1. Go to File > Open, then click Browse...
2. In 'File name', type 'c:\windows\system32' and press enter
3. Change the 'Files of type' field to 'All Files'
4. Drag any of the files into the 'cmd' icon
The actual interesting story here is Safari 5.
"Look, now Chrome is beating Firefox. But IE still isn't losing yet, so let's make up some reasoning and fudge some more until we're happy!"
"Ah, that's better, now IE looks like it sucks and my worldview is no longer shattered. Hooray for fudging data to make it say what we want it to!"
When I first did the data dive, I thought Safari was worse than IE, which I thought made a much better blog post. That would have been way more surprising. It was after due diligence that I was forced to discard that result.
I'm sorry, what? That's a pretty weak dismissal.
The article may have benefited from including a larger caveat about only testing one OS, but this seems like an intellectually honest elimination of a confounding variable.
"This is the same graph as above, with the unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged browsers removed"
What? Why not take out all results from the period when your system was unstable, rather than removing the results that looked 'wrong' to you? Good grief.
The reason I didn't sort error rates by month was to preserve statistical significance. If we try to only look at error rates from specific periods of time, we have to decide how short those periods of time are. Too long and we don't have data from some of the browsers; too short and we don't have enough data to form a significant opinion. It may have been possible to find a middle ground, but why bother when we can still get unbiased results for 80% of the browsers?
This says to me that none of the results can really be trusted because the error count is not just errors in the browser - it's apparently significantly affected by errors in their system, and we don't really know by how much.
Plus it seems kind of anachronistic to come to some conclusion about how the browsers compare having removed FF4 and FF5. It's only of historical interest how FF3.6 compares since anyone that downloads it now is going to get FF6 now anyway.
Given that the actual article does not have anything to do with the headline ("error rates" is never really satisfactorily defined, the real story is proxy mode Safari, and IE6 came out 9 years ago), what makes this headline so compelling?
Do headlines with the word "surprising" always work? Is it that everyone deals with browsers, so a browser related story is likely to have a wider mind share? Is it that web developers all just want a chance to make fun of IE6, due to the collective pain that it has inflicted on all of us?
Also regarding graph 2's commentary, 0.51 is not "almost" double 0.34. It turns out to be only 1.5x, so calling it "almost double" is about as meaningful as calling it "almost the same".