Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

Not so fast, the balance of this war has changed drastically since the old Netscape vs Internet Explorer days. Let’s face it, Netscape had no chance and ultimately lost (even though people still use it after official dev support was dropped). As some of you may have already read, the European Union decided to sue Microsoft (again) for anti-competitive behaviour by integrating their much touted web browser into every Windows release. No news there then, unfortunately them pesky Europeans don’t want to give up on the matter so even with the credit crunch the MS lawyers still have jobs.

Let’s have a look at the browser landscape as we see it today. Mozilla Firefox has grown increasingly popular, eating up IE’s market share. It is no surprise that the makers of Opera decided to pipe up about this, advocating the actions taken by the EU “According to Opera, the browser is the “most important application on the PC.” Actually Solitaire and Notepad should be up there somewhere. To look into brower popularity, I was thinking about searching for general stats on the web, but I thought I would use my own blog as a way to gather this data. This of course is not an accurate depiction of internet usage as a whole but gives us some idea:

My blog stats, most popular browsers.


What surprises me is that Firefox has grabbed 54.6%, with IE trailing at 36.8%. The thing I like about Firefox, is the ability to add extensions and of course tabbed browsing. No offense to Microsoft and IE 7, but they were very slow on the uptake with tabbed browsing. The one thing Firefox fails on is breaking into the corporate environment. Every work environment I have been in have stuck with IE and in some places banned the use of third party browsers such as Firefox and Opera. From an administrative perspective, it is easier to restrict and integrate Internet Explorer into corporate network policy since it is so heavily integrated into Windows. By policy, I mean specifically group policy settings which are already in place. Trying to implement the same restrictions on say Firefox would require more effort and time, time that most companies are not willing to afford. There is also the element of the unknown on how well Firefox can work in an enterprise environment. That flexibility we love so much with FF is also a hindrance for an admin.

The future
This is where it gets interesting. I forgot to mention this actually in my Windows 7 overview, but MS have integrated IE 8 into their new OS. I updated the Windows 7 beta picture gallery with a screenshot, I feel they are still playing catch up. They have introduced something called Accelerators, which are add-ons similar to the extensions for Firefox. Come on Microsoft bring out something new! They have added some privacy options and it can suggest websites you may like based on browsing history. Is this their way to steer your browsing habits to selected websites? Hmmm…

To me, Google Chrome is an unknown entity. I believe it still needs development, but if anyone can do it, Google can. It could be something to watch out for, all it needs to have is flexibility and speed. The faster the pages pop up the better. All we need now is for Apple to release Safari for Windows (as if) and we will have a real battle on our hands. Mozilla cannot afford to rest on their laurels, I welcome a richer browsing experience and the competition can only be good for us users.

facebook   twitter   email  

Tags: EU sue Microsoft, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, web browser

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.