microsoft

RSS used to be a hard sell, now most people seem to buy into the idea. Even though readers / aggregating homepages were around and people used them, no one seemed to think that the connection was being made between RSS and custom homepages. That fear seems to be gone, and RSS has won popular appeal… though it seems to have lost all buzz (no one really cared when google didn’t include a browser rss icon in Chrome). Now the hard sell seems to be semantic. People just don’t get that into structured data – and really it does sound pretty boring. Web2.0 was easier to sell, because it involved social networking and mass crowds. Semantic web is a harder sell because it involves primarily data organization. Eventually it should enhance interactions – but just telling someone that they need to have their data organized because at some point there may be tools that take advantage of the structure of data to enhance users ability to interact with your data, potentially in a way that takes advantage of the social graph… well, that’s nice, but who really cares? And why should people invest in something so early stage?

I love the theory of the semantic web, and microformats in particular – but semantic is not sexy… and it needs to be. Thoughts? How do you pitch the semantic web?

Both Microsoft and Mozilla launched new browsers in what is likely the most important battle on the web. Some would contend the mobile space or the web office race are more important - but without the browser none of it happens, so this is really what matters. I’d say Mozilla won round one of the new browser wars - Firefox had superior technology and innovation compared to ie 6, the proof of that can be seen in ie’s new version, most of which is just an attempt to get up to speed with mozilla.

So who will win this round? If you’re talking about number of users I think it will be ie, I hate to say it because it won’t win me over and it won’t win the tech community over - but many average users (read businesses in non-high tech) will likely stick with ie. With version 7 ie has eliminated a number of distinctions that have won firefox fans - most notably tabbed browsing. I just went back to work in an office that uses ie6, and by far the most annoying thing about it is the 4-10 browsers I have open all the time. Eliminating this will eliminate the need to switch for a large percentage of users. ie also has some add-ons that do exactly what a lot of the most popular firefox extensions do, further showing that ie is an attempt to catch up, and further reducing the chances of a non-firefox user switching.

But, forget about what ie does right. It is slow, it doesn’t have all the extensions that firefox has and never will, it charges for some add-ons, and can’t match the branding of firefox. - all it’s doing is playing defense there’s very little innovation in this release that didn’t come from mozilla. Not too mention FF has come with some new features as well - it wasn’t just a ui update. Perhaps my favorite and the most useful (that I’ve seen so far) is the built in spell-check. In the age of user generated content, we’re constantly filling in forms - whether they’re reviews or comments I’m faced with forms everyday - having a spell check that runs in real time is great.

My diagnosis - stick with Firefox (new version here). I don’t like the new ie, it was a headache to deal with some new css issues (still dealing with one) - but I’ll be extremely happy to see it in the office.

Interesting note - I just checked my stats for Lopico from the last 3 months, I still have visitors using ie 4 - I wonder what Lopico looks like in ie4?