Tomorrow is a holiday here, and it puts me in a good mood. Thanksgiving forces me to take some quiet time to ponder how truly blessed I am. So today I'm in an appreciative frame of mind. It also makes me feel somewhat child-like because I remember the smell of huge Thanksgiving dinners with my grandfather's family.

This atmosphere has put me in kid mode. That's the only way I can explain why I found it so fun to get wrapped up in cool web statistics that I found at StatCounter.com. Am I the last geek on the planet to find this site? StatCounter, I'm grateful for you.

What at first caught my eye was the percentage of usage for each web browser. Knowing how many people are using Firefox vs. IE vs. Chrome has value to me since the browser affects performance of websites (user perspective). It's also good to know IE 6 vs IE 7 vs IE 8. When Firefox came out about 6 years ago, I started using it primarily because it performed better. Now, Chrome and Firefox seem to be implementing the best new functionality and speed improvements, so I fire them up almost interchangeably - which is problematic for my bookmarks.

However, I was surprise to see the Mashable article declaring Microsoft Internet Explorer Loses Browser War. It seems to me IE still has the most share, but the drop from 99% to 49% over the past few years is noteworthy. Perhaps there are millions of nerds celebrating from a feeling of schadenfreude as they watch MS lose ground somewhere in the software industry. Come to think of it, I have a bit of thinly-veiled grudge residual from the hundreds of "blue screen moments from hell".

From my experience, Flash has been a bigger problem than a benefit in web development. That conclusion is affected greatly by my perspective of someone highly interested in performance. It is now published for the world to see that Steve Jobs agrees with me.