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Lessons from the Browser Wars
An anonymous reader writes to mention a piece on the Harvard Business School site talking about Lessons from the Browser Wars; specifically, what can be learned about first-mover advantages and the upsurge in Firefox use? From the article: "As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market."
"rapidly improving technologies".... IE hasnt had a real update in years... only now its IE 7 in the beta stage.
"In Soviet America, Passport Stamps You!"
Be better than the competition and make sure people learn that.
Simple as that.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Windows comes with IE pre-installed, so another browser has to be sought out, downloaded and installed to supplant it. Where else does this sort of edge apply?
It would be like buying a TV from a vendor with a huge market share which only has their affiliated station(s) pre-programmed into it, with a fairly complicated method of re-tuning being required to pick up other channels.
So, it's hard to see what valid lessons can be learned from such an unusual situation.
Semiliterate, buzzword-laden, and alternating restatements of the obvious with outright falsehoods. Yep.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Navigator v3 and 4 were not that great compared to IE v3 and 4.
Also, after around v4.5, Netscape didn't release a new version of the browser for about two or three years, while IE's development progressed in spades in comparison. They could have at least done some parallel development with the 4.5 code base to release 5.0 while waiting on the Mozilla team.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
While I've been trying to pry myself away from IE and meander over to Firefox, I've encountered a few bugs (quriks?) with FF in terms of how it handles fonts.
click here for jpeg explanation.
Is this because IE renders the page incorrectly? Firefox is on the left, IE is on the right. The only font settings I've changed has been increasing point size via the mouse wheel (on both browsers) 3-4 clicks. I would hate to have to change my display resolution just to make it look right (using a 19" CRT with 1280x1024).
IMO, IE just looks better to me, comparitively speaking. The way the font(s) are being displayed in FF makes for a terrible browsing experience to me - large text is extremely, overly large, while regular text is small & almost unreadable on my 1280x1024 screen (see screenshot).
Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated, I figured you slashgeeks could help me, cause I'm stumped. No, this isn't a troll, it's a legitimate question. I'd love to be able to use Firefox, but I'd want the text to be displayed *exactly the same* as it is in IE, and it would be amazing.
The article states that web developers are prone to developing for the browser with the greatest market share (IE) over ones that do not. What a fallacy!
Personally, I test most of my web development on firefox and mozilla, due to it's superior debuging support. Only after I get a portion of script working in those browsers do I test in IE and make the appropriate fix (through javascript or conditional compilation) to get it to work for IE. IE seems to always be the browser that needs some sort of "special case senario" code to function properly, while the other browsers need little to no tweaks for cross browser compatibility. And when they do, it is usually a sign of bad scripting which is remedied accordingly. I can say that I have never needed to use a CSS hack. IE however tends to crave bad scripting, even requiring bad scripting in some cases.
After that, I test in Opera (as I find it to be the most unforgiving browser when it comes to quirks) to make sure everything is on the up and up, and fix accorindingly. Only then do I consider that section of script ready for production.
I try to test on macs as much as possible, but, lacking a mac, this becomes rather difficult. I DO test on them at least once or twice during and after development, just not as often. Changes made acordingly unless the issue is on IE mac 5, which I refuse to support (and if you're a web dev I'm sure you understand why).
Everyone I know does their code testing in something akin to this manner. The bottom line is, IE comes second to more standards compliant browsers.
All in all, I think this harvard cat needs to do a little more interviewing with web developers. If I could, I would develop with full standards complance only, and lets the devs at microsoft worry about my site not working in their browser. However, we're pretty far off form a perfect world no...?
I've often wondered what the business model for browsers is. Since they are given away for free then I gather the primary way to make money off them, in IE's case for instance, is to set millions of peoples home pages to the page of Microsofts choice and make money off the advertising. I can only assume that the amount of money they make from this advertising exceeds the cost of maintaining the browers tech etc or there is an expectation of a large future return.
I figure that MS must be losing out cash wise in the short term. I can't see advertising revenues from their home page being too much in excess of their development costs and I would figure that advertisers would be very weary of taking their site stats for granted. Just because they have millions visiting one of their sites doesn't mean the visitors actually pay any attention to what's on there as I imagine most arrive there because they simply don't know how to set their home page and immediately move on to another site.
