Zachmann.NET
Browser Mania
With Chrome, Google has offered a very serious alternative to Microsoft’s approach to rich Internet applications.
Developers of Web sites and Web-based applications need to know which Internet browsers their clients will be using. All browsers are not created equal. Applications, especially more complex ones, may work fine in one browser only to fail in another. The browsers users are running make a difference.
Good News and Bad News
When Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 came out last spring, I characterized it as a classic good news/bad news proposition ("IE8, Not Quite Great," April 15, 2008). I noted that while it had nifty new features like Activities (now called "Accelerators") and Web Slices, it was so unstable that it drove me to use Firefox until I finally threw in the towel and removed it. I really liked IE8's integrated developer tools, however, and wrote that I was "eager for beta 2."
Well, after spending quite a bit of time with IE8 beta 2, I must say that IE8 is still a mixture of good and bad news. The latest version is certainly much more stable than beta 1 and will stay on my primary production system, but it's not up to shipping snuff yet. Also, Microsoft has stepped back a bit from its promise to provide full standards compliance by default.
The largest slug of bad news for IE8, however, is the rapid evolution of the competitive environment in which the final product will have to prove itself. Neither Apple's Safari nor the open source Firefox browser is standing still waiting for IE to catch up to them. And now, an even more consequential competitive challenge faces IE8 in the form of Google's Chrome.
A Shiny New Browser
At its peak, back in 2003, Internet Explorer had more than 95 percent market share by several measures. By August 2006, according to market-share analysis firm Net Applications, IE's share had fallen to 82.16 percent.
The two years since then have been difficult ones for IE. Microsoft has lost ground to both Firefox and Safari, with IE's share of the pie dropping another 10 points to 72.15 percent in August 2008. Safari, meanwhile, has grown from 3.53 percent to 6.37 percent, and Firefox from 12.46 percent to 19.73 percent. Within days of its initial release, Google Chrome moved the needle to emerge as the fourth most-used browser, according to Net Applications, with market share of 1 percent.
Despite the setbacks, IE remains the predominant browser. The problem for Microsoft is that it seems unlikely that IE8 will reverse its downward trajectory as it faces maturing competition from Mozilla and Apple, as well as the new challenge from Google.
Developer Outlook
With more than one in four users already relying on a non-Microsoft browser, and the reasonable possibility that this figure will increase to one out of every two users within the next few years, even the most Microsoft-friendly developers will want to think long and hard before betting all their chips on IE.
That kind of decision-making can extend to placing heavy bets on other Microsoft technologies. Consider Silverlight. Although it's positioned as a browser-independent technology, Silverlight remains, and is likely to remain, an easier technology to get to work on IE than on competitive browsers. This is more likely to inhibit adoption of Silverlight than it is to help reverse the ongoing market share erosion for IE.
Continued negative perceptions of Windows Vista aren't helping, either. Whatever its actual merits, Vista has the worst negative perception among ordinary users of any version of Windows since the ill-fated Windows Millennium Edition. Vista's bad rap, however, extends to a much broader universe of users. Cleverly obtuse Jerry Seinfeld commercials aren't going to change that perception very much at this point. Once people make up their minds about something, their opinions are not easily changed-if ever.
Get to Know Chrome
Chrome, moreover, has a very good story to tell and Google is telling it very well at the Chrome product site, found here. There's a series of videos that do an effective job of presenting Chrome's features and benefits. The cleverly crafted Google Chrome comic book does an even better job explaining the browser's unique architecture design principles and developer-oriented features.
By starting mostly from scratch and aiming to make Chrome an ideal browser client to run standard JavaScript pages quickly in separate processes, Google has offered a very serious alternative to Microsoft's approach to rich Internet applications (RIAs). We'll dig into more of the details of Microsoft versus Google RIA strategies and Web platforms in the future, but for now, the main thing is simply to note that we have a real horse race underway here, and Microsoft is by no means the sure winner in the long run.
This is why I now have all four browsers, IE8 beta 2, Firefox, Safari and Chrome on my main desktop system. Perhaps you should too.
About the Author
William F. Zachmann, born before the modern digital computer was invented, has lived with them (and made his living off of them) all his life. He was director of research for The Forum Corp. in the mid-'70s and senior vice president of corporate research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in the '80s. He has a copy of Windows 1.0 that Bill Gates signed for him the night it was rolled out at Comdex Fall '85. Zachmann is now director of Canopus Research Inc. He programs in C# using Visual Studio 2005 with a focus on ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.