bhavishya_KANJHAN

About a month and a half ago Mozilla announced Firefox officially held a market share greater than 20%. At the time of posting this marketshare.hitslink shows the share to be 20.41%.

Not too shabby owning a fifth of the market. However a look at the statistics of some of the popular Technology website shows a Firefox market share exceeding 50%. Arstechnica reports a Firefox usage of 51.34%, ReadWriteWeb at 55.04% and Techcrunch just shy of 60% at 57.80%

You might argue that technology websites are likely to be viewed by enthusiasts who are likely to move away from the standard shipped browser and that real number lie in average users. But then again it is the enthusiasts who spend a lot more time browsing than their, if I may say, ‘regular’ counterparts. This is real life scenario.

Doesn’t this increase Firefox’s usage statistics then? As an unrealistically simplified example let’s take 20 people browsing for an hour each versus 70 people browsing for 15 minutes each. Firefox’s timewise usage is higher than IE in this example but that’s not what I’m going for. The point is Firefox may be pegged at 20% (which by the way is a huge achievement) but it’s 20% weighs and counts for a lot more.

Scoble asks if Microsoft has a Speed problem. Examples of Microsoft Maps, Spaces and Hotmail are brought in. I couldn’t agree more. While the three products listed above have alternatives which match if not exceed the feature list provided by Microsoft, there are quite a few Microsoft solutions which still dominate in their relative section.

I’m talking about Microsoft Outlook. Even without Exchange it is a powerful and feature-laden piece of software which has no complete alternative. The same is the case for Microsoft Office. Sure there’s Open Office, Zoho and Google Docs but it’s only Word 2007 that gives me a built in reference manager for when I’m writing my essays. Most people may disagree with me but I believe Windows Media Player 11 is excellent as a media player.

All these have something common in them apart from the fact they’re developed by Microsoft. They are all bloated pieces of software. Add a couple of Gigs and browsing through Artists becomes a pain in WMP. having a huge .PST file in outlook slows it down to a crawl and Office in general can takes ages to start.

Microsoft really does need to start making leaner software. Scoble says “if you can’t make them fast, I just don’t want to have any part” ; and this is echoed by a lot of users too. Speed has always been of a lot of importance. But a lot more attention is paid to it right now especially since users see a lack of peformance improvement despite multifold increase in hardware.

Techcrunch reports that Google VP Marissa Mayer told Michael Arrington (of Techcrunch) that Google will be taking Chrome out of Beta. Turns out this is not news at all. Windowsitpro reports Google VP Sundar Pichai already told the same thing to The Times in UK with a time frame; January. This is most likely due to their decision to increase market share by convincing OEMs to bundle Chrome with new PCs who won’t accept a Beta product.

Gmail despite having a range of features has still been in Beta for years. But Chrome is still an immature product. Speed is its greatest advantage but Opera almost matches that and preliminary tests of Firefox 3.1 Betas show it is likely to match, if not beat, Chrome. In addition FireFox has a wide variety of addons which Chrome is yet to match.

I just think Google is better off developing a fuller product and then distributing the product en-masse rather than ship an incomplete product only to have users switch to a fuller browser.

Microsoft’s Mix Online today announced a blogging platform named Oxite. Unlike Microsoft but I’ll live. However what stands out most is that the platform is ‘open source’ and ’standards compliant’.  This right here could be a game changer.

Most people point out that Wordpress already has a huge community around it developing themes and plugins but let’s not forget Microsoft also has an evangelist following of its developers. You may be quick to dismiss the product and say it won’t beat Wordpress, and you’re right. However competition doesn’t necessarily mean have the highest market share, it means fight for existing market share. IE is still the browser market leader but does that make Firefox and Opera less competitive? I didn’t think so.

Ed Bott says “This one is worth watching.” and he’s right.

Have a look at the features here.

Scoble just wrote on his blog an article titled “10 Reasons why Twitter is for you and FriendFeed is not” but it reads more like (for the most part) why Friendfeed is better than Twitter. In fact it’s borderline patronising. The primary difference between Twitter and Friendfeed is that the former is a very focused source of information while with Friendfeed there’s a multitude of ways in which information is gathered and created. Not only are we talking imports like Flickr, RSS, Youtube, Googlereader etc but also posting of messages, comments, links and likes.

I’ve used Twitter only for a week longer than I have Friendfeed but I still find a lot more material on FF than I do on Twitter. Scoble implies in his very first point that Twitter is not for you if you can’t handle an influx of a torrent of data but within the first day of use you realise you get an incredible amount of control over what information you see and what you don’t.

There’s a lot more on Friendfeed than I could possibly say here. Aimed more towards the power users  I do agree with Scoble that Friendfeed isn’t for everyone. Whether the lack of ability of mass adoption is a good or bad thing for Friendfeed is yet to be seen.

You can find me on http://friendfeed.com/bhavishya