Having the number 1 browser has also hit their brand extremely hard, all of the security holes associated with IE taint their brand image across the board. Sure, windows would still be known for its security issues if IE had never been around but I feel that IE's security problems has seriously compounded the bad image factor. Unless Microsoft is making serious money from IE, or knows they will in the future, I reckon they'd be better of dumping it and leaving the job to Firefox and Opera etc. Is it really that valuable to them that when a computer gets a virus/hacked the finger is often pointed at IE and Microsoft on the whole?
ogglelog
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Yes the mighty MS still pretends that IE is a Mozilla clone.
So what the fuck happened. Well a couple things. The easiest was that MS started to include IE by default even making it a core part of the OS (we are talking the era around the middle of 90's so this talk includes windows 3.1)
In those days when you signed up to an ISP it was not unusual to get a CD with browser software for you to install as they could not be certain you would already have a browser.
This made it much easier for netscape to "sell" its browser to ISP's to include on their installation CD (you most likely needed a bunch of other software as well not included by default with windows)
Because MS started to bundle the browser (and other network software) with the OS nowadays it is rare for an ISP to have an install CD.
This means that it is no longer possible for you to get different browser when you hook up to the net. Even if you know about other browsers and want one you will still use IE to download it.
But something else happened as well. Remember there was a time when every site was build around netscape and it was IE that had to pretend to be netscape.
So why was this followed by years of IE only sites?
Well netscape dropped the ball. Version 4 especially was a nightmare with bloat and bugs that made IE seem not all that bad after all. Or at least not bad enough for people to bother downloading a large install over a modem.
There was a long time when Netscape just wasn't worth it. Long enough for IE to take over. Not because it was that much better but it wasn't any worse either (well not at the time) so why should you download a replacement that is just as bad?
Some people say there is no similar market effect. I think there is. Car sound installations. While there is a high-tech market for after market sound systems for your car it is tiny compared to the pre-installed market.
For most of the standard cheap radio and speakers factory installed are apperantly good enough and the cost and time involved in upgrading to a product no matter how superior is just not worth it.
So does Firefox stand a chance.
Well perhaps.
After all a cheapo car radio doesn't kill you. No matter how much the boxes may distort your favorite music they do not allow anyone to drive off with your car.
IE on the other hand is the car equivelant of a start button in a convertible.
IF this insecurity ever becomes to much of a risk then in theory people themselves would look for ways to make their OS more secure.
Yeah right.
I mentioned cars for a reason. Check the history of safety belts. In all the seats of a car. The dangers of unrestrained kids/luggage/pets in an aciddent are well known (both to themselves and other passengers) yet people actually fight safety measures designed to save their lives.
So what change does Firefox have of being adopted because it might safe people from some software accidents?
When american car manufacturers refused to make secure cars did american car buyers enmass buy european/japanese cars instead?
No. Only when the fuel price became unbearable did this happen.
As always, money is the ultimate motivator. As long as IE doesn't cost people more then it costs them to install firefox (cost as in time, hazzle, having to think for a second) then IE will not be replaced.
Personally I switched from IE to opera for just this reason. Opera has the unique feature of being able to resume easily and cleanily from where it left off after a crash. IE cost me to much time by crashing just as I had found the site with free porn eh, the site with really usefull info. Opera saved me time.
Nothing to do with security. I knew enough to make IE secure. (This was back a few years whe
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For example, replacing "first mover" by "new regime" and "second mover" by "insurgency":
"What is interesting are the lessons we can learn about how a fast [insurgency] can upset the normally strong barriers to entry that a [new regime's] advantage in a [country] can create. In short, the big lesson learned is that a window of opportunity exists for a [insurgency] to challenge a [new regime] in this setting early on when [democracy] has not yet diffused through the entire population - the [insurgency] can try to influence new users rather than get the small [democratic] base to switch over.
The [insurgency] has to have some sort of asymmetric advantage, such as [suicide bombings], in order to slow the build-up of network effects around the first mover and ensure that the [insurgency]'s product begins to build up a critical mass."
BTW this edited version could be illegal here (plan for a terrorist attack), but f**k it, IANAT.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Please don't let George Lucas get the film rights.
Actually the introduction of activex was innovative unfortunately it was implemented in a braindead manner
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Heres a bit of information for people who dont know this already and will be shocked as much as i was
4 5
..thanks to google paying them every time someone doeas a google search from the browser
/.
Firefox/Mozilla are making millions!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/11/05392
now how many times a day u search using the google search built into firefox??
ill probably be flamed out of existence but hell this is
With all due respect , Netscape had it's chance of getting a good % of the market(even with IE pre-installed) , but it was the bloated , buggy products (everything 4+) that really made it fail . Not everything !=MS is better .
