“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”

“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”

The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.

A successful open source project will see one of two trends:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].

- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].

[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.

[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.

So far [Microsoft] has been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more.

So true, except that none of it matters to Microsoft. If it cared about  “simplicity, security and speed”, it’d install Firefox + extensions with every copy of Windows.

It’s become pretty clear that the only way you can make money off a browser is by driving traffic from it to a search engine results page with advertisements. That’s how Mozilla makes over 80% of its revenue – driving traffic to Google from its search box and its default home page.

Earning revenue from ads on Microsoft Live Search pages through IE traffic is the only imperative driving IE development. And its getting costlier by the day to keep up with the competition.

Here’s a list of peeves and loves about each browser.

Opera Mini Good

• Faster page load times
• Snappier controls
• Smoother scrolling
• Slightly better font rendering (all of above relative to S60 Browser)
• Address TLD auto-complete: (type www.opera. and  a drop-down list appears with opera.com, opera.org , opera.net)
• Speed Dial-like shortcuts for bookmarks

Opera Mini Bad

• No support for multiple tabs
• “Small” font too small, “Medium” too big
• Screen does not occupy entire width when phone tilted (in portrait mode). I don’t think the browser is accelerometer-aware
• Not possible to copy URL

S60 Browser Good

• Does not ask for permission to connect; allows selection of default access point. This is because, unlike Opera Mini, which is a Java app, the S60 browser is a native S60 app.
• Page overview – a shrunk view of the current page which you can quickly scroll around on.
• Attractive Back/Forward implementation. Page previews flip forward and back, like moving your mouse across the OS X dock.

S60 Browser Bad

• Supports multiple tabs but cannot open new one!
• No “top”, “bottom”, “pgup”, “pgdn” keypad shortcuts
• Tedious process to copy URL. Bookmark current page, navigate to Edit bookmarks, copy URL, delete bookmark.

What else

Haven’t had a chance to check out Skyfire yet; the founders have decided, in a sadly common blinkered move, to limit launch to the US. A mobile browser from Mozilla’s been “just around the corner” for a while now (and won’t show up on S60 first). Google’s promised a mobile version of Chrome, but my guess is that Android will get it before S60 does. I don’t see mobile Safari on S60 ever. And it hurts to even speak of mobile IE.

“Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers…”

Having used  it since it was first released last year on Windows, I think this is more than just twisted statistics. Forget those measurements (down to decimal points, for god’s sake), but Safari definitely feels faster than either Firefox or Opera. Safari’s UI needs a post to itself, but it puts both IE and Firefox to shame.

Apple could put more muscle behind promoting Safari on Windows (for reasons I outlined last June), but I don’t see it giving either Firefox or IE a serious run for their money. My prediction is that Safari’ll be locked in an inconsequential battle for third place with Opera (also a fast, snappy alternative).

IE will always be number 1 because it’s pre-installed with Windows (and is un-installable). The vast majority of the installed base won’t switch to anything else (both home and business users). IE’s good enough. ‘Nuff said.

Firefox is the poster boy of the power-user crowd because it’s so customizable. But there’s an upper cap to the market share it can gain (see IE above).

Safari’s USP is speed and simplicity. Speed isn’t enough for the IE crowd to switch. And Safari’s simplicity (which implies non-extensibility) is a deal-killer for the Firefox crowd. Opera faces the exact same problems.

Between these massive masses of users, both of whom have diametrically opposite views on what a browser should be, are the miniscule 4-5% who use either of Safari or Opera, regardless of how good/fast/simple/snappy they are. Pity.

Footnote: Hark back to my June 2007 article about why Apple wants Safari on Windows – it’s got to do with the iPhone. Opera, with its large mobile push, probably has the same strategy too.

In a nutshell, Cringely believes that forcing developers to develop Safari-compliant AJAX applications will aid simlilar Safari-compliant applications on the iPhone (now that Steve Jobs has declared that third-party applications will be overwhelmingly web-based):

With the AJAX economy dictating that browsers with big market share like IE and Firefox get most of the effort, that leaves Safari as a second-class browser and, potentially, a liability for the iPhone.

Whaddayado? Introduce a Windows version of Safari, get a million people to download it in the first week, and scare developers into moving Safari customization higher on their AJAX priority list.

Non. That’s shockingly naive. The bottom line is that Safari just doesn’t matter. A million downloads in the first week (and projecting forward from there) isn’t even a microscopic scratch on the total number of IE and Firefox browsers surfing the Internet. Half of Google’s applications don’t work well with Opera yet – and it’s a browser which has a substantial number of users, most of whom are more likely to be heavy users of Google’s application services.

