The Alleged IE 7 vs. FF 2.0 War

I spent some time with IE 7 today. Finally MS has caught up to the rest of the browser universe. I loved the grouped tab favorites and homepage in IE 7. But out side of that I didn't see anything that unusual about it. Yet with all the marketing hype flying out of MS you'd think it was a browser revolution.

What about the Firefox vs IE war?

There is no war. MS knows that as long as it's operating system is the dominate, IE will be the dominate browser. Why? About 70% of the world doesn't bother to find, look at, or investigate browser options. They just click on that "blue E" to go to MSN. This group wouldn't be able to open their browser if you asked them "open your browser".

Add to this the fact that Live Office and other MS projects will further tie buisness users to IE and leave them with no other option. Why do you think they let their browser dwindle, not bothering to update it for 5+ years? Its a sure sign of market domination -- MONOPOLY.

What about the other 30%?

This group is your power users and IT pros. But about half of those are MS bigots. So what does that leave you with? 15% Which is roughly the real browser market.

FireFox and the Mozilla Foundation already have dominate control of that market. FireFox competes with Opera, and Konqueor and other lesser known browsers. It doesn't compete with MS. There is no "browser war" and FF will never expand beyond 20%.

The only way Firefox will ever expand beyond that mark is if a desktop Linux distro adopts it as the default browser and they successfully break into the consumer desktop market.

But just so you know.

I use Firefox .