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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.""
Foo.
Improved is such a generalization, and it will be interpreted and realized in that manner. Microsoft will undoubtably continue to bundle more crap into it, tie proprietary formats to it, ignore generally accepted practices of composition (delivering their own, which break pages on rival browsers, a la the Opera Bork-Bork-Bork fiasco), uselessly incorporate it into all their product lines (regarless if it makes any sense, i.e. XBox 3, all games played through a browser) and continue with the practice of patenting and copyrighting everything they can think of to fend off competition.
We've seen all this before.
"isn't that another tentacle around your throat?"
"yes, but it's an improved tentacle and i'm certain i feel better about it than the last one."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't think this article said anything useful. Clearly MS has to offer at least something if they want to remain in the browser market. It's taking time, but Firefox is gaining more and more ground.
It's not a bad thing if Microsoft wants to innovate with their web browser - more competition is a good thing. It will make everyone's internet experience better. Having two competing browsers is definitely a better playing field than just one monopolistic browser.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
What, so if Longhorn has a super cool browser the browser wars are "over" and MS won?
This is a "war" that isn't going away. Ever. (Well... until something supercedes browsers)
consider ways to manage browser coexistence because that is the most likely long-term outcome:
Maybe 2 browser engines world.. But with AOL Browser coming out (who has its own userbase already) And Netscape 8, and continued development on firefox, and IE, and continued development on opera, two browsers seems like a bit of a stretch, two major browsers even seems like a stretch in the not so distant future..
As the de facto sysadmin of my family it's a one browser world (regardless of platform). There are only so many spyware/adware/malware removal sessions on Windows that I can do in my life.
Speak truth to power.
If you want the hare-brained opinions of the analysts doing magic 8-ball predictions at Gartner you gotta buy their document. Wonderful. Who listens go Gartner anyway? It's opinion is no better than Slasdot's. I bet if you dressed up the average trolling Slashdotter in a suit and have him work for Gartner selling comments, PHB's would still believe it because it came from a guy in a suit.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
In reality though, as long as people continue to open those "Here is teh document" emails written in bad engrish, clicking "OK" in the "WOULD U LIKE TO INSTALLA THIS SUPER-HELFUL SEARCHING ASSITANTE" ActiveX prompts because they just have to see this "cool" web page and installing crapware like seedy P2P apps, spyware is not going away any time soon. With FF's increased install base and XPI malware beginning to appear in some websites, it's only a matter of time until it's a two-browser and much spyware world anyway.
Has anyone ever noticed that in Windows XP, a normal user can create/write new files/dirs to the root of C:\? It's things like this that will need to be corrected if MS really wants to meet their goals of maintaining a secure, stable OS solution. ActiveX controls need to be revisited. Default NTFS ACLs as well
Sure, there have been improvements. And for all of our sakes, it would be best not to rest on the laurels, but to continue the improvements.
Competition is good. Especially in this case. Granted, if I was forced to choose, I may not choose MS for the majority of software I use (if any at all), but I refuse to close the book on them (perhaps I'm just optmistic)-- I think they could someday arrive and live down their bad reputation.
Sociologists have proven it takes a minimum of 3 generations for social change. How long will it take for security to be cultured into MS?
As soon as I read Gartner says I was done.
I remember working for a software firm that used Gartner's projections in their justification for the development of projects. "It's going to be a billion dollar industry..."
Years later, the market still isn't a 10th of what Gartner projected.
Who are these "gartner" people, how do they make money by stating the obvious, and how do I get in on that action?
IT people should have gotten used to a multi-browser (i.e. more than 2) world 10 years ago. And by "getting used to a multi-browser world," I mean, "welcoming the benefits of a heterogeneous software environment by writing standards compliant code, validating that code, and testing it against multiple browsers".
War metaphors don't work. If anything, IE will have to coexist peacefully with Mozilla, for trying to fight it makes no more sense than a single man trying to fight a mountain by climbing it. That's not the world's most beautiful metaphor either, but it works much better than those related to battle.
