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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.""
...is no outcome at all. I hope IE, Firefox, and all other browsers have a long lifetime ahead of them.
there are so many PHBs, so-called "Security Engineers" and other FUD gobblers that it might just take Gartner proclaiming the existence of Firefox, before anyone in Corporate America listens.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
if IE would follow the fricking W3C standards. It's retarded this debate still goes on simply because MS doesn't give a crap.
They could fix a few bugs too, it's getting old that you still have to jump through hoops to make PDFs open correctly in every version of IE from 4.0 to 6.
I don't think this is an issue. Lets face facts. IE is basiclly unchanged since oh... version 5... and MS wont ditch the ActiveX bull. So there will be no major spyware for Firefox. I look it it like this. Firefox is designed to hold its own with a secure base. The whitelist and the lack of Atice X...whos worrying? Anyho... I don't think you will see anything come out of MS other than FUD.
Isn't it revealing that people instantly start to talk about a browser war once there is some kind of competition for a dominant MS product?
So we are heading for a world in which there are two competeing products and I've got news for all those analysts out there. That's normal in every other industry and normaly considered beneficial for consumers.
These so called analyst should finally start to realize, that an industry totaly dominated by one company is the unnormal situation, not the other way around.
Microsoft has for all intents and purposes conceded the non-Microsoft operating systems to the competition (Safari, Firefox, etc). Microsoft can't win a war they are not willing (able?) to fight outside of Windows.
And day by day (country by country), that space is getting bigger as countries adopt opensource or recognize the risk of supporting a US-based corporation exclusively. Will Firefox continue to make inroads into Windows? Most likely. Will it be necessary for competition to be restored? I don't believe so.
In the end Microsoft's own policy of a Windows-only world will limit their ability to fight the battle let alone win the war.
Why should Joe Average - who uses Longhorn - switch to Firefox when he already has a 'super cool browser' right on his desktop?
The only way I see people dumping IE on Longhorn, would be if they already used to and loved Firefox.
So, if Firefox is to combat IE on Longhorn, they will have to push and take as much of the marketplace as they can before Longhorn hits the market.
Then, the users, who are creatures of habit, will download Firefox the moment they get that long horn system on the INTARWEB.
But, thatd still be a lossy transition.
Pretty Pictures!
Has any analyst considered that there can be no winner to the "browser war?" Good gravy, war is certainly an easy metaphor to understand but its applicability to emerging and evolving technologies is tenuous. Better to call the competition by browser makers for the hearts of consumers a Red Queen's race. Do species stop competing for resources? Only the "stable" ones (i.e. thost that have become extinct) do.
As for bracing for the horrors of a two-platform web world, that call is many years too late. Apple's Safari is likely to be the dark horse that IT folks will have to adapt to. I think Steve Jobs means to make a big play for the PC pie. The Mac mini is as reasonable desktop as any from Dell, Gateway or Newegg (at least for corporate use).
In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter one jot what web client software is used. Browsers ought to be a whole lot stupider than they are. Just follow the meticulously defined W3C specs and lets all stop caring about "owning the platform." It's the applications that are far more interesting and carefully contrieved browser inoperabilities only stall the inevitable demotion of the underlying operating system to something akin to a really bloated BIOS.
Two browser world? Lunacy...
Why would MS need to upgrade their browser? They just embed the engine in whatever apps they have that they want to use it and let FF take over as the most popular actual browser. What does MS have to gain by having the most popular browser besides the most attention when there are security flaws?
Yeah, because there must be a winner. It's not like we can have more than one browser or anything. There can only be one.
This is crap. The media fuels this idea of one player as much as anyone does.
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)
True. It's like the saying, "the first million dollars is the hardest".
As to what the article said about Firefox's growth being unsustainable. Hasn't the same been said about Microsoft for the last 20 years? I mean, for 20 years people have been saying "there is no way Microsoft can keep growing that quickly", and they have continued to grow. Only recently have we seen an indication that they may be slowing down.
As long as it takes people to get fed up with it, that's how long.
Yes, Slashdot waxes on about Microsoft's security problems...various sources publish the more serious of the vulnerabilities. Is it stopping people from using Windows as a desktop OS? Well, not really.
I personally know of at least three people who dead out refuse to use anything other than Windows, even in -spite- of the flaws that it has. It's their belief that security problems that pop up will be fixed, and that they're perfectly safe in the intermission between them. They don't believe that Microsoft's security model is fundamentally flawed -- in fact many of them, smart though they may be, aren't even aware of Microsoft's security model (or even what a security model entails). I doubt they're the only ones in the world with that opinion.
Similarly, there's people who flat out refuse to use anything other than Internet Explorer as their browser, despite problems such as spyware and viruses being spread by it (directly or indirectly). Some of them, amazingly, just put up with spyware as being a regular part of the Internet that they can't avoid -- the slightly more savvy will download some sort of spyware or virus scanner, but a great deal don't even invest in that amount of protection. Why? Because it doesn't matter to them. Internet Explorer will view all of their favourite sites, and since it came with Windows, they don't have any incentive to go through the inconvenience of installing something else. Same goes for default administrator user accounts, firewall configuration, all of the things that can potentially cause security problems. If the people running the operating system simply don't care all that much, then there's not much incentive for the company to do so either.
The average IT department or web developer shouldn't care if it is a 1, 2, 12, or n browser world.
