Editor's note at 10:25 p.m. PDT: Since this blog was published, the video has been removed from the hosting pages. But this copy of the video remains on YouTube.
I know a girl who gets somewhat uptight when she's in the passenger seat of a car going any more than 70 mph. However, put her on some insane roller coaster, and she's just fine.
The driving dangers are real, you see. Whereas the roller-coaster ride just feels wonderfully stomach-turning.
And so it is with this charming new online ad for Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft. In most of its advertising, Microsoft has rarely reached 70 mph. But someone, somewhere deep within Microsoft, finally had the craving for the roller coaster.
Here we have a couple at the breakfast table. The husband is examining his laptop. It is not a Mac.
His wife asks to borrow his laptop for a minute. To be fair, shortly before she does this, she shows all the symptoms of being a little stressed. Her lips are tight. Her eyebrows seem even tighter.
She looks at her husband's screen. She is surprised at what she sees and says: "What's this?" Then her body begins involuntary motions. Will an alien being pop from her stomach, leap onto the table, and begin to sing a Celine Dion number?
Will she turn toward her husband, enraged at what she has just seen and assail him with words and fists and spittle and quotes from Joan Crawford?
Not quite.
In fact, she turns away from the kitchen table, not wishing to soil his PC. And then she vomits.
Yes, she vomits. She pukes. She throws up. She upchucks. She phones Huey and Ralph down the big white telephone. (This last phrase is peculiarly English. You need to say the words "Huey" and "Ralph" with an echoing timbre.)
Her vomit is yellow, powerful, and a decent, if distant, relative of the turbo-charged green liquid emitted by Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." Although, truly, one wonders what there really could have been on that screen to make her do so. Most wives have surely seen it all.
Still, her husband, the sinful, disgusting, smug pervert, slips on the vomit as it hits the kitchen floor.
What could possibly happen after all this drama? Does Superman turn up? Actually, he does. In the shape of actor Dean Cain. Dean, who appears unaffected by the detritus at his feet, asks, "Do you suffer from OMGIGP?"
This acronym, for those of you still in control of your diaphragm, stands for "Oh my god, I'm gonna puke."
Superman then goes on to explain that IE 8 has InPrivate Browsing while the husband, still prostrate on the kitchen floor, is privately adorned with even more of his wife's mellow yellow.
As the wife wipes her chin, all I can think about is that Superman's turtleneck is yellow too--and that, even a year ago, no one would have ever expected Microsoft to make a spot like this.
This work is not, as some have surmised, the work of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency responsible for both the "I'm a PC" and Gates-Seinfeld campaigns. It is the brainchild of Bradley and Montgomery, the folks that brought you the Mojave Experiment.
The vomit ad is one of a series, all featuring Cain. The series is taglined "Browse Better," and like the Mojave project, it has its own site, BrowsefortheBetter.com.
Interestingly, and perhaps, for some, ironically, the BrowsefortheBetter site says that for every download of IE 8, the company will donate 8 meals to Feeding America, an organization trying to stop hunger in the U.S.
Of course, some will say of this vomiting ad: "Out, damned spot." Harry McCracken of Technologizer has already dubbed it as "Worst. Tech. Commercial. Ever?"
I will say this. Microsoft has realized that it needs attention. It is finding many and varied ways of doing so. In this case, I suspect that someone has said in a long, long marketing meeting: "Hmm, maybe snot-nosed, filthy T-shirted, gross-out humored, socially inept children really do have an influence."
The amount of market share commanded by Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has dropped for the seventh consecutive month.
Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of over seven percentage points in a year, according to figures from Web metrics company Net Applications, released Monday. Mozilla's Firefox browser, meanwhile, has gained market share in the same time frame, climbing over three percentage points to 21.53 percent.
Microsoft's browser has steadily lost ground to its competitors in the past year. Its share dropped sharply in both October and November 2008, when it lost over one percentage point in each month.
Apple's Safari browser now stands at 8.29 percent, up from 7.13 percent in November, when IE dipped. Safari has gained share more quickly than Firefox in that period: Mozilla's browser accounted for 20.78 percent of browser use three months ago, and now has 21.53 percent.
Google's Chrome browser, launched in September 2008, now has 1.12 percent of the market, having overtaken Opera in November. Opera's share of the market now stands at 0.7 percent.
