Battle of the browsers - guess who's at the bottom of the big four
- Thread starter ack
- Start date
MHO and all of that, but the only time I've ever thought of Explorer as a good browser was when I was comparing it to a really dysfunctional previous version.
Tim
Tim
Just another opinion: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
If Apple isn't careful, they, too, can become "not cool anymore". Sometimes success breeds success and other times it breeds a form of lethargy and over confidence!!
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
IMO Chrome is so superior to any other browser and now that it is available on the iphone, if you are signed into your Google account it will sync via the cloud with all of your bookmarks etc on your Mac
The field of IT is littered with the corpses of companies that were leaders but failed to move with the times. I don't care how big Apple is right now - within 10 years they could go from market leader back to where they were in the mid 90's. Don't believe me? Look at IBM - the biggest computer company in the world, gave Microsoft its break when Gates was a pimply teenager, leader in desktop systems, biggest research budget. Failed when it tried to directly compete with Windows 95 by introducing OS/2. Now it is smaller than Microsoft.
Look at Compaq - capitalized on IBM's slowness and introduced the world's first 386 based computer. Became a corporate giant, made and sold the best laptops. Failed to keep up with the times, turned into a mail order company, then eaten up by Hewlett-Packard.
Look at Kodak - world's largest film company, inventor of digital camera sensors, spread worldwide and with a massive patent portfolio. Failed to keep up with the digital camera revolution and about to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
How many of you remember these names - Wordperfect, Lotus, Borland, SCO, Wordstar, 3com, US Robotics ...
The same could happen to Apple.
By the way, while I am reminiscing about history ... who remembers the browser wars of the early 20th century? Microsoft was dragged through the courts in the US and Europe for bundling Internet Explorer with the operating system, making it the dominant browser and destroying Netscape. They were accused of monopolistic, anticompetitive behaviour.
Now look at Apple. Safari is installed as the default browser on all iOS devices. You can not uninstall it, and you can not set another browser as the default. At least it was possible to set Netscape as your default browser over IE back in the day. On Android devices, the default browser which is shipped is simply called "Browser" - most people quickly replace it with one of the downloadable browsers like Dolphin, Opera, Firefox, and ... Chrome. How come Apple is not accused of anticompetitive and monopolistic behaviour? What they are doing is far worse than what Microsoft was doing when they were dominant. Even Microsoft did not take a 30% cut on all software installed on Windows computers, like Apple does on iOS devices.
Now look at Apple. Safari is installed as the default browser on all iOS devices. You can not uninstall it, and you can not set another browser as the default. At least it was possible to set Netscape as your default browser over IE back in the day. On Android devices, the default browser which is shipped is simply called "Browser" - most people quickly replace it with one of the downloadable browsers like Dolphin, Opera, Firefox, and ... Chrome. How come Apple is not accused of anticompetitive and monopolistic behaviour? What they are doing is far worse than what Microsoft was doing when they were dominant. Even Microsoft did not take a 30% cut on all software installed on Windows computers, like Apple does on iOS devices.
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
ease of use and speed outclass any other browser IMHO
It is very intuitive and all I can say is "to each his own, but for me the browser wars stop with Chrome especially since it is now available on the iphone. Have you tried the iphone app yet Chuck
Safari: I have no patience for products with serious usability issues. By default, the following option is set to Never in Safari: Open pages in tabs instead of windows. Now, who opens multiple windows anymore... When you actually set it to Always, it pops up a confirmation dialog, as if it thinks you are the oddball...
Market share. When Microsoft had their browser troubles, they also had such an overwhelmingly dominant share of the OS market that bundling software with that OS gave that browser an unfair advantage that could have eventually been leveraged into many other advantages, allowing MS to dominate many other categories/markets. There is very little threat of Safari doing that. At least not yet. I suppose long-term it's possible in iOS devices, but it's hard to imagine Apple OSX ever having a monopoly-making market share of the operating system category.