The way to survive, for both browser makers and users (and the IT departments that "love" them), is to stick to standards. GUI techniques will diverge, so help-desk paths through them will never be truly unified. But the actual use of data formats, network protocols, and even plugin APIs are most manageable when they interact according to the published rules, meeting explicit expectations of function and form. To take advantage of that consistency, browser makers can endear themselves to users and IT departments by fully documenting their compliance with those standards. Maybe even publish "use case" walkthrus of their apps, so everyone's on the same page.
--
make install -not war
Nah, actually, the first 10% is the hardest. Once 10% of the people (and that's a 60 million people or so out of 600,000,000 computer users) know about a product, it becomes mainstream enough for most people to feel confortable trying it. most people are sheep and don't want to get in front where the wolves are. (nothing wrong with this strategy by the way)
"Piter, too, is dead."
Didn't someone say years ago IE won the browser war? Now they say IE needs to improve to win the war? And why the hell must we call this a war and why are americans so damn obsessed with calling things wars? (disclaimer: I am a US american).
This is business not war. Microsoft has the top "selling" (for lack of a better word) product that everyone just uses. However, someone else is making inroads in this capitalistic society and is giving them competition. Hopefully Firefox, Safari, Mozilla, Opera and the like will give enough competition to break the monopoly and then all the browsers will improve with good healthy competition.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
What browser war? Some of us have taken our guns and gone elsewhere.
I didn't read the article because it is from Gartner and to me they just don't hold any credibility with me. Gartner will say whatever you want them to say if the price is right. But why is it that when microsoft comes out with a new and improved browser (of course it is going to be new and improved) it will be the end of all the other browsers. I don't care how good their browser is I still will not use any of Microsoft's crap if it was the last os in the world - Puried
Highlander! There can be only one!
It's a very Gartner "quadrant" thing to say, to be so deterministic. It's as if Gartner can only see a world in which one company drives the web.
No mention of W3C or standards or the state of plugin specifications, or anything about frameworks for interoperability.
These three analysts are Ray Valdes, David Mitchell Smith and Whit Andrews. I question the assertion that the growth of Firefox is based on unsustainable market conditions? Like what? That IE is insecure? If IE becomes "secure" will that immediately revert to the IT paradigm these guys are familiar with, where one technology emerges and drives standards?
Could it POSSIBLY be that Gartner analysts just don't see a larger force at work, that when open source products compete on quality and stability and unify their distribution methods, they are INHERENTLY more desireable, even on closed operating systems, than proprietary browsers? Because the standards can't be wrested into corporate control and the IT industry is waking up to the benefits of open source?
This is why I prefer Burton to Gartner. Burton papers tend to see things more how I see them. I have no axe to grind, nor do I work for Burton. I just encourage you, as the reading IT professional or hobbyist, not to revere the Gartner name blindly.
I pulled some very old Gartner papers out the other day, and they were laughably wrong about web standards 5 years ago. I don't trust them anymore now.
The first 10% share of the browser market is easy. To get any more than that will be very difficult. Difficulty further enhanced by actions Microsoft may take.
Microsoft will not repeat the Netscape mistake. Mozilla and Firefox are good for them because they can claim they no longer have a monopoly (and giving away browsers for free is okay). After all, browsers are no threat to Microsoft's main revenue sources.
Browser wars will heat up to the extent that Microsoft permits this to happen, intentionally or unintentionally. Microsoft is the major force that determines the outcome, despite other vendors' agendas for the near term. If it does not respond, then a critical threshold eventually will be breached in market share.
The fact that Gartner is saying this has more to do with business and the stock market than it does about technology.
Geeks pay attention to Torvalds and other techies about the technical merits. Suits pay attention to Wall Street and other business oracles about the financial merits.
