrong with choosing the simplest solutions? Why ignore solutions that other people have come up with that not only work but save time too?

I have no idea why this guy chose to ignore the simple solutions that are known to work and instead chose to reinvent the wheel but you wouldn't do something like that would you?