My Starcraft 2 Blog
Simple video summary of the browser wars http://www.fugly.com/videos/5122/get-firefox.html
Which *nix partly removes by providing a competitor at the OS level.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study
Scientific theories are developed by conducting careful experiments that isolate different variables and effects; when experiments are not possible, you look for observations that can substitute for those experiments. The browser wars have a mess of variables, interactions, and effects, and they are pretty much the worst kind of observation you can find.
Is it really that similar, though? Perhaps it's different in the USA, but many cars I've seen are assembled away from the factory. Smaller components such as stereos tend to vary a lot depending on the location where the vehicle was assembled -- they're certainly not provided by or branded by the car maker.
I would have thought this was a standard market where smaller car stereo makers could negotiate with the car assemblers to get their product included. Clearly the end customer has less choice (unless they rip it out and change it afterwards), but it's not so much a case of locking out competitors.
Yes, teacher, today you taught us that no matter who makes innovations such as tabbed browsing by Firefox and Opera, M$ will just come along and make their barely computer literate users think *they* (M$) were the ones to bring about innovation - thus the people actaully working to the net a better experience get no recognition at all!"
Browser wars 101, the customer is always right; you can blindly charge forward with your model only to find as Microsoft with Vista, your product being put back a year in an attempt to achieve your customers actual needs. More and more products now use a HTTP interface and if they look good in most browsers because the speak XHTML and CCS2, will the customers say 'Well I don't mind it looks bad' or go else where. In a couple of years the HTTP browser will be the ISO user interface and browsers that are most compatible will be the new standard regardless of whether it's built in to the OS. IE7 may have big backers but the consumer will decide its fate.
... It is happening again with Virtual PC vs VMWare.
Not that the article didn't sound all analysis-y and everything, but I think they missed the really important stuff.
I think Netscape ultimately died partly of self-inflicted wounds, and was partly the victim of Microsoft's monopoly abuse.
Clayton M. Christensen (ironically also of Harvard) foresaw the former about a decade ago in The Innovator's Dilemma. The demand curve for browsers is shallower than the supply curve because once the browser implements the standards, there is only so much more room for it to add value. Pretty soon it ends up oversupplying features that are less and less important to fewer and fewer people; the formerly underpowered latecomer catches up -- not with the other product (it arguably never will), but with the market's demand. No matter what the first-mover does at that point, it's just more oversupply. The latecomer stumbles onto some attribute that nobody originally thought was important (integration into the OS?) which the first-mover cannot match, and suddenly the first-mover's former advantage turns into a detriment.
Near its zenith, Netscape's best possible outcome was probably to license its browser to Microsoft, let it remain the standard, and get the advantage of Microsoft's OS monopoly. However, Microsoft's hubris, abetted by Netscape's constant attacks, precluded any possibility of cooperation. Netscape's best remaining alternative was probably to ignore Microsoft completely, resist the temptation to rewrite (which also killed competitors to Word), and use their resources to keep innovating in other ways. I think Christensen would have suggested that Netscape spin off as many new ideas a possible, and for the core company to concentrate on maintaining its core product.
Sadly, this pattern repeats over and over. I hope Java doesn't become the next high-profile victim.
Sorry this articule is "Stating the Obvious" and doesn't even analyse the market correctly - Amateur Hour! The real reason why many Firefox users have the browser installed on their PC is because IE 6.0 isn't supported by their operating system and/or hardware, or they are fed up with the poor code and critical patches not being implemented quicky enough. IE, and to a lesser extent Firefox, are only as good as their last critical patch. One day one of them (most likely Microsoft) will get things so wrong that a serious security breach will go unchecked until too many people either loose money or data (or in some cases both).
What I don't get is why Spyglass didn't sue MS for a percentage of their entire OS business when Microsoft claimed in the anti-trust case that IE is an essential part of the OS.
-GleeMany a true word hath been spoken in jest -- mod funny posts "Informative".
Almost a year after installing Firefox I've learned that you can have a standards compliant browser that doesn't prop it's ass up on a cushion waiting for the next fancy boy to come along. I haven't had a single spyware/malware infection since moving to Firefox from last summer. I got so tired of the scan with Hijackthis, Ad Aware, and Spybot merry-go-round that I knuckled under and installed Firefox.
