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I feel so Marty McFly. There’s a browser war again, reminiscent of the one we had in the last millennium, previous decade, nineties. This time, it pits Internet Explorer against Firefox (version 3 released yesterday), Opera (version 9.5 released last week), and Apple’s Safari. Microsoft isn’t going to crush these browsers like it did Netscape 15 years ago. The battle isn’t over what you have installed on your desktop anymore. The battlefield has shifted to the Web. (OK, I’m done with the whole military metaphor thing.) Now that Web 2.0 has gained traction, more and more people are living their digital lives on the Web. They’re using Web-based email services rather than Outlook, storing and organizing photos online with Flickr, editing documents with Google Docs or Zoho, and making their schedules universally accessible with Google Calendar. And they’re not even using PCs to do it, thanks to the iPhone. Today’s Christian Science Monitor has an article discussing a lot of this. They peg IE’s market share at 74% (down from like 99.99999999% 5 years ago), with Firefox at 18% and Safari coming in at 6%. (They basically ignored Opera in the article. Yo … what’s up with that?) They also quote Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan: “Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com, says he’s set up his wife on three different computers recently, two PCs and a Mac, and found that he didn’t need to load any software for her. Everything she wanted to do was available through her browser. She reads her e-mail at Yahoo and finds the rest of her software among Google’s many free online applications, including Google Docs, which allows users to create and share documents and spreadsheets, he says. ‘Her browser was taking care of everything,’ Mr. Sullivan says. She’s actually going online, ‘but if you don’t know any better, you’d think Google Docs is software running [on her own machine].’” I have to concur. Right now, other than the Big 4 browsers, all I have loaded on my laptop is anti-virus/firewall software, some encryption programs I’m testing, and a couple of disk utilities for managing my hard drive. I dumped MS Office. (Ahhhh … what a nice feeling!) I uninstalled OpenOffice — talk about bloatware! — because I never used it. Heck, I don’t even use the Windows calculator anymore now that Google has one. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian |
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In 2005, CNET’s Molly Wood wrote about Gates’ decision to release IE7 early, the first time Microsoft has ever released an update to IE without a companion OS upgrade:
“Gates says the unexpected release is designed to address the perception that IE itself is a massive security risk. What he didn’t say, but you know he was thinking it, is that IE 7 will easily put a stop to this upstart browser rebellion.”
I love the “browser rebellion” quote, because I think it rings true, given industry atmosphere and the (cult)ure of Firefox: to IE, Firefox represents an enemy that fights unconventionally (”GNU, What?” - Gates) and competes not just for feature supremacy, but for the hearts and minds of users. Sure it’s a browser war, but I prefer to consider it a rebellion.
That said, I’m not a huge fan of dumping all of my software just yet. I think GoogleDocs has a long way to go before it can compete seriously with MS Office.
I would, however, enjoy a small office experiment: attempt to complete your work at Jenkins for one week with just Firefox (Or IE) and any online apps you can find. Just, for the sake of IT’s collective hairline, don’t put sensitive information on Google Docs.
The results would make a great blog post.
Andrew
THAT would be an interesting experiment… for me personally, Google docs is sufficient and it comes in really handy when i need to collaborate with other ppl (like delegating list of things to bring to a BBQ, for instance). i don’t think ppl realize how easy it is!
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