Learn and Lead: Browsers

We have been inundated with posts on the new Google browser Chrome. Here’s another one adding to the flood of posts on the subject :-).

Google’s new browser Chrome is said to give Microsoft Internet Explorer a run for its money. IE at this time has 72% browser market share. So will Chrome make a big dent in IE’s market share? I am not sure if that will happen soon. As I wrote earlier, IE is most popular in corporate organizations because (a) it comes bundled with Windows, (b) we are too lazy to learn new tools, and (c) organizations don’t really see browser as a productivity enhancement tool. Even though Firefox is known as a better product, IE is still the most used.

So who will start using Chorme? It will be first used by people who anyway have experienced more than one browser. These are primarily the Firefox users. Chrome will basically eat into Firefox’s share before it starts to eat into IE’s share. I do admit that the viral marketing of Chrome has been much stronger than Firefox and I have come across a few die hard users of IE (not because they love it or anything, but because it is the only browser they have used) are talking about Chrome even while being oblivious of Firefox’s power. Some might just download and use Chrome. But the biggest loser in this browser war is going to be Firefox. Sad really...

Two posts on Mark Oehlert’s blog caught my eye today. In his post about Ubiquity user-generated mashups plugin for Firefox browser, Mark wonders why organizations standardize on IE when a much better product is available at the same cost (free). I responded on his blog and realized this could be a post of its own.

As I wrote in my post on why workplace learning is largely 1.0, here are some of the reasons for organizations standardizing on IE:

I guess the fact that the OS comes preloaded with a browser might have something to do with this.
We are lazy and don't really want to take the pain of installing a new browser, especially when we don't know the advantages.
We are too lazy to learn new tools. After all just installing Firefox is not enough. Vanilla Firefox will not provide the advantages that it does with plugins added.
We don't pay attention to teaching using tools like a 'browser'. Have you ever seen training on browser on any corporate productivity improvement training? Good case for 'Work Literacy' like initiatives!!!
The new plugins (like the Ubiquity) don't come with "business" or "corporate" examples in their videos. Heck I won't be able to make a good business case with the above video of showing that Firefox will improve productivity when the video talks about using mash ups to identify restaurants near you.
Applications run only on IE. Many (I am guessing all though I haven't tested all) internal application in our organization don't run very well on Firefox. So I need to have both browsers even though I use Firefox as my main browser of use.
In any case we don’t want employees to fritter away their time browsing. After all they should be doing something productive like work rather than browsing.

Wearing a corporate hat, having Firefox instead of IE has no advantage unless I integrate my training, applications and way of working to take advantage of the new tool. And, again wearing a corporate hat, perhaps the advantage is not worth the effort, or we don’t know about it.

Personally I started using Firefox primarily because IE 7 was hanging on me more often than I liked, and haven’t looked back since (except when I need to use internal applications). However I have seen a sum total of only one other person in our organization using Firefox.