Microsoft is more about business than it is about technology. I care about technology, they care about money. When you understand that, you learn to tune out 80% of the crap that's out there.
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Oh wait, it doesn't.
Firefox, like any browser, will have exploits. The question is, are the exploits worthwhile? For IE, the answer is almost always yes, because IE is a web-ready app built into the shell with root permissions. Not so with Firefox. You won't see viruses and malware spreading through the Gecko engine. It won't happen, because FF is built upon a reasonable security model. Microsoft threw away IE's security model when it tried to use it to win an antitrust suit. It's not insecure because everyone uses it, it's because it was flawed to begin with.
I'm confused. See I keep hearing that all these government guys get paid to promote and ensure that the there is plenty of competition in the market. Then I hear about 2 HUGE companies merging so that they can compete against the the only remaining competitor in the market. So now instead of 3 competing in the market it's just 2. And I hear the same government guys saying "Yeah, that's okay, we understand needing to compete, go right ahead".
Then we hear all these analysts talk about how competition drives innovation, competition is good, it keeps companies agile, blah blah blah.
Then we have groups like Gartner floating articles which in essence say Microsoft needs to win the "browser war" so that companies only have to deal with ONE browser. It's sounds an awful lot like winning the browser war means completely wiping out the competition instead of just holding a commanding lead. Why is it that there's a war anyway? I wish corporations would stop running campaigns against each other as if they were trying to channel G.W. Bush.
Why isn't Gartner promoting companies focusing on a standard vs. a product. While I understand their profit model is based of of referring people to specific products that they review and track shouldn't part of their advice be to not rely on a specific product because of the potential for competing products to take the lead. Isn't part of the analysis they do predicting what might come in the future and how to leverage current products and allow for flexibility when markets change.
Or are they really saying "There's no need or room for competition within the browser market. Just use IE if you can, until it becomes too unsafe. Firefox can't hold out forever, it will fail. Just keep waiting for Longhorn."
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
For all its advantages, Firefox growth is driven mainly by the way Microsoft keeps tripping over its own feet when responding to security issues. It's not so much that they were careless in designing the browser to begin with. What hurts them is that they can't seem to keep up with the problem. Patches take forever, and often introduce new problems. And many people can't even install the patches! IT people are looking at Firefox simply because they can't continue to live with Internet Explorer.
I just had a thought. I've long suspected that the IE codebase is a real mess, and may have already reached "critical mass", where every bug fix creates, on average, more than one new bug. If Firefox's challenge to IE's supremacy ever becomes an issue, MS will have to consider a scorched-earth strategy: abandon the IE codebase and build a new browser from scratch. A horribly expensive strategy, but then MS can afford it.
It's time for Microsoft to admit that ActiveX is a bad idea, and needs to be done away with. Even with their new secure way of handling content in the browswer with XP SP2, it's still a problem. In IE 5 you could turn it off, in IE6 you can't.
It's time to dump ActiveX.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Gartner again, are we listening to them or laughing at them this week?
Gartner gets ridiculed when they make comments "the crowd" does not like and gets exhaulted when they make comments that are liked. This is inconsistant, either Gartner is good at analysis or not, just to agree with them when they make predictions "the crowd" likes is not right.
The first 10% is easy. There are a lot of people who will gladly jump onto the latest and greatest.
The last 50% is also easy. Most people will 'follow the herd' and just keep using whatever everyone else is using, without really giving it much though.
In the 20-50% zone, there is an 'acceptance gap'. In here there is a 'critical mass' - the people who want to change, but need to 'stay compatible' with their offices, the die-hards who don't want to change, and will actively try to prevent the wider adoption, etc.
It's 2005 today...
So in a year, a top end system of today will be less functional then an average system from a year from now?
We live in two worlds very different worlds or at least we have different definitions of a top end system.
My top end system of a year ago is still leagues better then today's average desktop PC. It will be slightly more humble in a year and in need of a major gamers overhaul in a year.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra