DELETED_3139

[Burnsy2023]

I think MS will keep it's browser dominance. Firefox is very good, it's my primary browser, but it only got to that point because MS got complacent and stopped major development when it released IE6. Firefox is very buggy compared to IE, although it does have the advantage of decent plug ins. If MS allow easy developemnt of plug ins for IE8, Mozillia will see a decline in the market share and MS will once again regain the dominance it had a few years ago.

Burnsy

 

[MarcLister]

As with Burnsy I can't see IE losing its market dominance. It'll always have at least 60% of the market I reckon. Simply because its the most well known browser out there and Mozilla/Opera will find it hard to persuade people to use their browsers over the one they know and is installed for them.

I used to use Firefox but I switched to Opera and I'm very happy. Unfortunately there are a few sites that don't render properly, mainly because they are designed with IE in mind and just IE.

Unless the EU or the US government tell MS that it has to include Firefox and Opera pre-packaged with future copies of Windows, how are Firefox and Opera going to win over the masses?

And, ironically, the emergence of Firefox and Opera and their threat to IE's dominance could actually serve MS well. Why? Well if browser X has a nice feature that people seem to like or helps them do stuff on the web, what is to stop company Y making their browser Z have that feature in its next iteration?

 

[tolien]

Personally, I'd rather not see a winner.
Choice is good, and winding up in an IE monoculture would leave us with something resembling IE6 - undeveloped for years, riddled with security issues and lacking features, which would only be bad for the Web as a whole.

There's Safari for Windows and Opera as well, though it remains to be seen how much of IE's market share they can grab. Given the investment Google has in Firefox, one has to wonder how far they would let MS go. The same applies to the US DoJ, EU and Korean legal system...