Tag Archive for 'nestoria'

Browser Wars at Nestoria (Take 3)

Published by Ahmed on July 31, 2008 in about us, search, technical and what's hot. 2 Comments

It’s nearly a full 6 months since we brought you our last update on the state of the browser world (Nestoria style) and well over a year since the first installment.

If you haven’t read any post in this series before, I urge you to do so if you’re interested in learning why we place so much emphasis on tracking browser usage so religiously: we do it for you, our loyal (or brand-new) users. We want to make your experience as pleasant and uniform as possible, across all platforms and browsers.

With that in mind, let’s move onto look at the trends for Jan 08 - July 08 and how these contrast with our last review.

General Trends

Overall Share

Internet Explorer’s (IE) share has dropped from 84% to 81%, wheras FIrefox (FF) gained a full 2% points, claiming a 14% share of our users. Safari’s 4% share remains stable, leaving the same 1% for other browsers combined.

It seems that over time, IE is losing it’s share to FF. It also seems apparent that Apple’s release of Safari on Windows hasn’t yet seen any serious uptake/usage, with Safari’s share relatively unchanged.

Firefox Comparison Internet Explorer Comparison Big 3 Browsers Comparison

Version Trends

Previous trends seem to be continuing as far as version uptake is concerned; IE7 usage is increasing every day, with IE6 becoming less favoured but still accounting for a large portion of visits.

We saw a more extreme migration to FF2.x in our last post (with nearly all users quickly switching to the new version), resulting in very low usage of 1.5. The introduction of version 3 this June again saw a fairly swift initial uptake, representing 1/3 of Firefox usage within a few weeks of release.

The long tail of browser/device usage

Whilst traditional platforms and browsers account for the bulk of Nestoria usage, it’s becoming clear that there are a number of capable browsers on a greater and greater range of devices, and that people are beginning to use these devices for the odd spot of property hunting.

Windows accounts for 94.11%, Macintosh for 5.28 and Linux for 0.35%. Things get interesting when you see that the next most popular platform is the iPhone, claiming 0.06% or around 700 visits per month. Next up is the iPod touch with about half the usage of the iPhone. Symbian (all phones) has around the same usage as the touch, whilst the PS3 and Wii bring up the rear with around 200 visits per month.

So, please do let us know how Nestoria’s doing on your chosen system/os/browser, especially if you wish the experience was better.

In The Lab - Sponsoring Research

Published by astle on April 16, 2008 in Google Maps, partnerships and technical. 1 Comment

Nestorscientists,

After his appearance at AGI2007, Ed was approached by a professor from UCL about sponsoring summer research projects for students from their Master’s program in Geographic Information Science. I went along a few months ago to pitch our project ideas and I am happy to report that one student researcher has taken up our challenge. Christopher Osborne will be working with us this summer to find new and innovative ways to present property-related data to users on a map. Chris comes from a background in online mapping - having built map interfaces for Brent Council and other UCL researchers. He will work primarily on his own, but with ideas, guidance, and data sets provided by Nestoria. We’re pleased to be working with the UK academic community and look forward to seeing what Chris comes up with.

Origin of the name ‘Nestoria’

Published by Ahmed on October 9, 2007 in about us. 3 Comments

People are always asking us where the name ‘Nestoria‘ comes from.

Ask and ye shall receive. Prepare yourselves for a journey that will take you through space, time, London, and latex.

When we were looking to set up the company in the UK, we did all kinds of research into what would be an appropriate name for our baby, the easiest way to find UK property. We trawled through page after page of books claiming to provide everything we needed to make that once in a lifetime decision. Alas 20,000 suggestions later we were still unconvinced. We needed something with real pizzaz, something weighty and meaningful.

So we donned our latex gloves and headed for the British Museum’s most secure and sacred vaults. Through a personal academic contact, we were able to gain access to thousand year-old texts barely scoured by the human eye. During our fourth day in the vaults, whilst unbundling yet another tome, a small scrap of yellowed parchment swayed to the floor.

Our friend at the museum quickly identified the note to be from the hand of Vincentius the 3rd. Translated, the note told of expeditions to Londinium and the many wonderful new experiences to be had there. Vincentius made heavy use of derivations of the ancient Latin stem ‘nestor’ which has been translated to mean ‘to search and find’.

With the team running low on food and water, we took this as a sign. The site must be called ‘nestor’. Not catchy. Nestoria. Much better.

And so there you have it, the solid, precious history of the name ‘Nestoria’.

PS

Anyone who says otherwise, comment away. Anyone suggesting we named ourselves after an Argonaut can go straight to the feedback form.