Ideally, we would all be coding to standards. Is your html compartible with the defined standards? XHTML, CSS, and so on?
After all, my cable company doesn't think of this as a '137 television world'... they are concerned about video standards.
Does the NBC Nightly News start up with a banner ad saying, "This broadcast best viewed on RCA Televisions"? No. That is just absurd.
I had high hopes for Firefox, but if Gartner says they're a comer, it's time to start the "Firefox is dead" dirge [tt]. F$cking Gartner.
You can tell Microshaft is scared when the Word Fud Machine pumps out not one, but two anti-firefox stories the same day Google comes out with maps.google.com that works in both Exploder and Firefox.
Half the people out there don't need Windows for anything but games any more. Oh yeah, and to run bloated non-standard-compliant shit, like Microsnot's newest buzz-toy "binary xml".
So just how is Microsoft going to compete when Google OS is running as a distributed app on millions of computers? Oh, they won't be able to - right. And Gartnew won't have anything to write about, because it will all "just work".
my journal: scripts for leaching porn baked fresh daily
Nobody need to support two browsers. Only thing that should do is to stick standards, not some crappy application specific workaround.
At last web developers will learn to use HTML not IEHTML. That's why whatever share FX will have, IT stuff now understood there're standards and that's where those rendering of pages coming from. And that's also why any other browser user (like Opera users) should support FX because it increses the awereness of standards and that will only help their beloved browsers, not harm.
This would make a good poll question if it was a lot stupider...
Anyhow, I switched back to IE for something today, basically I was downloading and installing new firmware for my mobile phone, it wanted pop-up windows, and while I could have probably gotten it with Firefox, I like to do things by the book when the alternative might be an expensive paperweight!
But besides this, in the last quarter, for example, I think I've used IE only once, when a terminal server was down and I had to fall back to an ActiveX version of the software I was using.
(Gosh, could that be why MS keep activeX around?)
It seems to me these are very specialist circumstances. Hell, I use a TN5250 emulator more than I do IE, and I'm a Windows-only SA with no Linux in my organization (Calm down dear, I'm working on it, I'll have a production FreeBSD box in every office in 2 months). So for me it is a one browser world.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
So, for all these "high-end" systems being sold to consumer-sheep at Best Buy, Circuit City, Dell Online, etc. with the "Intel Integrated Graphics" and "Shared Video Memory," they'll run like CRAP because the processor will be so busy rendering Longhorn GUI details that it is bumping "normal" priority threads/processes out for the system itself?
Yeah, I can see that happening. What is MORE likely is that Longhorn will use the XP UI, and auto-detect those systems that have separate video cards and turn on additional GUI features from there...
(A) software can come from someone other than MS
(B)That the MS brand means Yugo, and not Rolls Royce
This news means point, and very possibly (B) also. (A) above has been reached.
As soon as they realise that MS is not the only company selling software, People start to ask if they can have an OS that is not 0wned in 3 minutes or less.
Anyone who asks me to fix a spyware infested computer is told that it would not have happened if they had a Mac or ran Linux. If they call me back a second time for the same problem, they better have backed up anything they want to keep, because the only solutions I offer are to install Linux or FreeBSD. If they want to go on using Windows, they had better call another family member.
My mother and my son both now use Macs.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
It's not a two browser world, it's a three browser world. And not even THAT statement is correct. It should be more along the lines of "It's a 3 HTML Engine world". IE is the only browser that uses Microsoft's engine, but the othe two are Gecko (Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Kmeleon) and KHTML (Konqueror/Safari). It's a pretty safe bet that most Apple users are now using Safari, at least those with hardware that can support it. As long as Apple is pushing it, the KDE folks can justifiably claim their browser engine is one of the big boys. And if you don't like those, there's always Opera.
Ain't choice wonderful?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It's 2005 today, but it's still earily in 2005. Back in April 2004, MS said (and I'm quoting Microsoft Watch, which is where a the hoo-rah started):
Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
So that's what Microsoft Watch says Microsoft said, so I can't tell you for certain if Microsoft believed it at the time, and I can't tell you if they still believe it now. I'd say that in mid-2006, that sounds more like a high-end system than a mid-level system. Intel has slacked off the rate of speedup, but I'd believe a 4 GHz dual-core would be available (if not common) in 18 months. (Moore's Law says speed doubles every 18 months.)
2 gigs of RAM sounds like a bit much for an average system, since today a quarter that much is sufficient even for MS bloatware for the average user. I don't know enough about video processor speeds to comment on them, but I'd believe that gigabit ethernet and wireless could be common in 18 months.
So yeah, it sounds like MS was being rather optimistic with those numbers, at least for Longhorn launch time. But by the time Longhorn has been out for a year (which will be only a fraction of the way through it's lifecycle) those systems should be common.
It sounds like MS is telling its developers to come up with something neat for a very powerful system. Whether they're talking revolutions, eye candy, or lazy programming, we'll know later this year when the betas appear. I'm betting it'll be a bit of the former and rather heavy on the latter two.
One has to wonder if users will even pick up Longhorn all the quickly. The upgrade from ME to XP was a nobrainer. 95/98/ME barely worked at all for many people. XP is stable enough that I think a good chunk of people will either stick with it or maybe try a Mac. What is Longhorn's major selling point? What does it stand to offer the average user? MORE features? MS is already hiding most of the control panels from the average user. Seems like more features will just be more control panels to hide.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death