Wednesday, November 30, 2005

In the trenches

Browser wars are still raging. Explorer Destroyer distributes scripts to harass IE users, and Google is paying a $1 bounty for every person who switches to Firefox because of this campaign:
IE users will see a friendly message stating that they need to download and install Firefox to view your site. This script will do the most good and make you the most money. Can you handle it? (At least try it for a day to see how good it feels.)
How good does it feel to deny users access to content based on their choice of a Web client, the choice that in corporate environments is often forced on users by system administrators who control every piece of software that is installed?

The Web browser market today is a zero-sum game: marketshare must be pried away, and even small gains now come with a big price tag. In stark contrast, competition for the next platform's users has not even begun: a relatively small investment buys a monopoly. Who will take advantage of this opportunity?

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i am so into this post. well, now im having second thoughts on calling myself a victim of the firefox-google side. im currently handling multiple blogs with these buttons that generate "$1" but sad to say for a month i gained nothing.. hmm.. thinking of creating a tech-ran-blog out of this.. then i chanced upon your blog.. with a cool url too..

8:21 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

If this use Firefox message thing is going on, it may help level the playing field in the long run since Mozilla users have been denied certain IE-only features for a long time such as posting nasty blinking butterflies and such in MSN Groups. I think there's something about Firefox having to be backward compatible, too, in order to render below-WC3 HTML standards IE webpages, but I'm not a techie so will not say more.

12:33 AM  
Blogger Chris Saad said...

This is totally wrong. The "browser war" is supposed to be about no one controlling the web. About open standards meaning that the user experiences a consistent experience irrespective of the browser - that Microsoft can't hijack HTML and make it proprietary by controlling the browser market.

Firefox/Google asking publishers to limit access to their site based on browser thing they could do (in the interest of their high moral ground and their stated philosophies).

But I find the idea of the 'next platform' fascinating. My partner and I are working on a reader that treats RSS like an alerts feed rather than a news feed - we too think that HTTP can do more than just web-serving!

We're calling it 'Touchstone' (www.touchstonegadget.com)

9:12 PM  

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