Besides, how long has Safari for Windows been around? 3 weeks? And it’s about another week to the iPhone launch. That’s simply not long enough to gain traction. For Safari to make any sort of difference, it’d have to be launched at least a year ago, and promoted heavily by Apple, a la
the community effort by the Firefox junta.

So why launch Safari for Windows after all? It’s simpler than most commentators are making it out to be. Hark back to my post last Friday. The iPhone is cool enough for developers to want to develop applications for it anyway. Safari for Windows gives them a browser to test compatibility on with without having to invest in iPhones and/or Macbooks. Jobs stressed in his Walt Mossberg interview at the D conference about the OS and browser being the same Mac applications:

.. It’s REAL Safari, REAL OS X. We put a different user interface on it to work with a multi-touch screen… it’s an amazing amount of software.

It’s about dramatically lowering the entry barrier for developers to write applications for the iPhone, not compelling them to be compliant with Safari on Windows.

In fact, one of the tenets of the “new Web”, or Web 2.0, as it’s more popularly known, is that value is moving up the software stack, and that applications are now commodities; the real value lies in services that are offered via those applications. For instance, I’m writing this document on Writely, a sort of Wordpad-for-the-Web. Mind you, it isn’t an application in the traditional sense of the term, as much as it’s a service. In any case, the important thing here is that it doesn’t matter what browser application I’m using to access this document on Writely. I’m using Firefox, but I might as well have been using Internet Explorer. Or Opera. Or Safari. Or… well, you get the idea. The browser does not matter any more. It is a commodity. A lot of application “services” today run on the same principle. All of Google’s offerings: Search. Local. Maps. Gmail. Orkut. Blogger. Writely itself. Take a look at the hottest tech startups today. Flickr. del.icio.us. 37signals. YouTube. Digg. Bloglines. Spot the pattern? How you access the application services does not matter.

The browser is just the way we access the Internet today. What will matter is how we will access the Internet tomorrow. I’ve said this in the past, and I’ll say it again here. Google Desktop (GD) is the application to watch out for. The future will belong to what are known as Internet-connected widgets, or as MS calls them, Internet-connected components (ICC) . These will be used on desktops, mobile devices, and any other appliances that will be connected to the Web in the future. And GD is one application that uses these ICCs already. Almost every single plugin connects to the Internet to gather the data it needs. Or take a look at Konfabulator, deemed valuable enough to be bought by Yahoo!. These widgets are the future of how information and content on the Internet is going to be created and accessed. Taking it to the next level, imagine these widgets on your smartphone. Or in your TV/TiVo. Or in your car. That is the opportunity for ICCs.

So does MS need Internet Explorer?
The area we’ve talked about above is where MS’s future opportunities are. Ray Ozzie and his team have to find a business model to monetize this opportunity. That’ll require his deep technical insight. It’ll also require immense technical talent from within MS to build a programming model around the new Web. And here’s where I’m going to step in and make this assertion.

Microsoft should stop developing Internet Explorer.

Instead, it ought to concentrate on building the Internet into the very heart of the next Windows, whether it’s the successor to Windows Vista (for the desktop), or Windows Mobile (for mobile devices). Firefox is doing a better job than IE in every respect. It’s the better browser by far. Only Opera can come close to being as good. IE isn’t MS’s competitive advantage in the least, in many respects, it’s a liability. A wise move would be to cease development on the browser – any development on IE would be simply playing catch-up to Firefox and Opera. It makes no sense to compete in such a market when you’re better off building up tomorrow’s market. Microsoft needs to jump to (in the words of Guy Kawasaki) “the next curve”. Or in the words of John Sculley, “change the rules of the game”, as he did at the helm of Pepsi.

I sense that Windows Live is another mistake that the company’s making. Not the idea of web-enabled services – that’s fine by me. But the fact that Windows Live works best on IE and has problems with Firefox, Opera, Safari means that we’re going down the same path again – trying to “lock-in” users to their browser, when it doesn’t make sense – does the value lie in Windows Live application services, or does it lie in Internet Explorer? There’s no rationale in their policy right now, and it looks as if it’s degenerating into an ego issue – stop the spread of Firefox at any cost. If Ray Ozzie is to be believed through his “The Internet Services disruption ” memo, MS is now a services company, only with multiple product offerings. (As an aside, this model is precisely what Gates had alluded to in his book “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” more than half a decade ago. Talk about visionary!) So why is it competing in a senseless, hopelessly commoditized market which isn’t even a revenue source, where all it gets is bad publicity, and where its product offering is way behind competitors from a feature and ease-of-use point of view?

If Microsoft has the courage to back up its vision with action, it ought to include a copy of Firefox with Windows Vista, as the default browser. But the home page ought to be Windows Live. Hmm – now that’s a move that makes sense!