Tim
That was the assumption by many, including our government of course. In reality, it had no foundation. When I joined Microsoft, we had a streaming media player. Even though it was bundled in Windows, no one used it and the app of choice was the Real Player. Reason? The app was not competitive. Once we made it competitive, then it took off and beat out Real Player.
We see clear example of it here again. IE is bundled in every version of Windows yet Chrome came out and took over the lead. Why? Again, software capability. Consumers are not stupid. They don't pass on something better because it is not installed by default And at any rate, even the default version in Windows requires frequent updates so the customer has to be comfortable with that anyway.
Chrome rose to the top because it went back to basics and streamlined the experience. The experience extended to installation -- something apple does right in its "out of box" experience of hardware. You clicked to install Chrome and in just a few seconds it said "done." No dialog boxes. No reboot. Nothing. It installed even easier than apps do on phones and tablets! Then there was performance as it ran. So much faster than IE which had negated much of the advancement in computing power. Chrome also "felt" more friendly. Just look at its error messages:
The technical term for this is "unhandled exception" which would be the type of error message you would normally expect to see. The above shows someone with a sense of humor, trying to make a bad situation a bit better. If a page hangs, Chrome puts up this:
Again, super friendly. The IE team at Microsoft was disbanded when IE got its market share. I think it was down to 4 developers! Then the attacks started against it and the team was ramped back up. But the job was to fix the security breaches as fast as possible. Talk about the worst job possible! Hack happens at midnight in some country overseas and by morning PR needs an answer to tell the press, and you need a fix developed and tested broadly in matter of days. Then work again with PR to put out the message, get VP approvals for the patch release, etc. All the time you are getting cursed for putting out a product that attracted so much negative attention. If you were an A+ developer, that would not be the group you wanted to be in. So is there a surprise the Chrome came from behind and took over? Nope.
As to Apple products, I think they have sort of monopoly that is much worse than Windows. On Windows, ultimately you as the consumer could install anything you wanted regardless of what Microsoft did. Not so with Apple hardware. If Android had not come around, I am confident apple would have attracted regulatory attention and would have had to put more neutral set of rules for apps. It is unhealthy what they are doing for consumers in keeping out key components that are competitive to their own platform. I have had a number of product ideas for example that I could not get off the ground because I could not figure out a way for Apple to allow them to exist on their platform. And leaving out half the mobile world is not acceptable in many business plans. So if there was something wrong with Microsoft, there is something 10X wrong with Apple in this regard
.
OK guys...you've convinced me! As a dedicated IE user for many, many years I am now ready to make the switch on permanent basis. I've made Chrome the default browser and installed it as well on my Galaxy Note. Even though I expect a bit of a learning curve I am going to stick with it for several weeks and see what I think.
FWIW, Amir, I agree to a point. Even given an unfair market advantage, the weaker product will usually be beaten out by a better one. Eventually. But that unfair advantage was the rationale, and is what the law is there to prevent. And I'm not sure they were completely wrong, thinking about it. IE was a pretty buggy, unfriendly browser for years with overwhelmingly dominant share. It took a long time for something like Chrome to come along, with sufficiently deep pockets behind it, and knock off the hilltop, bad as it was.
In other words, once they owned the category, they stopped investing in serving the customer. Maybe what the suit assumed wasn't so wrong after all...
It could still happen. It probably should happen. Being one of the many who enjoys the interconnected world of Apple products (what others call the closed system), I can't say anything they've done seems to be holding me back, but anti-competitive practices shouldn't be tolerated. You can't have free markets if the most powerful players are allowed to stack the deck.
Tim
In other words, once they owned the category, they stopped investing in serving the customer. Maybe what the suit assumed wasn't so wrong after all...
It could still happen. It probably should happen. Being one of the many who enjoys the interconnected world of Apple products (what others call the closed system), I can't say anything they've done seems to be holding me back, but anti-competitive practices shouldn't be tolerated. You can't have free markets if the most powerful players are allowed to stack the deck.
Tim
Similar threads
 | Steve Williams Site Founder | Site Owner | Administrator |  | Ron Resnick Site Co-Owner | Administrator |  | Julian (The Fixer) Website Build | Marketing Managersing |