Gartner Says it's a 2-Browser World 409
prostoalex writes "In its advisory to the IT managers Gartner says that even though the factors that drive the current Firefox growth are not sustainable, IT departments better get used to a two-browser world. "Concerns about security currently favor Mozilla Foundation's Firefox, but the market tide can shift if security breaches result from increased usage of Firefox", says Gartner and ZDNet adds that "Microsoft must deliver an improved version of its browser in Longhorn if it is to "determine the outcome" of the browser war.""
Longhorn... (Score:2, Informative)
Concise version of report (Score:3, Informative)
No need to read article now.
Re:As simpleminded as Gartner is... (Score:3, Informative)
That's a misapprehension (Score:5, Informative)
I don't actually know the minimum requirements for Longhorn. I do know that it will require a lot of horsepower and a high-end video card, because they're playing catchup with OS X (both in terms of eye candy and in terms of useful features such as Expose').
So I expect that Longhorn will run perfectly well on today's mid- to high-end systems, since they're trying to take advantage of video power currently going unused. Today's bottom-range systems may not run it at all, or will do so pokily.
"Better get used to a two-browser world." (Score:2, Informative)
I officially proclaim us at (or beyond) the point where we can say "screw people with Netscape 4.0 or IE 3 or whatever".
The existing differences between the rendering on the current versions of the main browsers (and most minor browsers too) are so trivial that a completely standards-compliant page can be made to look good in any of them, even if they might look slightly different in each.
IE misinterprets the box model? So what? With reasonably chosen values, things look fine in each. That fancy bevelled border that you want shows up as a plain old border in IE? Who cares? There are worse things than a plain border. And so forth.
Re:Longhorn... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bummer for Opera (Score:3, Informative)
Having several meetings about which _font_ your home page uses are _not_ unheard of, and the same goes for their use of java, dhtml, javascript, ActiveX, Flash, Shockwave, etc.
To add insult to injury, in some cases when they find that they can't make their page render the way they want it to, they just save it as a gif and make their entire page one image, or at least several images of text and such. Which works on all browsers, as long as you're not blind or using lynx anyways.
Generally they don't care too much about that last 10% as long as they can make it look right for the 90% that use IE.
Re:No surprise ... (Score:1, Informative)
why is the above insightful?
Gartner receive payments from Microsoft to write articles that make them look better than they really are.
doesn't need MS to survive
Just because they are big enough to survive, doesn't mean that they don't want *more* money.Gartner is a pretty big group *respected*
Of course they are respected. If they weren't respected, why would Microsoft bother to pay them large sums of money to write articles about them?
Re:New & Improved (Score:2, Informative)
No, I'm going to have to support the grandparent on this one: .NET is junk. The CLR is horrifically slow, and the control set is woefully incomplete. To do anything in .NET you have to use P/Invoke waaaay too often, and once you do that, you're no longer writing managed code, which is supposedly the whole point of the CLR.
Plus, with the CLR, you don't get any language, you get a subset of the language. (no Multiple Inheritance, templates..) and while I don't use multiple inheritance, I most certainly do use templates.
Re:Longhorn... (Score:3, Informative)
Last I heard, IE 5 was the last version of IE made for the Mac, because future browser enhancements required the "sophistication" of Longhorn. Whether this decision was the result of or the cause of Safari is an exercise left to the reader.
It's funny in a way... CSS requirements for Safari made Apple radically improve system-wide typography services in Panther (drop shadows, et cetera).
With the loss of Avalon as a direct feature of Longhorn, one has to wonder what "manditory" features in the next generation of Internet Explorer cannot still be provided under MacOS X.
Re:Longhorn... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:2 browsers? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:New & Improved = Drop ActiveX (Score:3, Informative)
Re:New & Improved = Drop ActiveX (Score:5, Informative)
From what I've understood, ActiveX is similar to Java - an ActiveX control is placed into a web page, and it is then used to enhance that page in some way. I could be wrong here - I don't use Windows for anything but gaming nowadays.
Mozilla's XPI files, on the other hand, are browser extensions. They give the browser new functionality in a modular way. For example, I have currently installed a Nuke Anything extension, which adds a "Remove this object"-option to the right-button menu, which allows me to remove the object being clicked.
This is one of the basic ideas behind Firefox: make the basic browser have only a few features, and let people extend it as they please.
So, in short: ActiveX controls are web applets, XPI files are browser addons. And since XPI files aren't installed unless the user specifically requests it (and certainly not from any random page), security is not a concern anymore than it would be for installing any other program.
Anti-monopoly move (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, I'd love it if an open-source browser took over. But I don't think it's going to happen.
Moore's "Law" (Score:2, Informative)
It's not a law, and it's not about speed.
Re:New & Improved = Drop ActiveX (Score:3, Informative)
Java, on the other hand, runs in a sandbox...
Re:New & Improved = Drop ActiveX (Score:2, Informative)