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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
So which one is country and which is western?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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)
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.
No need to read article now.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
...is no outcome at all. I hope IE, Firefox, and all other browsers have a long lifetime ahead of them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
factors that drive the current Firefox growth are not sustainable
At its current rate, every elementary particle in the Universe will be using Firefox by 2010. Clearly, that's not sustainable.
What browser war? Some of us have taken our guns and gone elsewhere.
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.
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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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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
Ah, yes, I remember. That was the same Longhorn that was planned to have a Database Filesystem (WinFS), but it had to be removed in order to facillitate a 2006 release schedule of the OS, and a ~2008 release of the Filesystem. Meanwhile other people (Apple) have already got their implementation (Spotlight) running smoothly. I wonder if MS will ever realize that they can't do everything and do it well, especially when they go off and ignore standards, and definitely not in a timely manner. 2006... IE still won't be standards compliant though, and it will still be full of holes, and it will still only run in Windows.
Fortunately, by the time that Longhorn is released, everyone will be running Firefox on Google's forthcoming operating system.
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.
Last I heard, IE 5 was the last version of IE made for the Mac, because future browser enhancements required the "sophistication" of Longhorn. Whether this decision was the result of or the cause of Safari is an exercise left to the reader.
It's funny in a way... CSS requirements for Safari made Apple radically improve system-wide typography services in Panther (drop shadows, et cetera).
With the loss of Avalon as a direct feature of Longhorn, one has to wonder what "manditory" features in the next generation of Internet Explorer cannot still be provided under MacOS X.
cant wiat for the IE virus that install firefox as default...