Browser Wars
Bookmark :
Firefox 3 went live on Firefox Download Day, though the time of release and being in the UK meant I downloaded it the day after (Washington Post article). Never mind, I've now had a quick look around and it looks nice enough, but one thing both bothers me and makes me chuckle about the Firefox steam train. Is it really the greatest thing since sliced bread?
As an Opera user I get frustrated about the trumpeting of Firefox as Opera deserves to have as big a noise made about it and a larger market share as a result, but any gain in Opera share is likely to be at the expense of Firefox rather than the devil that is IE, so the winner is M$. On the other hand, I like the nice smug feeling when I use mouse gestures, speed dial and so on, without having to hunt for plug-ins and subsequent slow down in my browsing experience. Feel free to find comparisons with the Win/Mac/Linux and also Lotus/M$ collaboration battles.
I've had Firefox installed since 0.9, but it’s never been my browser of choice. I'm certainly not an IE fan, though I do confess to having had IE4 as my main browser for a time 10 years ago, but that was because Netscape 4 was slower than a sloth addicted to opiates. My main browser has been Opera since v5 and I am currently on v9.5. With v5 I had all sorts of compatibility problems and had to resort to IE for secure sites, but now I come across very few sites that I prefer to browse in Firefox or IE and speed has always been Opera's strong point. (There is a newer test here with some interesting additional points in the comments)
(read more)
Back to the real point though, and that is that the advance and choice of browsers seems to have bypassed Notes. Lotus has gone to huge effort to create a superior Open Source alternative to M$ Office, but forgotten to spend a day or two utilising the latest browsers within Notes. As far as I can tell in ND8, Notes ironically still uses IE for displaying web pages and the Preview in Browser toolbar icons include 1 for IE, 1 for each of Netscape 4, 5 & 6 and 1 marked Other (which did very little, despite my tinkering). Netscape? Come on, Netscape 6 is 7 years old and was not even relevant when it was released (Netscape blog article).
So much has, and is, being done to improve the Notes client in ND8, yet the little corner of Notes called web access is antiquated and, well, embarrassing. IE is quite widely recognised in the industry as being the weakest browser for general surfing and for security, yet it is the one Notes is tied to. In today's world of governance, the controlled, corporate desktop is more likely to restrict users to a specific browser and if that browser isn't IE, then browsing through Notes becomes disabled and another bit of “Yeah, It Can Do That Too” disappears (nsftools blog article).
So much has, and is, being done to improve the Notes client in ND8, yet the little corner of Notes called web access is antiquated and, well, embarrassing. IE is quite widely recognised in the industry as being the weakest browser for general surfing and for security, yet it is the one Notes is tied to. In today's world of governance, the controlled, corporate desktop is more likely to restrict users to a specific browser and if that browser isn't IE, then browsing through Notes becomes disabled and another bit of “Yeah, It Can Do That Too” disappears (nsftools blog article).