Microsoft may be its own toughest competitor. As noted by Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 8 browser is taking the browser market by storm...so long as you define "browser market" as "Internet Explorer 7." Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 browser, at 30 million downloads and counting, isn't being affected by IE 8's uptake. But then, neither is IE 6.
It's only IE 7 that is getting squeezed by IE 8. And you thought they were friends...
Here's the data on IE market share:
(Credit:
Asa Dotzler (Data from Net Applications))
This suggests that Firefox, with roughly 22 percent of browser market share, is the second-most widely used browser on the planet. Not bad when you consider the previous state of affairs when Firefox 1.0 was launched, as Dotzler does:
Back then IE 6 was the most popular browser with almost 85% of Web usage followed by older IE versions accounting for another 10 points of share, and with all other vendors' browsers accounting for only 5% of usage.
In other words, we have real competition again, competition that sees an open-source upstart seriously challenge Microsoft for first place in browser usage. Mozilla has accomplished this by making Firefox easy to use, easy to contribute to (which keeps getting easier, as Glyn Moody reports), and powerful through a large and growing community.
Importantly, Mozilla has had to fight for every user. Unlike IE, Firefox isn't pre-installed with Windows. That "30 million" number I cited above? That's not even due to an auto-update feature, which Mozilla has yet to turn on. Once that happens, Firefox 3.5's impressive download numbers should soar.
Perhaps Microsoft should stop competing with itself and start competing with Firefox...?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
As CNET's Ina Fried reports, Microsoft is trying to downplay Internet Explorer 8's performance deficiencies, arguing that "in most cases, the difference could literally be measured by a blink of an eye."
I guess that it depends on who's blinking. Walt Mossberg, the noted personal-technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, rebuked IE 8's performance in an All Things Digital post, noting that in his tests, the new version of the Microsoft browser was slower than Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome. All of them. Considerably slower, in many cases.
Microsoft claims IE 8 is very fast, but in my tests, speed and performance were its worst attributes. Using two computers, one running Windows XP and one running Windows Vista, I timed the loading of a half-dozen popular Web sites, plus two folders containing numerous news and sports sites. I repeated the test in IE 8, and in Firefox, Safari 4, and Chrome. In every case, IE 8 loaded the pages and folders more slowly than most of the other browsers, and in most cases, it came in dead last.
In some instances, the differences were tolerable--a few seconds. In others, primarily the folders containing 9 or 21 sites, respectively, IE 8 took two or three times as long as one or more of the other browsers to complete the task.
Speed, of course, isn't everything, and some, including the Practical Technology blog, tip their hat to Microsoft's other innovations in IE 8, such as its management of tabs.
But these are all somewhat secondary to the biggest reason to use an alternative browser, and specifically Firefox: community.
Ironically, it is community that has made Microsoft so dominant on the desktop, but which is arguably its greatest failing in mobile. Microsoft keeps trying to do IE by itself, while Mozilla gets the help of a global, diverse development crew, one that creates exceptional add-ons like AdBlock Plus and more.
Microsoft will almost certainly fix its performance problem in IE 8. The real question is whether it can fix its community problem.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Mary Jo Foley notes that the more standards-compliant Internet Explorer 8 may cause some problems for website owners. Why? Well, many have tailored their websites to non-standards compliant IE7 (as well as prior versions), and may find that opening the doors to IE8 may not be painless.
As Microsoft noted on its IE blog:
What does "getting ready for IE8" mean for web sites? IE8 displays content in IE8 Standards mode - its most standards-compliant layout mode - by default. In previous blog posts, we've discussed how this aligns with our commitment to Web standards interoperability. However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of IE to display differently than intended. This creates a "get ready" call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in IE8.
It also creates a "get ready" call to rival browsers, and particularly Mozilla's Firefox, to capitalize on Microsoft's incompatibility with itself to remind website creators that web standards are just that: Standards that should lead to greater cross-platform/browser compatibility. As more websites code for IE8, it should lead to those same sites working better with Firefox, Safari, and other browsers.
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