Apple has been dominating the tablet market ever since the company released the iPad, so calling the current situation a tablet war might be a bit overly dramatic. But things are heating up. The number of Android-based tablets is growing, and now even Google itself has joined the fray with the Nexus 7.

What is the current standing in this “tablet war,” and how does it differ across the world? Luckily, we can get an idea by using data from StatCounter. Their data is based on web usage (visitor stats from 3+ million websites), so it will represent the tablets actively used to surf the web.

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Over the past few years, social networks have become a major communications channel for today’s brands and companies. That’s why it’s surprising to see that even now, in 2012, many of the world’s top brands have a relatively weak presence on both Twitter and Facebook.

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This week we focus on web performance. There’s something about HTTP pipelining, scalable web architectures, python memcache client, and web performance testing with Fiddler.

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Today it’s 31 years since Microsoft finalized the purchase of 86-DOS, also known as QDOS, or Quick and Dirty Operating System. This was the operating system that would be installed on the first IBM PC, introduced in August 1981.

The rest is history, as they say. If you would want to relive the good – ahem – old days of DOS before it was even called MS-DOS, here’s how you can.

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There’s no doubt that Facebook is the dominant player on the social networking scene, but just how dominating is it? We know that there are many other social networks, including the well-known LinkedIn, Twitter, and others. How do they compare with Facebook in terms of traffic, that’s the question.

Last year we published a study of social networks with more than 1 million visitors per day. Then we could spot 29 websites that made the list. This time, it’s down to 26. It seems like Facebook keeps growing and many other sites find it harder to keep users.

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Since its creation by John Resig in 2005, jQuery has become one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries on the planet. It’s used by more than half of the top 10,000 websites in the world, and keeps getting more popular every day.

One question web developers using jQuery are faced with is how they should host the jQuery file. Should they host it themselves, or should they use one of the freely available content delivery networks (CDNs)?

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When you depend on an external service for functionality for your own app or web service, it often makes sense to monitor it. You want to know when its API isn’t available, because that affects your app.

That’s why we were somewhat surprised when we stumbled upon this in Twitter’s API Terms of Service (their “Developer Rules of the Road”) the other day:

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This week we focus on web performance. There’s something about SPDY and how it’s gaining traction, high performance HTML 5, latency as a constraining factor in achieving faster web browsing, and much more.

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As the Internet keeps growing, so does the number of registered domain names. It makes sense, of course. The number of sites grows, so we need more addresses.

We recently mentioned that we are likely to pass 100 million registered domain names across all country-code top level domains this year (ccTLDs, e.g. .de, .cn, .uk, etc.).

A respectable number, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

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We just wanted to let you know that we recently updated our iPhone and Android apps.

So what’s new in this version? Mainly two things:

• The ability to pause/unpause monitoring. We added a toggle control for this on the check info page. This can be handy if you need to do some maintenance and don’t want to trigger a lot of alerts, for example. Just don’t forget to start the monitoring back up when you’re done!
• An outage view, where you can also examine the reason behind each outage. This is the new default view when you tap on a check. Needless to say, this is great for troubleshooting on the go. Tapping on an outage will show you which monitoring locations first detected the outage, and the reason for the error (for example a connection timeout or an HTTP error code).

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