Is Firefox perfect? Of course not, and I hear the code base is getting to be a rat's nest and will require a complete rewrite at some point. Sure it has bugs and security holes, but they're almost always fixed within days (for security related fixes at least). I can surf with confidence knowing that if I do stray into a grey area of the web my browser isn't going to let my system get ass raped as easily as IE.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
IE is weak and far away from innovation.
See the new Firefox ad: http://www.mustseeblog.com/?p=85
IMO the best ad of the current competition!
I doubt that very, very much. Apple a dominant PC platform? What about the competition laws? Would they allow one company to produce only software which only allows for their own hardware, if that software had 90% of the market? Would the business world even buy software from a company with no negotiation margins? Apple aren't interested in dominating the market. Their main purpose is making money, and they have different ways to do that.
The only current system that could replace Windows is a nix system that isn't linked to hardware, like Linux, but they have a long, long way to go.
...was compliments of Tantek Çelik, standards evangelist, and main designer of the Tasman rendering engine which drove IE for Mac. In digging for his history with the project, I note a few things:
- Daring Fireball's archived recap of the history of IE for Mac leading up to its cancellation,
- A blog entry describing how after Tantek was finished with IE for Mac, Microsoft moved him over to
...WebTV (?!),
- An entry on the IE Blog where it looks like Microsoft is advertising for various open positions, and many people are responding with mixed emotions.
I also considered throwing in a link to Tantek's Box Model Hack (well! I guess I did after all!).As for TFA... gah. Don't get me started on TFA. It doesn't mention IE for Mac at all (perhaps the Publications Coordinator who wrote TFA never heard of it?) and makes some innocent and half-assed assumptions about Web Standards—mostly their lack of existence.
And the marginalization of other browsers? Her argument basically runs that other browsers don't stand a chance against IE's installed base, while conveniently overlooking the fact that IE itself was once an "other" browser and citing ways that IE got the leg-up on Netscape without ever noting that those other browsers are doing the same things to IE. The argument basically runs "Yes, things changed in the past, but things will remain as they are now because they're the way they are now." Buh?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Back at those days, Microsoft had put an unbeleivable effort in IE 4 (its codebase could be compared to all the windows at that time), and was a great success. It's impossible to say that IE 4 had overcome Netscape in every feature. But it was so innovative that they could not compete.
At that time most of all people needed EXPERIENCE. And IE had given so much power to web developers, as never before and later. (later they restricted some features, after security issues).
Now, when hand-crafted pages fade in front of information portals, people need easy use and security more, than experience. And IE still has to bear this burden of all supported features.
But not the IE issues is what pushes Firefox forward, but its own real value. Not that Firefox overcomes IE in every feature, but it is so innovative, that they cannot compete. For example if you discover firefox plugins, you never look back.
To go in pace, MS has to redesign IE heavily. Meanwhile, they did nothing in special in IE 7, which means that the share of happy Firefox users will continue to grow fast.
Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.
The above debate is poorly framed because the anticompetitive tactics are wrong. The tactic was to forbid the vendor from installing Netscape and to make it very difficult to have a default other than IE. The difficulty tactic persists to this day in the form of endless beg screens and "updates" which change preferences and break competitor's code. Sooner or later, the hapless user pushes the wrong button and ends up with the wrong preference. If that does not work, Bill helps them along or their computer mysteriously stops working.
"Researchers" indeed. I can't imagine anyone thinking that a browser that still lacks tags had any technological edge. Only a bigot who never used the other browser, except long enough to be frustrated because the shortcuts were different, could possibly think that way.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://blacks.pnimedia.com/disclaimers/browser_sup port.aspx
(you may have to view it with a non-IE browser).
It is generally believed that:
Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included cookies, frames (in version 2.0), and JavaScript (in version 3.0).,
and further that IE 5 was the first version with some technical advantages over Netscape 4. It can easily be argued that most of the problems Netscape had on Windoze were M$ induced, as such problems did not exist on alternate platforms. You can see for yourself by loading an old computer with Debian Potato, which contained Navigator 4.7. It can also be argued that IE 4, which came with Active Desktop, was a security nightmare which Microsoft has yet to recover from. Whatever technical advantages IE might have had are completely obliterated today with such obvious problems as lack of transparency, SVG, tabs, buggy CSS and so on. The few toys available for fancy content on the development side are also eclipsed by other free projects.
