Since it was Father’s Day here in Sweden yesterday – yes we know it varies around the world – we thought we’d pay homage to some of the people behind the Internet as we know it today.

Some of the obvious choices would include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for TCP/IP, Vannevar Bush for much of the conceptual thinking behind the Internet, Ted Nelson for coining the word hypertext, Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web, Marc Andreeseen for co-authoring Mosaic, and many others.

But why go for the obvious? We thought it would be fun to give some credit to a few lesser-known contributors to some technology or product that is a part of Internet history. These are guys who have made important contributions that affect us all but that may not have received the same accolades as others. So even though this didn’t exactly turn out to be a Father’s Day post, let’s take a look.

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How many users do the various web browsers really have? We often hear about market share percentages, but we rarely get to see any actual user numbers.

So let’s try to estimate how many people are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Not in market share percentages, but the actual number of people.

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As you may have noticed, our April Fool’s joke this year was to take irony into overdrive and launch SaveIE6.com. There simply is no other browser that web developers love to complain more about than IE6, so turning the tables on them (no pun intended) and make a whole site dedicated to praising IE6 seemed like a fun idea.

Luckily for us, irony proved to be alive and well on the Internet. The site has been incredibly well received, and was one of the most retweeted links on Twitter yesterday. If you haven’t checked it out already, you might want to take a look!

We have picked out some of the funniest comments people added to the petition page, all explaining why IE6 is a superior browser…

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Microsoft’s long-lived Internet Explorer 6 web browser has been with us since 2001. Lately it’s been getting a LOT of negative attention, such as the recent Norwegian initiative to encourage web users to move away from IE6 in favor of other web browsers.

We feel that all this negative attention towards IE6 is highly undeserved, which is why we were very happy when we found SaveIE6.com.

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Google Chrome has its “incognito” mode, IE 8 has its “InPrivate browsing” mode and Safari has its “private browsing” mode. It’s only a matter of time until Firefox adds one as well. These new privacy modes in the various web browsers will create serious problems for site owners that rely on revenue from affiliate programs and targeted advertising. It will also change the landscape for web statistics software and skew visitor statistics for websites.

Why? Statistics software (for example Google’s own Analytics), affiliate tracking, and targeted ads all rely on cookies to work. People have been able to disable cookies for a long time, but this is the first time that people will be able to enter a browser mode that prevents cookies from being stored with just a simple click.

In this article we focus on the site owners’ perspective and will cover three main areas where the browser privacy modes will hurt them.

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We wrote about the results of our Firefox campaign a couple of days ago. In short, a free offer made lots of people switch web browsers to Firefox. We had expected that a lot of people would install Firefox and come back to our website to be able to be able to sign up for [...]

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Congratulations to the 1,000 Firefox users who managed to land themselves a whole year of Pingdom uptime monitoring for free in our campaign last week. (Yes, all 1,000 accounts disappeared like butter in sunshine.) Interestingly enough, when we analyzed our web server logs we noticed that 23 percent of the people that visited the Pingdom [...]

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