Posts Tagged ‘Safari’
First, the interesting part. As the web watching community knows, what was going to be Firefox 3.1 is now to be Firefox 3.5 as a better “representation of scope”. Of course, that is not what us users have to worry about.
What we have to worry about is that Firefox 3.5 and Apple’s Safari 4 are probably going to be released around the same time. And we have to worry about which is better.
And if we are to listen to the developers, we would have to settle for both. Both are deemed to be “fast”, “secure”, and “powerful”. They are both standards compliant, but both still in beta, so we hardly have much material to work with. As far as I can tell in my tests – they both do their basic job (loading websites) well and fast.
Truth is, one cannot really tell yet. Both have some serious bugs and problems to fix – in particular, stability problems. Safari seems to have introduced plenty of eye-candy, in a particularly useful manner: galleries, top sites, quick dial kind of things. On the other hand, Mozilla seems has been up to a few tricks of it’s own: super-speed, super-security, and a very powerful administration mechanism that makes it completely independent of the host operating system’s settings.
In the end it will come down to whichever is most convenient to use. And that is where, I think, Firefox will take the cake. I am talking about the Firefox Add-Ons. The one true advantage in Firefox. I cannot work my browser without my myriad of addons, such as FireFTP, DownThemAll!, Ubiquity, Fasterfox, and the many personalisations themes and extensions.
I think Firefox will take this round home.
Microsoft hasn’t had appreciable competition for its two cash cows, its Office productivity suite and its Windows operating system, in more than a decade. Recently, however, Apple’s Mac OS X and Linux for Netbooks have given Windows a run for its money on the desktop, and Google, Zoho, and other software-as-a-service providers have mounted a challenge to Office.
But the real competition is in the browser, which increasingly displaces the traditional desktop operating system, and through which businesses and consumers reach their preferred applications. This is perhaps why Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer highlighted Microsoft’s need to improve Internet Explorer to Wall Street analysts on Tuesday, as Mary Jo Foley reports.
Or perhaps it’s related to the European Commission veering toward a decision that would force Microsoft to bundle competing browsers like Mozilla’s open-source Firefox with Windows.
As Google and others enter the Commission fray to ensure a level playing field for competing browsers, Microsoft will quickly have to figure out winning innovation strategies, and not merely distribution strategies.
All else being equal, if users have real choice in their browser, they’re unlikely to choose IE, at this point, unless IE 8 can catch up with Firefox’s extensibility and Safari’s or Google Chrome’s speed. Microsoft clearly needs to compete again through product innovation and partner innovation.
Intriguingly, an emerging strategic priority for Microsoft may do both: open source. Microsoft is now inviting open-source developers to participate with the company in building out Visual Studio 2010, as The Register details, just as Microsoft is seeking open-source add-ons for its customer resource management offering.
No, Microsoft is not magically morphing into an open-source company, but it’s increasingly an open source-savvy company. Microsoft increasingly seems to grasp the “open core” strategy that JasperSoft CEO Brian Gentile recently explicated on his blog. It’s a way for companies like Microsoft (and IBM, Oracle, and others) to participate in open source without abandoning their investments in their existing license-based business models.
As Microsoft moves into browser-based delivery of more and more applications, I think we’ll see even more browser innovation and open-source innovation from the Redmond giant.