Microsoft's failure to compete is a very good thing. LAMP is the way most serious content providers chose to serve their content. The Microsoft way is as stagnant and dreadful as IE. If they had managed to make a economically and technically competitive offering, life would be much harder for users of non M$ software. that One or two outrageous examples (taxes too!) are more than enough. IE7's mild enhancements, most of which are available through "shell" programs already, will not be good enough to halt IE's loss of marketshare to other browsers and ultimately to better platforms.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Firefox is pasty code carried over from Mozilla, which itself was a clone. Stop getting your open source panties all worked up, Firefox is yet another open source copy of someone elses technology.
As I recall, Microsoft offered free support and customizations to those ISP's that chose to offer IE as part of their initial package. Microsoft through the small independant ISP's that they supported for free, in my opinion, more heavily influenced the market than anything else. As more and more sites were optimized for IE, more and more people switched, because that was what worked best. Standards aside, MS was able to create enough of a difference that people wanted IE, or at least the free support that using IE would get them. Unfortunately, unlike WINS, the people with the most influence in adopting MS technology were not the ones who understood it.
You make it sound suspect to be in it for the money - isn't that the prime motivation for all business ? Maybe i'm too sensitive , but i really love the Opera browser and i didn't mind paying for it from V3 to 7.?
Is that money is not in the sales and distribution of software, but in software related services. So make your product free software (as in GPL) from the beginning and maximize distribution and third party access so that you can place a wedge in the market place to offer value added services
If Netscape was GPL'd from the beginning, it would have totaly changed their market focus, it would have totally changed their business strategy, it would have totally changed their development style, and they probably would have been in FireFox's shoes today rather than out of business and sold like second hand colthing to AOL. In fact, IE would probalby have never gotten to the point it is now and Microsoft wouldn't have been able to apply their anti-compettitive stratigies, just like they wern't able to apply them to Red Hat, or SUSE, or Apache, or sendmail with very much success.
Sorry, but I don't buy that Netscape 4's problems were caused by Microsoft. I abandoned Netscape when version 4 came out, and I don't use Windows. IE on the Mac had better standards support, was faster than Netscape, and was less buggy.
Netscape decided to ignore standards and add more and more proprietary hacks. For instance, they didn't want to support CSS at all--they had their own proprietary JavaScript Style Sheets, and when they finally implemented CSS in Navigator 4 it was by translating it to JSSS, so if you turned off JavaScript all your CSS broke. They didn't want to support standard tables either.
Meanwhile, the Navigator code base was becoming a mess, partly because of the focus on adding more and more proprietary NSHTML and JavaScript hacks. When it became clear that web developers weren't interested in building Netscape-only sites, it was too late to go back and undo the damage and implement CSS and tables properly.
They also took the kitchen sink approach of insisting that everyone who wanted a Netscape browser also wanted a Netscape mail reader, news reader, IRC client, and so on. That might have made sense on Linux, but on the Mac there were much better alternatives everyone used (NewsWatcher, Eudora), so nobody wanted the bloat of Netscape. Microsoft did the right thing and made their browser just a browser, and offered separate news reader and IRC clients. (Which nobody wanted, so they were eventually dropped. Anyone even remember Microsoft News?)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Slashdot needs to update its story icons. I mean using the IE logo for a browser story - it's hardly appropriate is it.
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
Pretty much, the sum total of everything in this article was;
You mean big companies generally have the advantage over small companies and charity efforts?! I must invesigate this further!
This wasn't worth a mention on slashdot. Pai-Ling Yin does have an impressive CV, but she is relating fuck all in terms of actual fresh knowledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
I get a bit annoyed by the incessant criticism of Netscape 4.x nowadays. It certainly wasn't perfect...it WAS a bit bigger and slower than Netscape 3.x, and its user interface seemed contrived, but it really was the best browser around back in its day. Netscape 4.x was one of the first browsers to support dynamic HTML features or any form of CSS. Sure, the support is pretty rudimentary now, but it was pretty groundbreaking back in '97. Furthermore, it was a saint compared to Internet Explorer 4.0. Thanks in part to web integration, THAT had a tendency to slow down the entire system by its mere presence, crash and bring the entire OS down with it, and in terms of rendering capability, it was no better. It was so problematic, assertions that it rendered other browsers unusable and required a reformat to remove were only typical of accounts at the time. The only big problem was that Netscape 4.x stayed viable for far longer than it should have or was originally intended to be. Thanks to badly-maintained code that needed to be rewritten, false development starts, and bureaucracy, the next usable version (6.1/6.2) didn't come out for about four years later. Even then, I was using Netscape 4.x sporadically myself well into 2003! Internet Explorer 4.0, meanwhile, was pushed aside by newer versions far sooner and its deficiencies masked over with the passage of time. It wasn't until Mozilla Firefox came around several years after THAT that they began to give serious attention to improving the user interface and give the browser a badly needed marketing boost.
