Thinkervine

You may have heard. Microsoft is not shipping IE8 with its new operating system Windows 7, which should be released in October, in Europe. Several solutions are being proposed as how users will install a browser on their machine but all have a common proposal: Users will have the choice on which browser to install.

This is a major threat for Microsoft and might lead to a big marketshare loss. Today, many people use Internet Explorer as it is the “default” installed browser and do not bother to look at something else. In the future, they will have no default and will have to make a choice.

Microsoft will be starting an evangelisation campaign, trying to rally most of the users to its new version of Internet Explorer, IE8. It started with a (laughable) comparison with Firefox and Chrome.

The below table shows their points of comparison. You may notice how the left column is populated, and you really got to check the comments.

According to this chart, IE8 should be the prefered browsing choice. But when it comes to real facts, this depicts how Microsoft tries to jeopardize real facts using marketing speech. This chart would have been of more interest if actually it had presented something more representative of reality. Showing a “no coverage” case for Firefox and Chrome when it comes to Security or Privacy is just meaningless. We all know how Chrome first introduced the “anonymous mode” that has been adopted in IE8 at a later stage. Both browsers support all common security and anti-phishing mechanisms.

Search has always been an enhanced feature within Firefox which had the small search box on the upper left, Chrome uses the address bar as a search engine, providing predictive typing. Where does this compare to anything provided by Microsoft.

Funny enough, Microsoft skipped Opera and Safari. Aren’t they considered as real threats to Microsoft ? Opera has just launched its Opera Unite platform, which introduces an embedded Web Server and several features. They were also the firsts to introduce the speed dial feature that was adopted in Chrome (supported in IE using Google Toolbar).

There’s one particular section I love: Performance. We all know this is a major issue in IE8. Slow for starters (cold and warm starts), slow for rendering pages and aweful Javascript execution speed. Both Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 3.0 have been introducing great enhancements. So what do they have to say for their defense ? “Top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive during rush hours”. Does that mean that the Internet is in a permanent congestion ? They might have missed fact that people have been consuming lot of media on the internet, that many now are living through DSL and Fiber. We’ll let them know. And I’d really know what kind of car they’re riding, old bikes perhaps. On the basis of this statement, you might just need to align on the basement ? Yeah, right. Why bother upgrading to IE8, let’s just get back to IE5

Now talking real, does browsing restricts to Windows users only ? What about Linux and Mac users ? Hence, what does Microsoft say about portability ? Or perhaps they might develop Linux and Mac versions for IE8 ? Which we righteously can claim ?

This is about time to go out and claim it. Microsoft, we would be glad to adopt IE8 provided you hand us copies under Linux and Mac. And I’m sure many others would do as well, so it’s up to you. Care to listen ?

That was the blast of the day. Everyone’s been talking about it in the last 24h although rumors have been going for a while.

It has been announced through a comic strip, drawn by Scott McCloud, and yet it drew a great interest. Yesterday, the windows version of Google Chrome based on Webkit (the browser engine behind Safari), was available to download (Linux and Mac versions are on their way).

Google has a trend to get into anything that is related to the web. Starting from search to social networks. Yet, they were missing something. An end to end tool that will help analyze the average guy’s behavior on the Internet, helping them enhancing their search algorithms and construct browsing profiles for more accurate and targetted ads.

Although, Google toolbar was filling a part of the job, it didn’t provide enough information. So Google Chrome is there to fill the gap.

My first thoughts on the browser: light and fast, sober and user friendly. But it still has a lot of improvements to get before maturity. Still lot of bugs (javascript and SSL/Certificates handling), still missing lot of options (Java VM, extentions and theming, bookmark organization, own proxy management, RSS,).

But on the other side, it has few ups: the stealth navigation mode, the mozaic of most visited websites  (borrowed from Opera), the fading status bar and the modularization of tabs.

And geez, why “Chrome” ? They could have thought of a more unusual, something a bit out of the common.

So do we really need another browser ? Probably not, but Google might come with the new generation of browsers and toggle the hands. Meanwhile, they have extended their partnership with Mozilla until 2011 to have Google as the default homepage on Firefox.

I will be waiting for the next betas in order to see how it improves but it is still far from being mature enough to replace Firefox as my default browser.