Gartner Says it's a 2-Browser World

prostoalex writes "In its advisory to the IT managers Gartner says that even though the factors that drive the current Firefox growth are not sustainable, IT departments better get used to a two-browser world. "Concerns about security currently favor Mozilla Foundation's Firefox, but the market tide can shift if security breaches result from increased usage of Firefox", says Gartner and ZDNet adds that "Microsoft must deliver an improved version of its browser in Longhorn if it is to "determine the outcome" of the browser war.""

Comments

That's a misapprehension

[jfengel]

What was reported as the "minimum requirements" were actually the "expected average new system". It shouldn't be the least surprising that the average new system in 2006 is rather better than a top-end system today.

I don't actually know the minimum requirements for Longhorn. I do know that it will require a lot of horsepower and a high-end video card, because they're playing catchup with OS X (both in terms of eye candy and in terms of useful features such as Expose').

So I expect that Longhorn will run perfectly well on today's mid- to high-end systems, since they're trying to take advantage of video power currently going unused. Today's bottom-range systems may not run it at all, or will do so pokily.

Re:New & Improved = Drop ActiveX

[ultranova]

Could anyone please explain to me how Mozilla's XPIs are better than ActiveX, now that ActiveX are not installed by default anymore ? Oh, yeah, they're cross-platform (when written in JavaScript). But they have all priviledges when accessing your machine (even in JavaScript, they can do pretty much anything by scripting native components).

From what I've understood, ActiveX is similar to Java - an ActiveX control is placed into a web page, and it is then used to enhance that page in some way. I could be wrong here - I don't use Windows for anything but gaming nowadays.

Mozilla's XPI files, on the other hand, are browser extensions. They give the browser new functionality in a modular way. For example, I have currently installed a Nuke Anything extension, which adds a "Remove this object"-option to the right-button menu, which allows me to remove the object being clicked.

This is one of the basic ideas behind Firefox: make the basic browser have only a few features, and let people extend it as they please.

So, in short: ActiveX controls are web applets, XPI files are browser addons. And since XPI files aren't installed unless the user specifically requests it (and certainly not from any random page), security is not a concern anymore than it would be for installing any other program.