I’m interested to see what reasons browser developers might have that would prevent them from doing this.

What do I think we should shoot for though? How about maybe 2/3rds of how quickly Flash moves. That would be about 60% in 15 months.

Quite frankly, my mother could care less about Firefox’s superior rendering engine and standards support. She could care less about tabbed browsing. Even for many IE users, pop-up blocking is common. So that is a tough selling point.

So how do I sell it to the person who sees the internet the way we don’t? We see it as tags and selectors. My mom sees it the same way she sees the TV, only instead of a remote controll, she has a mouse and clicks on the screen.

I don’t have an answer to that.

There have been a few cases for me, where I have convinced people on the merits of Firefox’s superior security over IE. But even that doesn’t always work.

Browsers on the other hand take a while for the rest of the world to upgrade because it’s dependant upon the everyday common idiot to do it. It usually takes a computer savvy nephew to come down to ‘ol Uncle Jim’s basement and upgrade his browser choice. Even then, they’ll be like “What’s this program doing on my computer…where’s my internet.”

It feels more like getting a package in the mail than moving to a new city.

It does, doesn’t it.

As much as I like tabbed browsing, more sophisticated autofill, and better bookmark organization, these are clearly user interface features within the browser itself and I’m happy letting users decide if and when to apply the upgrades which introduce them.

Excellent point! Despite the great features that come along with FF, and the fact that I have about 10 different extensions along with it, I will be (very) much happier the day it supports CSS 3.0 and other greater techniques on the DOM etc…

Help spread Firefox to every computer you can get your hands on.

ROFLOL! You know, at my Alma-mater University, I had heard some tech geek went into all the computer labs of the entire school and installed FF on every single one of them. They said it took about a month or so…but it happened over the summer when the labs were less cluttered with students writing mid-term papers etc. Overall they have about 500 computers on campus (not many for 30,000 studets – eh. it’s a state school).

Anyway, Good read, great points. I’m with ya.

“Okay, well let’s look at Safari then. Safari took about a year and a half to become arguably the best browser in the world, on any platform.”

— could you tell me where I can download Safari for my Windows and Linux boxes? Sure there is Konquerer and the rendering engine in itunes but I always find the Apple statement about Safari being the best browser on any platform a bit laughable given it only runs on one platform! It’s a great browser and the best available for OSX, along with the Geckos and Opera.
How does Apple benchmark this? … and if it’s the best why doesn’t it have Adblock? – something to restore sanity and readablity at last :D

“The real challenge is convincing the people who see the blue “e” on their desktops that there is reason to use another browser.”

— after speaking to some users of websites I manage it could be more like this:
“The real challenge is convincing the people who see the blue “e” on their desktops that there is another browser.”

sample answers, and I’m not kidding here:
Q: What browser are you using?
A1:Windows
A2:XP
A3:<insert ISP name>
A4:Outlook Express
A5:I don’t know

Grass roots education is what is needed here to counter the ever present F.U.D

Cheers
James

Your average user believes the application is the interface and only understands a browser upgrade in terms of interface improvements. It’s not until you start to use more than one browser that you learn that web pages are interpreted, not just viewed.

I’ve always been hesitant to upgrade to each new FireFox release because it breaks my extensions and even my themes. We need to stop telling people why they need to make the effort to upgrade and just remove the need for user effort.

I agree that FireFox is faster than IE, but I don’t know that it is noticably faster than IE to the average user on current hardware. Maybe on older hardware it is more noticeable, and this is a good battleground.

There are a lot of users out there on older hardware, who are not even running Windows XP. Anyone on Windows versions eralier than XP, can’t get the latest security patches for IE. Advantage FireFox. FireFox probably runs better on older hardware than IE. Advantage FireFox again.

“The best browser in the world, on any platform” is not the same as “The best browser in the world that works on any platform”. The former simply says that it provides the best browsing experience, period. The latter says that of all browsers which support all platforms, it provides the best browsing experience. These are two totally different things and the original statement certainly doesn’t imply Safari is available for Linux or Windows.

As for the statement itself, that’s me saying it at this point… not Apple. I say it because in my opinion, it’s true. It’s subjective, so no benchmarking is necessary. Safari has built in popup blocking… I don’t need AdBlock. In fact, I think the blocking of standard ad units acts against the economic best interests of consumers. If you don’t pay for your content by viewing ads, you will pay for it in other ways.

Regarding your multiple choice answers, you are absolutely right about that. That is exactly the sort of thing I see as well when asking browser-related questions to consumers. Sucks.

This actually is my biggest issue with Safari, you have to upgrade your OS to upgrade the browser. This sucks, and when we hear that MS is going to do that with longhorn we all complain! This just bugs me because early versions of Safari had terrible js support and it is hard to test them on one mac.

Oh, lastly I have found two ofbest things to help get non-tech ie users to go to FF… find as you type, and the dictionarysearch extension…

Sorry, I thought you were referring to this:
http://www.apple.com/safari/
(http://images.apple.com/safari/images/indextop062203_01.gif)

It’s a great browser, but it’s not the best browser on any platform if it can’t run on every platform.
I know what you are getting at regarding UI but I think this (the content at the Apple link above) is just some marketing spiel from Apple. Which of course they are entitled to say given it is their browser……