"Okay, maybe this is actually too simplistic a view."
That's correct.
"I don't think that its unfair to say that both sides will claim to be better than the other. Microsoft claims to be better all the time, and advertises heavily to that effect. How does the average consumer tell the difference?"
You're a consumer who just bought a PC, and it has Windows on it. Either you made a mistake, or Microsoft is right. Which will you say out of the gate? Why, you will say that Microsoft is right, and believe its advertising.
Microsoft started off being better than the others by dint of having a product, which helped IBM make its choice. Because IBM hardware was cheaper (over time, thanks to clones and Intel's budget pricing of their processers), the majority of computers sold over time became x86 compatble machines. Microsoft leveraged the original IBM contract such that it could provide an OS cheaper than the competition to OEMs. Again, Microsoft comes out "better" because it's cheaper and available.
Better doesn't always mean that something has been sat down with and thoroughly reviewed. Few people make such rational choices in life. Better means it was cheaper, it was easier to get (came with the computer), or that they simply don't know better because they believe the marketters once they get their first PC.
You seem to understand this when mentioning FireFox. Internet Explorer is "better" because it comes with the PC. For FireFox to beat it requires phenominal effort -- but that just shows how bad Internet Explorer is.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Am I the only one who just wanted a browser that would launch/display acurately, securely and reliably? 90% of my personal browsing is News (like Slashdot/GoogleNews) and online Banking and (I hate to admit it) checking xbox.com to see who is on Live at any given moment. The rest is downloading drivers and patches for the most part. From a professional standpoint, researching (Like Lexis/Nexis) is a big one. Nothing too demanding there. Couldn't we just focus on getting the basics really right? I feel the same way about OS's and Cell Phones.
One key flaw at Netscape was due to the engineering mismangement. It was a combination of micromanagement combined with little to no responsibility for the source code. Anyone could make changes to any part of the source code at any time. Not only did you have to worry about implementing your changes using varios API's; but those API's could change right out from under you, and you had no warning about it.
This is understandable when you've got management which apparently doesn't trust the engineers to do their job.
I find it very amusing that the big VC's in Silicon Valley (KP for one) have continually flouted former high-ranking Netscape managers to their prize startups. And from what I've seen, those startups have had their engineering staff decimated by the same mismanagement which killed Netscape.
The Harvard report seems to go after the low-hanging fruit from a top-down level. A pity that they don't focus on what's required for building the foundations a company needs to sustain itself. Without those foundations, death of the company is guaranteed IMHO; and Netscape is an unfortunate prime example.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
The FireFox powers-that-be have been getting arrogant. Look at the way they dealt with some bugs.
1. The "Download Window" bug, where the CANCEL button cancels your entire download. It's bad UI design. But when people reported this through Bugzilla, they were repeatedly told by the Firefox powers-that-be "this is not a bug."
2. Their refusal to let you save a webpage with a filename based on the title. Instead we get a hundred default.asp files. Again people asked for this to be changed, and even all this the Firefox powers-that-be replied (and I quote) "Why would you want to save the web page be saved as anything but the filename?"
3. Extensions are a great idea... that break with nearly every release. It got so bad I gave up downloading the updates (with the security fixes) because I got sick of my extensions breaking. People have complained about this too, but the Firefox powers-that-be aren't listening.
Firefox used to make leaps and bounds, but when they reached a critical mass, they got arrogant. I doubt IE will come back. Microsoft *are* arrogant, but OpenSource doesn't have to be. Please, Firefox ppl, listen to your users!
Do we need any special lessons to know that if your product has a lot better availability (preinstalled into Windows) and better quality and standards/CSS support (if you do a fair comparison of NS4 and IE4 you will see) it'll easily grab a lion share in a developing market?
I think this video pretty much summarizes the browser wars. Well, at least from the perspective of this flame-baiting post. Wheeee!
Is this a link directly to the denial page? I can't access anything other than that with Opera 8.54.
Apparently, your photography site wouldn't know a standards compliant browser if it bit it in the ass.
Or more realistically, an FF extension to change the User-agent string. My bank (Föreningssparbanken) used to lock me out before, but with an extension that was quickly fixed. Then they had a period of putting up a warning instead ("We can not guarantee the security of ..." -- yeah right..) but now it's no problem. They even keep track of new versions and tell users they might want to upgrade, at least for Opera.