Posted on 12/22/2004 8:32:38 AM PST by holymoly
Remember those days back in 1995, when Netscape Navigator was synonymous with internet? That was the time when Microsofts Internet Explorer entered the market for a head-on collision with the Netscape Navigator. That was Browser War I. Now the battle was reignited by the fire of FireFox, internet browser of Mozilla. This is the beginning of the Browser War II. And it appears that this time Microsoft is losing it.
Internet Explorer is rapidly losing market share. OneStat.com a company in Amsterdam had conducted a worldwide survey in late November. The survey shows that Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. FireFox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.
Net surfers are opting for FireFox to Internet Explorer due to security concerns. FireFox offers much more security from worms and viruses than IE. FireFox 1.0 was released for free on the web on Nov. 9. Within just one month 10 million copies of the browser were downloaded. It is an open source software which improves with time as bug-reporter and bug-fixer community grows.
Mozillas President Mitchell Baker is optimistic that FireFox will grab 10 percent market share and Mozilla's many technology parts will become an increasingly important application development platform.
She says that the product is so nice that people love it when they try it. It is innovative and has new features, it makes the Web a more enjoyable experience, it makes people more comfortable, and it's fast. It's a set of things you would want in a browser if you sat down and really thought about it. She added that people rarely realize that the quality your web experience is determined to a large extent by the kind of browser you use. Firefox gives them that wonderful browsing enjoyment.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows on the other hand feels that people will stick with IE when they consider all the things that made them to opt for IE in the first place. He said that Microsoft is developing a new version of browser but one will have to wait till 2006. Schare said that Microsoft goes to people and gets there feedback on what they want and what they dont want in a product. It is not so easy to satisfy absolutely everyone.
To us however somehow the diminishing share of IE from the market says something else. It says that nowadays costumers have a new way of giving a feedback. They just switch to someone else.
see my #117
Thanks. I'll give that a try.
You've been proved wrong multiple times already. #117 is the most comprehensive example.
Are you actually saying that charities and churches are evil? I hope not.This is a completely different matter. Charities care for the poor who cannot pay for the things they need.
Wrong. I steal nothing. Stealing implies that what I take is no longer available to the original owner. I think we can all see the fallacy of your statement there.OK, let's put it this way: You don't steal, but you infringe on other people's copyrights by downloading content from their websites without them getting paid for it, which is conceptually comparable to stealing.
Since socialism means the state (or other central authority) controls everythingIf you cannot make money from your work because others give things away for free, your work gets devaluated. How can you compete with a free product? In the long run, there will be no incentive to be creative or innovative at all, because you cannot earn a living from it. That's typical of socialism. In the end there will be one standard browser (which is free), one standard operating system (which is free), etc. It will be the end of the software market.
This a late entry--and solid contender--for most idiotic post of the year.
#117 covers a different topic. I'm still waiting for your proof that IE is a free product. In fact it is NOT free, because it's sold as an integral part of another non-free product.
IE has been FREE for years. It was free about 10 years ago when Netscape was its major competition. It's always been free. Where have you been? There's never been a charge for IE.The charge is hidden in the price of Windows.
Another reason why Microsoft's idea of creating a unified experience for users rather than creating a platform that allows users to run tools of their choice to do the things they want is such a bad idea.
Then, can you tell me why IE is free to Mac users?Because it's old! IE 5 is 1998's technology. There's a lot of obsolete stuff you can download for free.
There you have it-- you said it yourself: IE is free. Bye.
It has the added benefit of a cool mascot. What would IE use for a mascot?
I switched to IE in 2002 because at that time I was still running a granny P(I) 150 MHz Dell. My Netscape Communicator 4.79 was extremely slow on all sites that use Shockwave Flash (and that meant most sites even in those days). IE's performance was much smoother and so I was forced to switch to MS (but still it was sluggish if you have multiple flash ads).
Now I have got a new computer, I'm not sure if I will keep using IE though.
I set my homepage to Google.com rather than my ISP's internet service home page (with all the clutters). They don't put news on the homepage (yet), and it's reasonable clean as far as web pages go.
The cool thing is that the default "Firefox" start page IS Google.
this was to be expected.... firefox is much more userfriendly than IE
you said it yourself: IE is free.That's not what I said.
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