KnowledgeForward

I just had a good conversation with a reporter from the New York Times regarding why people choose not to update their technology and my blog posting on “More People Pick Their Religion Than Their Browser?“.  I’m not sure how much of it will wind up in print, so I’ll relate here what I said.

First, it’s a fact that even though vendors come out with a new release doesn’t mean that everyone automatically upgrades.  For example, 0.14% of browsers are still Netscape (not Mozilla/Firefox - I actually mean the old Netscape).  That may not sound like much, but given the number of browsers out there it actually adds up to a real number.  And since these stats are based on hits on websites, it does mean they are actually in use and not just sitting dormant on an old PC somewhere.

The reporter asked a good question, which is whether the people that are slow to update their software are good for the industry.  I gave a resounding “yes”.  These stodgy users force vendors to give compelling reasons to upgrade or else they won’t do it.  And the reasons have to be good enough to make up for their strong bias towards sticking with what has worked in the past.  When their PCs finally bite the dust and they need to buy a new one, that’s when they’ll get new software.  Good for them.

Of course, software as a service (SaaS) promises to change this whole dynamic.  Since the vendors make money from ongoing subscriptions rather than on periodic upgrades, they no longer have an incentive to make changes just to get a revenue bump.  But the other side of that coin is that SaaS vendors might have more incentive to skate by with whatever they can as long as it doesn’t cause a mass exodus of users.  Also, many enterprise users are uncomfortable with software that can change incrementally and frequently because of the burden it places on training and help desks that have to support users.  End-user SaaS is still new so it’s yet to be determined how these pros and cons will play out in the enterprise.

I blogged yesterday about how IE is still maintaining a tight hold on the browser market (see IE is Still Beating Mozilla and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead). Today I wanted to explore the question “why?” Not that I think IE is a bad browser or that Mozilla is categorically superior - I really don’t have a strong preference. But I find the selection process interesting. So did the New York Times in a recent technology blog post (The Browser Choices We Make) which wondered “why people choose the browsers they choose. Let us know about what’s behind your choice in the comments section.” So what did they find? Well, culling through the 170+ responses didn’t help explain why IE is popular. In fact, on the surface it did just the opposite. Almost all the responses are about why they chose Firefox, Safari, or Opera, yet IE owns ~80% of the market.

Of course, the reason is that the majority of IE users didn’t explicitly choose IE. They use it because their computer came with it (and they don’t know they have a choice or know how to change it) or their employer requires it. Some do make a conscious choice to use IE, mostly because of compatibility. I guesstimate that in the US only about a quarter of the IE users explicitly selected IE at best (19% of all users). So combined with the 23% represented in other options (if you assume all those were explicit choices which may not be the case for Safari either), a conservative estimate is that only 42% have explicitly thought about and selected their browser.

Since choices about browsers or Java and .NET are often figuratively referred to as “religious” decisions (for example, see this posting on “The Firefox Religion“) that brought to mind a recent study on religion. According to the recent Pew study, 44% of Americans have changed religions (if you include switching between different forms of Protestantism). This means that more people probably change their religion than change their browser. Strange. One would think it’s easier to install Firefox on your laptop than to convert your religion. Still, both numbers are pretty high when you consider how often we tend to stick with the status quo in other areas of our lives. To me, this propensity to change shows that Americans are not afraid of replacing whatever comes installed on their laptops or their souls.

I just checked the most recent browser stats and, no surprise, IE is still keeping it’s grip on the browser “market” (can it be a market if it’s free?).  A browser study I did in 2005 of 217 organizations found that 89% had some form of IE (mostly IE6 at the time) as their desktop standard.  At the time 17% of respondents said they had considered changing their browser standard.  Corporations, governments, and non-profits also influence consumer browser habits since they create the majority of sites that consumers browse.  In my study I found that these organizations were more open about the browsers they targeted for their sites than what they forced their own internal users to use (49% did compatibility testing against Netscape and 29% had help desk troubleshooting scripts to help Netscape users; the numbers were 28% and 11% for Firefox).So how have things changed since 2005?

Not much.  OneStat shows about 83% marketshare globally for IE and 77% in the US.  According to them the most popular browsers on the web are:

Marketshare (from Net Applications) shows about the same as the OneStat US shares give or take a few percent.

 Browser    Total Market Share   Microsoft Internet Explorer 75.47%

Firefox 16.98%

Safari 5.82%

Opera 0.62%

Netscape 0.61%

Mozilla 0.32%

Determining browser market share is a bit of an art form.  While my market share numbers were obtained by directly asking organizations, most stats are determined by looking at web server logs of visitors and by reporting sent by services installed by participating sites.  So the stats vary based on the types of users that hit these sites.  Ultimately, the only stats that matter for an enterprise determining what to use is what its target population is using and is expected to use in the future.  I’m not interested in the horse race or religious aspects of browser selection - the reason I think browser selection matters to enterprises is twofold: 1) to determine which browser offers the best experience for its employees (such as distributed management of security settings, compatibility, etc.) and 2) to determine how websites should be developed and tested based upon the browsers its audience is expected to have.

