Two web browsers currently use a rapid release schedule combined with automated updates. Chrome has had it from the start, and Firefox started using it this summer with the introduction of Firefox 5. Both Google and Mozilla release new versions every six weeks.

There are some differences between Chrome and Firefox as to how these automated updates work, but essentially the idea is that the browser should be updated to new versions automatically without bothering the user, and ensure that as many users as possible are running the very latest version. There are plenty of benefits to this approach.

However, we’ve noticed that this process seems less successful for Firefox than it is for Chrome. We pointed this out a while ago, noting that Firefox now leaves a good number of users behind with every new version.

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Apache is still the undisputed king of web server software but according to the latest Netcraft Web Server Survey from November 2011, NGINX usage has grown almost 300% over the last year.

In real numbers NGINX increased from about 15 million sites a year ago to 43 million in November 2011. That’s a faster growth than any other web server software tracked by Netcraft.

Since we’re big fans of NGINX at Pingdom, we wanted to try to understand this tremendous growth, so we put some questions to Andrew Alexeev (Q&A further down). Andrew looks after Business Development and Marketing for NGINX Inc., the company formed in October this year, backed by $3 million in venture funding, with the intent to expand the open source NGINX project and explore commercial opportunities.

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Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.

Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.

One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.

There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.

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There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s iPad is the biggest seller in the tablet space, but we have seen many iPad competitors come out over recent months, including Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Blackberry PlayBook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and many more.

However, despite all these Android tablets, according to comScore in October 2011, 95.5% of all tablet web traffic in the U.S. comes from iPad.

That is a stunning number. So, is anyone really buying all these shipping Android tablets, and what do people do with them after they buy them? Because they don’t seem to be surfing the Web.

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Mozilla’s development pace for Firefox went into overdrive this year, as they adopted a strategy similar to that which Google uses for the Chrome web browser. Mozilla’s new, rapid release schedule for Firefox calls for a new version every six weeks. On Tuesday, November 8, it’s already time for the release of Firefox 8.

But there are clouds on the horizon. For every new version of Firefox that Mozilla releases, a fraction of users are for whatever reason not being upgraded. There’s a long tail of older versions starting to form, and over time this may accumulate enough version fragmentation that it could become a real problem.

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Apache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground.

It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

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As a server OS, Linux has long been highly successful and a poster child for open source. For example, Linux currently powers a majority of the world’s web servers and supercomputers. As a desktop OS, however, Linux has yet to gain mainstream acceptance.

That said, there are some countries where people have embraced Linux on the desktop to a greater degree than most.

Since you probably wouldn’t be able to guess which these countries are no matter how hard you tried, we have highlighted them in this article. Read on to find out where desktop Linux is most popular, plus some nice bonus stats.

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According to Google, there are currently 100 million activated Android devices, and the user base is growing by leaps and bounds. Each day, 400,000 new Android devices are activated. That’s the equivalent of 146 million new Android devices per year.

Does that mean that one year from now, we’ll have 246 million Android devices? At the current growth rate, yes, but here’s the thing: Android’s adoption rate so far has been accelerating.

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We bet the team over at Mozilla is about to pop open a few bottles of bubbly. Why? Because Firefox 4 just sailed past 100 million downloads. The new browser version was released to the public on March 22.

Even for such a widely used software as a web browser, 100 million downloads in a month is quite an accomplishment.

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As you no doubt have noticed by now, Mozilla launched Firefox 4 this week. It was downloaded 7.1 million times in the first 24 hours, and is now up to 15 million downloads and counting.

We figured a Firefox infographic would be nice to celebrate this event, so we made one for you. We hope you like it!

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