Internet Explorer vs Netscape vs Firefox vs Opera vs Etc.
I didn’t care enough to learn about it when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were dragging it into court, but now seeing Firefox 1.5 vs IE 7 just on the horizon, my curiosity is peaked. Firefox is stealing market share from IE, why is this a concern for Microsoft?
I have a choice of which web browser I want to use, but most (if not all) of them are available to me free of charge. Why then do developers fight for market share? What’s in it for them, if there is no income from end user, no adds ala msn/aol messenger, no income I can see at all (other than perhaps a preset home page)?
Microsoft wants to control as much of your computer as it can. I am not saying that to crititise them, merely saying the truth. Their original goal was to integrate IE deeply into Windows so that it was inseperable from the operating system. They beleive their success depends on controlling as much of the day to day computing experience as possible. They may not make money from IE directly but it does have strategic value for them. It is much easier for them to integrate Windows and Office with a browser that they developed.
Netscape - I believe they are just grasping at something trying to get a market to open up.
Firefox is open source so programmers are basically doing it for fun and to give us a better choice than IE. Hard to compete with that business model.
Opera - they hope to make some money selling a pretty good alternative to Windows (until Firefox stole their thunder).
The average person is quite reluctant to switch brands, be it browsers, operating systems, cars, corn flakes or whatever. If a manufacturer can build and maintain brand loyalty, people will stay with that brand, regardless if the product/service is free, costs a nominal amount or even big bucks. It is much easier to build in added costs if a manufacturer can claim their brand it better than everyone else. In an ideal branding world, a manufacturer can claim the ultimate market share, then raise the price of their product/services because there no longer is any competition.
Microsoft is going after you as a web user because it is also going after web developers to use Microsoft web tools, going after systems administrators to only use Microsoft systems software, yadda, yadda. They want the entire supply chain. Microsoft can afford to offer a free browser if everything else in the chain makes money for Microsoft. By creating proprietary standards, Microsoft can control everything, or at least it hopes to do that. If you use a different browser you will be shamed into switching to IE because your browser will not support the proprietary-based content coming from sites designed, built and maintained only using Microsoft tools.
Or as Henry Ford apparently said to the first question about the Model T, “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black.”
To add to Duckster’s comment about Microsoft targeting the whole chain from developer to end user, a lot of the impetus for Firefox is to stop any individual company from being able to control the web. Right now that means fighting against Microsoft, but that’s probably not the motivation for all the Firefox developers. Competition and building to web standards are good for the web as a whole.
No ads? During the brief and unfortunate time that I was forced to use Internet Explorer, I had it hijack my startup page quite a few times to redirect me to microsoft.com. Standard “404-Not Found” messages were replaced by a page directing me to a search on MSN. I even have a system upon which I have never used Internet Explorer that pops up ads in IE windows from time to time.
When you use one Microsoft product, it often forces you (or at least pushes you hard) to use another. It’s darned near impossible to get to parts of microsoft.com using Netscape. In fact, I once ran a tidy little business making Web sites designed with FrontPage work in browsers other than IE.
IE is all about dragging you into the Microsoft fold!
