Mozilla vs. Microsoft

Alyce Lomax of Motley Fool fame has posted an article (sorry, registration required) highlighting the continued migration away from Microsoft Internet Explorer and toward the more OSS-friendly Mozilla, citing security as one of the major reasons for this slow defection.

What Alyce doesn't examine, however, is the feature set differentiation between the browsers. To blame security entirely for the defection is too easy. It isn't justabout security, that's the straw that's breaking the camel's back. It'sabout features and functionality.

Yes, yes. IE 6 has pop-up blockers too. But the feature is hidden in themenuing system and isn't easily accessible like the ones available forMozilla/Firefox. Sometimes you *need* to allow pop-ups. WebEx/MeetingPlaceare prime examples of sites that require the ability to randomly pop upwindows at will. It's easier to just click a checkbox on the toolbar beforeloading the site than it is to navigate through the menu system to find theoption and turn it off, then hope you remember to turn it back on again. Thelack of tabbed browsing has been cited numerous times by convertees. "Onceyou experience browsing in a tabbed environment you'll wonder how you livedwithout it." And with no upgrade to IE in sight in terms offeatures/functions, it's difficult to advocate staying with a 1999 browserin a 2004 world.

Standards compliance - not support - has become a big issues as well. Mostof the blog sites, which have grown very popular of late - are based on CSS.IE supports CSS, but then only implements a subset of level 1. Mozilla, onthe other hand, supports CSS to the letter, making it more compliant than IEin this respect. When you're trying to support a wide variety of browsersOUTSIDE the corporate environment, where you have no control over the user'sdecisions on browsers, it is generally best to fall back on standards. WhenIE doesn't truly support those standards, what is a developer to do?

You can put a big sign on your site "You must use IE to access this site",but the more savvy of us will simply use the masquerading feature ofMozilla/Netscape to change our user-agent to fool you or, worse, we'llsimply write you a nasty letter and take our business elsewhere. IN a worldof shrinking profit margins, every customer counts - and that means thosecustomers who won't use IE for whatever reason.

Alyce makes some interesting points, but she's stuck on the security hypeand that may be a motivator to move from IE to ABM (anything but Microsoft)but that isn't the reason people stay with an alternative browser or push atcorporations to provide support for both IE and gecko-based browsers.