Which Browser(s) do You Use?
If your answer to me for this question is "Only IE", it would not surprise me at all. Many people still go for the default installed browser and that's why Internet Explorer has still 54.5% marketshare as of Feb 2010 (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers). A couple of years back I too was like one of you using only IE4-6 until I banged my head hard to understand what the buzz around Yahoo Pipes was! Each time I opened Yahoo Pipes in IE, whatever showed up never ever made any sense to me. Fallen in love with IE, I even kept ignoring the warning message about version not supported that showed up on each of my attempt. And when I started it on Firefox the whole interface came up fine and then onwards I stopped using IE, for Yahoo Pipes that is.
Did you think that Firefox was powerful than IE! Right?? Well everyone has his own shortcomings and strengths and this applies to Browsers too... I though have been downloading Firefox since it's 1.5 version (or earlier maybe!) but didn't use it because of shortcomings in it. Yes Firefox too had/has shortcomings, for example FF took more time to load/start, and IE version below 7 opened even in Explorer/folder-listing windows, FF didn't support Embedded OpenType fonts which I used to make multilingual sites (unicode was not much popular then) etc..
Then as Firefox and Internet Explorer were not enough, I started using Safari & Opera with Opera becoming my most used browser. For Safari I always appreciated its anti-aliased page output. When Chrome made its appearance, it became my default browser in the very first week, for It starts up really fast and loads javascript intensive sites as Yahoo pipes, gmail etc very fast. So as of now list of browsers I use is as below ordered in decreasing order of usage.
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Opera
- Safari
Why would anyone want to use multiple browsers? Well there may be many reasons, the reasons that applies for me are
- What if you have multiple gmail accounts and need to check them regularly? For a single browser only option is to sign-in for first account, check mail, log-off, sign-in for second.. and so on... If you have multiple browsers, sign-in to different accounts in each browser, checking "remember me" option and keep on using it for weeks before signing-in again. This is one of most important reason for me to use multiple browsers
- Chrome is fast, faster than any other browser so is my first choice now.
- When chrome first appeared, it did not support plug-ins so till to date I don't use any plugins but I do have two on Firefox one of which is DownloadHelper to download videos off youtube. Secondly when you open a RSS url in Firefox you see formatted entries instead of raw xml (chrome mostly fails here!)
- For IE RSS rendering is even more evolved one, where you can filter items based on tags or sort them etc.
- For opera I like the fast-open shortcuts (ctrl+1 to 9), I guess FF may too have implemented it but I never used it anywhere else.
- For Safari, well as I already said once before it's rendering is quite good.
- As a developer I need to ensure that my code works fine across all/most browsers, so having multiple browsers is a must.
Cartoonist Caldwell Tanner of College Humor suggests that web browsers can be compared to modes of transportation.
It says
- Firefox : Fairly well-rounded, but nearly unusable because of all its stupid add-ons.
- Internet Explorer : Worthless, but good for occasional bashing.
- Safari : While very efficient, its quality is vastly exaggerated y the people that use it.
- Opera : Some people really love it, everyone else just thinks it looks f*cking stupid.
- Chrome : Very fast. That's about it.
Oh! now I repeat! Which browsers do you use? Eager to hear from you!!
Will Internet Explorer 8 bring back IE’s lost Browser market
Internet Explorer 8 has crossed the Beta stage with Release Candidate 1 being made available to public. If no serious flaws are found in this release, the next would be the final release. It’s being reported that Internet Explorer 8 is better than IE7, so does it mean that it would be instrumental in recovering IE’s lost market share?
When Internet Explorer was released it started as a competitor to already on top Netscape Navigator. Aggressive marketing strategies kept on raising its market share until it became the king of browser market with over 94% share around mid 2004 when it started declining.
Were competitor browsers responsible for decline of IE’s market share or it was Microsoft’s own decision to end the war? I feel it’s the latter. Whether it was an intended decision or was outcome of overconfidence, Microsoft decided to decline, by declaring in 2003 that Internet Explorer would no longer be standalone applications but major versions would be released only with the new versions of Windows Operating System. So while Internet Explorer 6 was the default bundled browser with Windows XP, and IE7 default browser for Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has just been released when Windows 7 is nearing its finish.
You may think that despite declaration of not releasing IE as standalone apps, they indeed continued to release installers for IE as they did for IE7 which many users installed on Windows XP systems and now for IE8. The fact, however, is that these installers are not standalone applications as they are too sensitive to Operating System configuration. While other browser may have their minimum requirement for Operating Systems, IE’s minimum requirement is specific to minor updates. For example take the current IE8 RC1 release, which has a dependency on a minor update (KB932823) which according to linked page says “Install this update to resolve an issue in which a user is unable to use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to download files on a computer that is running Windows with IME enabled.”
Since my installation was a fresh XP SP2 installation with only those updates installed which were required for Windows Live Writer, I decided to go ahead with automatic downloads and the installation failed! Should we call this a standalone application which cannot stand-alone and fails for want of a 400KB update which could have easily been added to its already heavy size of 16MB without much ado?
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When I already have Opera, Chrome, Firefox and Safari installed on my system (ordered according to my usage pattern), would I care for IE after such failures? I would not, leave for one reason that I wanted to have a blog post on it’s usability compared to the other 4 as mentioned above. So I decided to give it a few more moments and made the updates manually completing the installation and got the greeting message “Welcome to Internet Explorer.
Do I look like diverting from the title “Will Internet Explorer 8 bring back the lost Browser market”? No! I’m coming to the point! though the installer for Internet Explorer 8 RC1 is available for download and anyone can download it, the 400KB update mentioned above that needs to be downloaded manually goes through online Product Authentication check ,and pirated copies of Windows OSes are bound to fail the check and will require to live solely on Firefox and Chrome. This necessarily means that Microsoft clearly means to exclude the section of users living on pirated versions of Windows OS and give away that piece to its competitor browsers.
In any case it’s unlikely that Internet Explorer will ever regain its market share considering that now there are comparatively many competitors each trying hard to beat others and in process slicing off another piece of IE’s share. What are your views? Eagerly awaiting those in comments.
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