Internet Explorer's drop of seven percentage point since February last year is a continuing trend. Microsoft lost over nine percent of browser market share in the preceding two years.
Most of IE's drop in the past year has been in Internet Explorer 6, which fell from 30.63 percent last February to 19.21 percent this January. Internet Explorer 7 has gained market share overall over the same time period, rising from 44.03 percent to 47.32 percent.
Microsoft launched the first release candidate for Internet Explorer 8 last week. It hopes to regain lost ground by adding features such as private browsing and a cross-site scripting filter.
Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.
Alternative browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and may be aimed at toppling Microsoft's reign, but analysts say Internet Explorer's "overwhelming dominance" in the workplace will be difficult to defeat.
The main reason for the Microsoft browser's seemingly stranglehold position is the near ubiquity of Microsoft products used in enterprises today.
Ray Valdes, Gartner's research vice president, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia: "Due to longstanding accumulations of dependencies, most enterprises will find it difficult or unfeasible to switch from Internet Explorer to an alternative browser, such as Firefox, Opera, or Safari."
Valdes said it would be "difficult, if not impossible" for the average organization to abandon IE in favor of these alternative browsers. He noted that many software systems and applications are dependent on IE's HTML rendering engine embedded into other Microsoft applications, such as e-mail client Microsoft Outlook.
Another driving aspect is IE's administrative functions that allow enterprises to centrally manage and administer the browser, Valdes added. "Unlike Firefox, Microsoft provides mechanisms that meet this requirement, such as group policy objects and the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK).
"A key enterprise requirement is the ability to centrally manage and administer the browser...As a result, for many organizations, abandoning IE and replacing it with another browser is unrealistic," he said.
Through these management tools, for example, companies can more efficiently control user access and better manage security policies related to Web browsing.
According to IDC, IE's dominance is also perpetuated by the rest of the IT industry, creating a cyclical relationship.
Because IE currently has the dominant market share, makers of Web sites, software applications, and other components that are accessible via a Web browser will place the highest priority on ensuring their products support IE, Mark Levitt, IDC's program vice president for collaboration and enterprise 2.0 strategies, told ZDNet Asia.
While new features offered in Firefox or Chrome could help propel either browser's position, if they showed "sufficient advantages over IE," Levitt said Microsoft would unlikely give the competition enough time to close the gap before it releases similar features for IE.
Victoria Ho of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.
It appears that nearly 2 million people in the United States downloaded Google's new Chrome Web browser in its first week of availability, Nielsen Online said Wednesday.
Nielsen, which bases its statistics on the behavior of a panel of Internet users, said that from September 1 to September 7, 1.93 million people visited the Google "Thank You" page associated with the download process.
The online chatter about Google's browser surged to more than half the remarkable level of Apple's iPhone, Nielsen said. This chart shows the percentage of blog postings and other online commentary that mentioned Chrome.
(Credit: Nielsen Online)That's nearly 1.4 percent of all U.S. Internet users, Nielsen said. That may sound small, but it's a pretty good response for a beta version of a product that most people don't need, since so far, it only refines the familiar activity of using the Web.
Of course, getting people to try Chrome is easier than getting them to switch, but Google appears determined to push the open-source browser as hard as possible. On Tuesday, the company began a program to let people get the latest Chrome updates.
The buzz followed on the heels of the launch, according to Nielsen's measurement of Chrome mentions on blogs, discussion boards, and other online forums.
"The interest in all things Google was apparent in the online discussion surrounding the somewhat-unexpected Chrome launch," said Jon Stewart, research director of technology and search at Nielsen Online. "The browser was mentioned in nearly 1 percent of all online discussions the day after its launch--a respectable slightly-more-than-half of what the highly anticipated iPhone 3G generated when it launched earlier this summer."
There's a lot of action in the browser market these days: Google just launched its Chrome browser, Firefox 3.1 is due in months, Apple hopes Safari will spread across the world of Windows, and Microsoft is touting its second beta of Internet Explorer 8.
But a huge swath of Internet users is still getting by with IE 6, which is no doubt is why Google just released a new version of Gmail for the vintage 2001-era browser.
