Browser wars. Who cares?

Q

Qualm

Gawd
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May 31, 2003
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There's a lot of computer press coverage lately that Microsoft is losing "market share" with IE, that its competitors (especially Firefox) have been gaining a lot of ground recently. While undoubtedly true, I think the press coverage is rather ironic, because it's hard to argue about "market share" when these products are "free" - I put "free" in quotes because I don't want to get into the argument of whether you "pay" for IE when you buy a Microsoft OS ...

Who cares who has the biggest piece of a zero dollar market, really? Do you? Does Mozilla? Does Microsoft?

Well I guess I can think of one "market share" reason that the browser wars might be important - let us consider the concept that having highly functional software running on an MS OS, but not another OS (such as Linux), is market-penetration-limiting for those other OS's. Can't convince people to adopt your OS until you can match the features of what runs on Windows, right? I think if you can make a strong argument that this concept applies/applied to MS Office vs. OpenOffice, but does it really apply to a web browser?

Are the browser wars important to YOU?

- Qualm
 
Qualm said:
Are the browser wars important to YOU?
Click to expand...

Yes, so long as it advances the quality of product in general. while mozilla isn't a real threat to ie's market share, if it's enough push the ie development team to run a tighter ship, then we all win.
 
As a web developer, absolutely. I'd love to see anything that would motivate MS to get off its collective rump and fix IE.
 
It may be a "Zero Dollar" market, but if browser wars are going to cause the developers of browsers to make more secure and better designed browsers then I'm all for the wars.

IE and its spyware/adware problems are out of hand. I consider myself a smart browser and I have had a couple problems with spyware/adware that were very frustrating. I built/setup two computers recently for family and within the first week I received phone calls about popup problems, slow downs, hijacks, etc... They are not smart browsers/users, but neither are most computer users and it is starting to become a serious problem with IE at the center of this cancerous spawn of spyware/adware.
 
The reason I care about it is that the more IE loses dominance and others gain ground, the less we'll see sites that work correctly with IE only.
 
Qualm said:
There's a lot of computer press coverage lately that Microsoft is losing "market share" with IE, that its competitors (especially Firefox) have been gaining a lot of ground recently.
Click to expand...
Let's keep things in perspective a bit. IE lost 1%, and moz picked up most of that. Now, that's a noticable drop, but hardly "gaining a lot of ground".

Although, I should add, that many of us who use online banking are forced to identify ourselves as "IE" so the damn sites will work properly.
 
Personally I care because it drives me crazy that Opera doesn't get hardly any respect despite it's capabilities. (Again I point out that it's just about the only commercial browser out there, yet third most popular in a world where most are free. That alone speaks volumes of it's quality...)

Plus I too am sick of having sites screw up just because the idiots who made them used IE only proprietary code. That is just so stupidly lame it's not even funny. Any idiot knows it's best to follow standards whenever reasonably possible, and it's reasonably possible since standards work in IE as well as everything else...
 
Tangent said:
The reason I care about it is that the more IE loses dominance and others gain ground, the less we'll see sites that work correctly with IE only.
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Abso-freakin-lutely
 
One thing's for sure: I never touch IE with a 60-foot pole.
Once I stopped using IE and started using Opera (Which I've yet to see any worthy website compatability isues with), Adaware (always latest version) NEVER picks up a single damn piece of spyware! Never, I mean it. IE's popularity is not only a bad thing for other browsers which are so much more convenient, but also for US, since IE is constantly putting peekholes through our internet to dirty goddamn spyware. Cookies, Gator, and all kinds of crap just thrive in IE, like germs in your mouth at night.
That is why the only time I use it is for windows update.
PS, other browsers are serriously faster, and offer TABBED browsing... + mouse gestures/combos that completely own all ass when it comes to surfing pr0... eerm, forums.
 
Do you have Opera set to identify as Opera? By default it identifies as IE, so you get the pages intended for IE. Really, most of the issues occur when a site tries to figure out which code to send you based on the browser ID and sends you a page full of proprietary crap. Normally IE gets at least mostly standard stuff while "unkown" browsers get pages full of proprietary crap. I'm afraid you'll have to tell ME why this is, this is just the way they do it. The reason people like me set Opera to identify as Opera is because it's not fair to the makers of it if all the places that check to see what you are using think you are using IE. That's one point towards IE, one less point on Opera, totally throwing off the numbers.

As for sites, well, mostly just annoying crap like the infamous issue with MSN where it positioned text using a negative value so that it would be unreadable due to being inside an image, table, or even off the left border. Well, they say it was on accident, but, many of us wonder... However, my local school has a web service where one can check grades, homework (I had a teacher who posted homework on this) and so on. The service would give you a ton of errors if you used Opera set to identify as Opera. If it identified as IE, you could get in and do a lot, but, it would still log you out in a matter of seconds and give you the occasional error anyway. I contacted their staff, but they said they buy the stinking thing prepackaged, so there's nothing they can do even though it's probably pretty simple to fix. Unfortunately, complaints of this nature aren't exactly considered high priority. It's not as if I'm changing schools just so I won't have to use IE. *sigh*

As for multitabs, I LOVE that. I always hated having to open a bunch of seperate windows. This way all I have to do is hit CTRL+TAB or click and presto, switching in less than a second to a different window without moving things around or anything. Mozilla still doesn't handle tabs as well as Opera though, IMO.
 
XOR != OR said:
Let's keep things in perspective a bit. IE lost 1%, and moz picked up most of that. Now, that's a noticable drop, but hardly "gaining a lot of ground".
Click to expand...
According to the stats at w3schools.com (no idea how accurate they are, though), in the last year, Mozilla usage has doubled from ~6% to ~13%, with IE5+ falling to 80% from 87% (IE6 is 90% of that total). Now, those still aren't earth-shattering numbers, but that is about six months of well-publicized Firebird/Firefox release, and only 4/5 users on IE for the first time in a while.
 
The biggest problem with statistics taking is that certain people are more likely to visit certain sites and these people are more or less likely to use a particular browser. For example, at a community college, you will likely see more IE usage than at a college that is known to be great for computer programs (like the college I was previously going to, they even weren't scared of linux. I miss that.) And a site like freshmeat.net which is made up of programs that are almost all at least originally intended for a *nix os (though at least most have ports) you will likely see more of mozilla, konquerer, etc, and not so much of IE.

Really, I saw something promising. Apparently thecounter.com used to keep stats. Unfortunately, they seem to be dead as far as I could tell. Something commonly used for a large variety of sites is the best bet. As someone said before, the issue comes down to sampling. A sample must be random to work. If it focuses too much on one area, then it's no longer a useable sample.

Anyway, I was just using that example to show that Netscape isn't exactly dead. Regardless of it's current project status, it will be a while yet before it truly dies. Plus, who knows, some crazy freak might pick up the mozilla code and add in all the crap netscape insisted on adding to make it theirs. I sure hope not though. If netscape would just properly die, people will have to start using standard code a bit more. You can't get away with just supporting IE as there have always been those who liked other, better things. I would love to see the day where Opera wouldn't have to ship set to identify as IE by default because all pages work like they SHOULD.
 
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