IE8 coming in 2009, but will it be late to the Firefox party?
CNET's Ina Fried reports that Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 won't surface until 2009. With a release candidate not scheduled until the first quarter of 2009, the final release won't hit until the second (or possibly even the third) quarter. Microsoft released a beta of IE8 back in March 2008. Roughly a year later, we should see the full release in action.
By that time, will anyone care?
Yes, Microsoft continues to dominate the browser market with 71.3 percent market share, according to Net Applications, so, the majority of Internet users will continue to use IE. But that's not my question. My question is whether they will care.
Using Firefox is an affirmative act: you have to download it. You have to want it. IE, on the other hand, finds its way to end-customers through preinstalls, Windows Update, and other means. People use IE by default.
The good news for Firefox? More and more people are making that "affirmative act," while IE usage continues to slide, again according to Net Applications:
(Credit:
Net Applications)
With Web chatter mounting around Firefox 4, which is also expected to hit in 2009, I think we'll see Firefox top 25 percent market share by the end of 2009, as well as increased competition from Google Chrome (perhaps hitting 3 percent market share in 2009).
Microsoft no longer competes in a vacuum: it has real competition, and that competition is innovating and iterating product releases faster than Microsoft has for some time in IE. The good news for everyone is that Microsoft responds well to competition. The bad news is that Microsoft needs more than inertia to drive IE adoption going forward.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The press had lots of mighty expectations on Chrome too. With not even 1% market share and no "affirmative" action other than on the first few days of its release being a Google baby, we now know that it was just plain'ol anti-Microsoft hullabullah.
By the time of the soccer world cup in June 2010, 20 months away, you will see (based on current trends):
* 1/4 of all Internet users using Firefox, and
* 1/3 using one of the big alternatives (Opera, Firefox, Safari).
* Internet Explorer will be at 60%.
So if I was designing my web presence for 2010 I'd certainly want to ensure I get 10 million visits instead of 6 million. So will someone deploy Silverlight and exclude 40% of their potential users. I'm sure someone will and their marketing people will kill them.
What has happened over the last few years thanks in many ways to Firefox and what is happening moving forward has had no impact like a meteorite falling on your head will give you a mild headache.
Umm, okay, except for that FF growth curve that keeps eating away at IE usage 'marketshare'... ;)
Now, if FF4 does come out in 2009 it won't be until later in the year. Even if its a fundamentally new technology it will take at least a year if not two for the developer to produce a sufficient rich and compelling ecosystem. This is, of course, assuming that they are willing to fragment their user base (sorry, you have to use firefox! screw you IE people). That's quite a lot of time for a market leader to react to the new dynamics.
So while 'no impact' is an understatement I don't think it will have a paradigm shifting impact in the 2-3 year time frame.
Run task manager in XP.. and it will give you your memory usage in K.. not MB. Its 2008!!!! It wasn't until Vista that they changed this!
doh! It will stay the same even if you check your XP task manager in 2050. Bad example for an OS that was released in 2001!
And frankly, no one cares if it's in KB or MB.
But I agree with you, Microsoft usually reacts. But they generally do make a better product for a diverse user base when they react.
But I agree with you, Microsoft usually reacts. But they generally do make a better product for a diverse user base when they react.
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That's laughable - unless you "diverse user base" you're speaking of is the hacker community. M$ makes products hackers can exploit in their sleep, even 12 year old children pwn M$ trashware on a regular basis. It's garbage for slaves who are afraid of their computers or for running games on. Nothing more.
I personally use Chrome and Firefox and beta IE8
Chrome, in all tests I have ran.... WINS
It is faster, easy to use and well I just don't see why anyone would use anything else.
My only guess is people don't know it is out there. Being so new, or just not being loaded on their Manufactured computer
just my .02
I'm not saying Chrome ain't a good browser but it simply can't be the answer for everybody. I would definitely see it taking the place of IE as a default OS browser for the casual user but for every power users and beyond, it simply ain't enough. Yes my Firefox is slower than Chrome but it has so many other qualities it's not even a problem for me.
The primary reason I use FireFox is because I can close browsers and restore sessions. I don't think you can do that in IE8 or Chrome the way it does it in FireFox.
On the one hand, it is debatable whether Microsoft responds well to competition. Their history is littered with the debris from search and destroy missions carried out for the purpose of killing competition. Netscape being the most pertinent example. Microsoft won the tactical battle and killed Netscape, the company. But Netscape won the strategic war. And now we have Firefox.
On the other hand, it is not bad news that Microsoft needs more than inertia to drive IE adoption going forward. Rather, that is good news. It means that, for the first time in a long while, Microsoft faces real competition. And that is good news for everyone. Well, everyone except Microsoft, and you apparently.
1 no one cares about linux even if its freeeeee... Add $20 to it and you would be the only one using it
2 I dont see linux coming out with any software that will inovate the way we use our computer.
3 you excape from the asylum and you need an electric shock.
1 no one cares about linux even if its freeeeee... Add $20 to it and you would be the only one using it
2 I dont see linux coming out with any software that will inovate the way we use our computer.
3 you excape from the asylum and you need an electric shock."
What are you talking about? The article is about Microsoft, IE, and Firefox, and my comments are about Microsoft. Not Windows. Not Linux. And you are talking about Linux as though it and Firefox are the same thing and as though I was commenting about Windows and Linux. Are you really that clueless?
Are you really that clueless?
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Yes, he is. M$ pays him to be that way. Read that comment again, it doesn't make any sense unless you think of him as a 12 year old whiner using mommy's computer in the basement. Or an escaped mental patient I guess.
They will do everything they can, using cash, to clobber and sow FUD against any competitor. I find the current climate really exiting. We finally, after a long time, have some decent competition that M$ can't buy their way around.
Firefox, OSX, Ubuntu, Chrome and others are all eating away and M$ are looking old, tired and lacking of innovation. Vista? yeah right. XP with a prettier GUI and no one wants it. IE8 same old, same old....
TTFN
- by Mam00th November 22, 2008 9:44 AM PST
- Although you normally seems to have a small personal bias against Microsoft, I do agree with most of the point in this article. It is true that people using Firefox mostly do it by choice and that most people use IE because they just don't care, they don't care about respecting the web standard and etc.
- Reply to this comment
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(20 Comments)The point I agree with you the most though, unlike some commenter, is when you say that Microsoft reacts well to competition. I should also add that it reacts very very badly when there is none... But isn't that one of the consequence of free market?
I think it is great news that we finally see a competitor on his way to get 25% of the market share against IE. Since Microsoft killed Netscape, development on Internet Explorer almost stopped, making the browser a rotting old piece of software. But now, with Firefox, Google Chrome and the likes, it's great to see a company such as Microsoft with so much financial and human resources trying to innovates in a domain that they left for dead 6 years ago.
We now see innovation in the browser space like never before coming from all of the different parties. Competition breeds innovation they say and as much as I dislike old saying, this one is mostly always true.
Thanks Mozilla (and every Firefox contributor's), Google and Apple, for bringing back competition in OS, browser and software space.
Oh and you might change the last sentence for "The other good news is that Microsoft needs more than inertia to drive IE adoption going forward."
PS. I usually do not comment on CNET because most of the commenter are savage fanboys and / or just act like monkeys, and also because my English is not my first language. Please feel free to correct my grammar / spelling.