The update means IE 6 users will get access to colored labels for messages, Gmail Labs features, integration with AOL Instant Messenger, and invisible mode for IM, Google engineer Jon Perlow said on Google's Gmail blog on Friday. The upgrade catches IE 6 users up to features available to users of Firefox 3, IE 7, and Safari 3.
Google said it worked with Microsoft's IE engineers on some of other issues, including memory-related performance issue when running JavaScript programs in the browser, and Google pared back some user interface features that had been causing trouble for IE 6 users.
Google Chrome is a warning shot over the bows of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
The open-source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies is now on the battlefield.
So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?
Google Chrome has many competitors to contend with, according to these August stats.
(Credit: Net Applications)Initially at least, it's not likely to change the market share rankings. According to Net Applications' browser market share statistics for August, IE has 72 percent share, Firefox 20 percent, Safari 6 percent, and Opera 1 percent.
But even before Google's browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company's agenda of Web-based applications.
Here are some possible implications for the four major alternatives to Chrome.
Internet Explorer
IE still claims the dominant share of the browser market, and it still has the hard-to-beat distribution channel of being built into the most widely used operating system.
CNET News Poll
Firefox has been chipping away at IE's share for years, but the dominance has remained fairly secure, and unless Chrome offers revolutionary new abilities, it's not likely to do more than perhaps increase the chipping rate a bit.
Microsoft has lit a fire under its IE team, and given that Google is such a powerful Microsoft rival, that fire doubtless will burn all the hotter because of Chrome. The forthcoming IE 8, with beta 2 released last week and the final version officially due to ship by the end of January, is a sign of how serious Microsoft is.
Officially, Microsoft welcomes the competition. "The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online," Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, said in a statement.
Vast numbers of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, which is ancient in Internet years. That cuts both ways for Microsoft: it's hard to get people to upgrade to IE 7 much less to IE 8, but those folks aren't moving to the competition either.
Of course, with Google's Web application agenda, the bigger long-term threat is to Microsoft's Office team, not to its IE team.
Firefox
Firefox potentially stands to lose the most from Chrome.
It's the leading alternative to IE and the standard bearer for those who love open-source software and revile Microsoft's technology, its business practices, and its philosophy. If you're hell-bent on taking down Microsoft, you could pick worse allies than Google.
Mozilla has something for the philosophical purists that Google lacks, though: a measure of independence. "Uniquely in this market, we're a public-benefit, nonprofit group, with no other agenda or profit motive at all," Mozilla Corp. Chief Executive John Lilly said in a blog posting Monday.
Survival is a powerful motive even if profit isn't, though, and the Mozilla Foundation, the parent of the Mozilla Corp., relies on Google for tens of millions of dollars each year in exchange for prominent placement of Google in the browser's search. Happily for Mozilla, Google just signed up for three more years of subsidizing Mozilla, so Firefox and other foundation activities should be financially sound at least for the time being.
Firefox has built a massive grassroots fan base, though. And even Google, for all its charisma, money, and power, will have a hard time replicating that.
Finally, though Chrome at first blush is bad news for Firefox, there's a subtler reality at play: IE is the dominant browser, and the greater the number of credible underdogs that exist, the more that dominance can't be taken for granted. Don't be surprised to hear Mozilla and Google present themselves more as allies than foes.
Safari
Apple has expanded its Safari ambitions from Mac OS X to Windows, most notably by letting the browser hitch a ride along with the iTunes update software. However, Safari has yet to become a force to be reckoned with.
But Safari could benefit indirectly from Chrome: both browsers are based on the open-source WebKit rendering engine.
If Google sponsors aggressive Webkit development--and doesn't end up wrestling with Apple for power over the project--both browsers stand to gain. Google's Android browser for mobile phones, it should be noted, also is based on WebKit.
Opera
Opera has a small share of the browser market, so it's the most likely to drop in position if Google Chrome catches on. It already fights for relevance against the bigger players.
But Opera is a scrappy company. Not surprisingly, it prefers to look at its own growth rather than its sliver of share, and CEO Jon Tetzchner points out that its share has grown each time a new browser has emerged as a viable competitor to Internet Explorer.
"Last year, we had more than 50 percent growth in our user base," Tetzchner said. "I think we'll do quite well this year as well. It seems every time there's talk of new browsers, that's been a positive thing for us. It has been good there is focus on browser alternatives."
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