Google Docs and Spreadsheets now enters Desktop- open war on MS Office!

Today Google has launched its newest front on its fight against Microsoft's domination of PC world.
With the release of Google Toolbar 3 beta for Firefox, Google has quietly launched a direct attack on MS Office. Users who install new Google Toolbar 'can' now 'double-click' any compatible document (.doc, .xls, .odt, .rtf, .csv) on their computer and it will open straight in a browser in Google Docs and Spreadsheet. It doesn't end there, when users click on links to any such file online, it will open straight in Google Docs, no more need to download files first and then upload them to your online word processor. Users can also 'drag' files to their browser to open it in Google docs.
This is yet another signal on Google's intention to use its huge market cap in Internet to gain access to Microsoft honeyspot. Google never misses an opportunity to attack Microsoft where it hurts the most, the toolbar for IE doesnt have this cool feature yet, so in a way, if people want latest toolbar, they have to get firefox. The latest toolbar update includes the much awaited bookmarks button and many new features.

Digg.com, please tell us how many of your users use Firefox

Many people find it really hard to beliee that 65% of Digg users use firefox, may be its time Digg should release that data..
I find it really suspicious that the article (here)I wrote saying the above statistics got buried within minutes it hit the frontpage..

65 % of the Digg users use firefox!!

65% Digg users use Firefox, in a span of 10 days I had about 30,000 unique visitors from Digg and around 10,000 visitors from Slashdot. So it gave me an idea to compare the browser preference and platform between the two user communities. As you can see about 48% of the visitors were from Digg and about 13% from slashdot.





So it can be seen that about 65% of the Digg users (see below) use various versions of firefox while only 17 percentage use Internet Explorer (all versions combined). When this is compared with Slashdot users again around 65% use various versions of firefox (mozilla excluded), only 11 percentage use IE.

Digg Users stats below:




Slashdot users:



Eventhough Firefox usage is comparable between the two communities, Linux adoption vastly differed. About 20% of Slashdot users were on Linux compared about 9% in the Digg community.

Slashdot stats;

Digg Users stats:

What does the statistics means

• The Firefox is almost 4 times as popular as Internet explorers among the Geeks or early adopters, if this trend stays in another 3-4 years firefox will be as ubiquitous as Acrobat reader.
• Between the two Slashdot community is definetly more 'geeky' when we consider the adoption of linux (Slashdot beats Digg 2:1 in terms of linux penetration), but numberwise digg has more readers so it could mean that if we take raw number of linux users Digg may be having more 'number' of linux users.
• Ofcourse the above two data has to be understood bearing in mind that there are thousands of people who are members of both these wonderful websites.
• Cnet has reported that only .1 percent of the Firefox users click online ads and .5 % of IE users click online ads. This bad news for adsense users because bulk of their traffic is from Firefox users on the other hand this also corroborates this article because geeks are unlikely to click through ads..
  

Update: Some have commented, how this can be extrapolated to all the users of Digg?
The answer is, during the period of study, the article which got frontpage in Digg was under 'Technology' category which is one of most frequented sections of Digg.
I would love to see if any bloggers who got dugged has different stats..

Adsense Referral gets Firefox v2 but loses Google Toolbar!

Ever since Firefox version 2 was officially released, I was wondering why Google Adsense referral program is still carrying the older version 1.5. Today Google Adsense team has updated the installation file to include version 2 but mysteriously the Google toolbar is missing. Even after installing the package, the toolbar is missing, see the screenshot.


I don't know if its an error or a deliberate decision. Anyway this is good for bloggers, now you don't need to 'convince' people that not just Firefox is great, but Google Toolbar is also great.
If this is a deliberate move then the possible reasons could be either Google decided to update the Firefox version of Google Toolbar which is currently lacking in features vis-a-vis the IE version, or it could mean that Google is thinking that even without the toolbar it can make money from Firefox
For those doubting Thomas' you can try the adsense referral in this page. But let me warn you, I am definitely not soliciting you, dont want to get bounced by Google adsense.