Yesterday, Apple announced it will be introducing a version of its Safari browser to run on Windows. You can already download the beta here. Possible motivations range all the way  from breaking Microsoft dominance by forcing web application developers to code for more than just IE (only 11% of enterprises test against Safari according to a study I did of 217 end-user organizations in 2005 while 90% test against IE6+) to breaking Microsoft dominance by installing a platform-independent web stack. Recall the recent articles in the WSJ and E-commerce Times about how iTunes for Windows installs a separate networking stack (called “Bonjour”) that, by all accounts, seems to work well and without harm to Windows. It will be interesting to see Apple’s next move.

I just saw a great blog posting “On Mozilla and The Evolution of the Browser” that talks about microformats and the future of browsers.  Microformats are ways to add simple, machine readable tags to otherwise human-readable web content (my definition-forgive me if I missed a formal one somewhere).  hCal is a simple example: “Friday, June 11th at the Hackney Pavillion, 7pm” could be tagged so it could be clicked via some type of UI and added to your calendar. 

I like microformats, but rather than seeing Mozilla thinking about which ones they should build into the browser I’d prefer they keep the browser lean and extensible and create a plug-in API so that anyone who feels like creating a microformat interpreter can do so.  The UI of the browser would accomodate whatever microformat plug-ins are installed.  I think they are considering a more open approach and the technologies they picked were just samples of what could be inserted into the browser - at least I hope!

I can actually think of quite a few more actions that could be taken on web pages.  I wouldn’t force the user to understand which are due to microformats and which are possible without them.  They are all just actions (like other than historical or techie reasons, why would subscribing to RSS be accomplished through its orange icon, adding a calendar entry under a submenu from a green plus, and personal bookmarking be from the bookmark menu, and editing from the tools menu?).  And I disagree with Alex Faaborg’s statement that the content area shouldn’t be altered.  The UI I envision for microformats would be a combination of page-wide and contextual microformats that could be applied:

Page-wide actions

Place in toolbars across top or side rather than forcing user to click on a “+” symbol in the middle of the toolbar.

• Tag (del.icio.us)
• Rate (Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit)
• Blog
• Discuss (Wirefan)
• Subscribe (RSS, Atom)
• Edit
• Bookmark (Yahoo My Web, del.icio.us, enterprise equiavelents from IBM, Microsoft, BEA, etc.)
• Store (to workspace, offline)

Contextual actions

There’s a familiar UI for contextual capabilities which is to support right-clicking to take action on items and have the option of a contextual toolbar the provides pushbutton access to choices on the highlighted or cursored information.  Given the number of microformats that could be embedded in a page there will probably need to be a “show all codes” equivalent where you can see all microformatted areas while holding down ctrl or something like that.

• Map
• Save contact
• Contact (call, IM, email as appropriate)
• Add to calendar
• Search (Sphere, Google, Wikipedia)
• Virtual teleport (Slurl)

People love an underdog story – the little guy who the big guys ignore but triumphs through gut, gumption, and raw talent. I just watched Rocky again for the first time in years (the original, non-Roman-numeraled movie) and the clichés are all there.

This explains why the press loves the Mozilla vs. Microsoft story. Every couple of years IE and Mozilla (formerly the Netscape guys) go at it again, releasing new versions of their browsers and the spotlights shine brightly on them. It’s not as much that the product improvements themselves are that exciting, but the resurfacing of that underdog story.

A look through my press quotes from InformationWeek, Forbes, ComputerWorld, and Tech News World shows how nothing really changes. I was interviewed by NPR on this subject in 2005 as well, and I can guarantee they didn’t care just because of the evening news listener’s interest in tabbed browsing and CSS support. But “Can a plucky non-profit beat giant Microsoft?” – now that’s a story!

Here are some other quotes of mine for historical perspective on this never-ending story:

• Round I in 2000: Netscape Communicator 6.0 vs. IE 5.5
  • http://www.iw.com/magazine.php?inc=041500/4.15internettech3.html
• Round II in 2004: Firefox 1.0 vs. IE
  • http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/general/2004/11/09/generalbhsuper_2004_11_09_REC_0000-2609-KEYWORD.Missing.html
• Round III earlier this year: Firefox 1.5 vs. IE7
  • http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;453717301
• Round IV this week: Firefox 2.0 vs. IE7
  • http://www.technewsworld.com/story/53870.html

In my most recent interview, when asked if I thought Mozilla 2.0 was a major release, I said not really. But they had to put something out since the spotlight was going to be there anyways and they have to look busy. To quote myself:

“I think they’re invigorated, knowing browsers are in the news again,” he said of Firefox maker Mozilla. “They want to have something to show if people are going to pay attention to them.”

I do think Mozilla 3.0 will have more in it, but really the value of a browser is that it’s a thin, stable platform on which to run web applications. I want all the improvements and variation in the apps, not the viewer for them. Where there are fixes needed, fix them. Where there can be neat improvements (like tabbed browsing – love it!), make them. Put in support for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technology. Otherwise, leave it alone and just keep my apps humming along smoothly.