There's one major obstacle to adoption of non-IE browsers: something I call the "big blue E syndrome".
I see it a lot at work-- all computers have both IE and Firefox installed and the icons are positioned next to one another on the desktop. As far as I can tell, there are only two of us using Firefox despite it being accessible alongside IE. That big blue E, for most people, IS the internet. It has "Internet" in the name, for goodness sake. I don't use it simply because I need to get things done online in the day and I find IE mindnumbingly slow.
If Google really want to be cheeky, they should take the e from their logo, turn it blue and use it as the Chrome icon. Then rename the browser "Internet with Google"...!
Google is trying to get people to move to _faster_ browsers, meaning Firefox 3, Chrome or IE8 (and definitely not IE7). IE8 gets less attention because it is still in beta. I don't see an anti-MS stance there.
How can the author claim Firefox is Google's ally? Does he not realize that Chrome is a WebKit browser? Is he completely unaware of the recent TraceMonkey vs. SquirelFish Extreme vs. V8 battle?
All Google is doing is telling its users like it is...There's a lot of advancement in the world of browsers, and Microsoft's not a part of it!
Fast JavaScript VM's are Google's ally. In the long run, TraceMonkey, SquirelFish Extreme, and V8 are all money-makers for Google. IE7 and Microsoft's slow JS engine is not.
> There's a lot of advancement in the world of browsers, and Microsoft's not a part of it!
Umm.... the benchmarks I've seen of IE8 show substantial (order of magnitude) improvements in javascript speed. They are still behind, but we should be able to count on a big increase in javascript speed across the board in the next couple of years.
I'm guessing in the sentence, "Google now regularly hawks its own Chrome browser on its search page, the same page that 63.5 percent of the world uses," "regularly" means "occasionally" since I've never seen it.
I see it a lot at work-- all computers have both IE and Firefox installed and the icons are positioned next to one another on the desktop. As far as I can tell, there are only two of us using Firefox despite it being accessible alongside IE. That big blue E, for most people, IS the internet. It has "Internet" in the name, for goodness sake. I don't use it simply because I need to get things done online in the day and I find IE mindnumbingly slow.
If Google really want to be cheeky, they should take the e from their logo, turn it blue and use it as the Chrome icon. Then rename the browser "Internet with Google"...!