Fergus Cassidy

Raised browse

It's a nice day. You're walking aimlessly around some shopping district. Something in a window display catches your eye, provokes your curiosity and overrides your purse strings.

Stepping through the door, you're stopped abruptly and informed that you are not allowed in. When asked the reason why, you're given three of them.

That's pretty much the deal with web browsers these days and the situation seems to be getting worse.

I use the shopping analogy because from the point of view of companies doing business online it has the same effect - people with money to spend are being told (not politely either) to spend it elsewhere.

For those without Windows or Internet Explorer's browser it's a common occurrence and by way of a recent example, Eircom.net's recently-launched Music Club comes conveniently to mind.

On entering this pay-to-download site I was greeted with the welcoming message: "You cannot view the eircom net music club because your computer does not meet the minimum system requirements".

These are then listed as: Internet Explorer 5.0 (or higher); Windows Media Player 7.0 (or higher) and Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP. Whatever about getting around the first two, the third would require a visit to Lourdes.

Businesses like this must be coining it in if they can afford to turn away about 10% of potential custom. That's the current figure for non-Microsoft personal computer operating systems.

With the playing pitch so massively skewed, people using other operating systems inevitably find themselves in an uphill struggle when faced with sites like the one mentioned above.

MS muscled its way to the de facto standard, hijacking the abbreviation for personal computer along the way. You know where you stand when you're asked whether you have a PC or a Mac.

Changing this situation will take a seismic shift in the tectonic IT plates, something which is not going to happen any day soon. Or the day after.

The browser situation, on the other hand, is not as fixed in stone and is showing signs which suggest change is afoot.

It isn't all that long ago since Netscape had the lion's share of the market before Mr Gates got on his steamroller and pressed metal to the pedal. The de facto standard was joined by a de facto browser. For companies doing business on the web, the browser is the potential customer's shop window. If they can't see it clearly then the shutters might as well be down and the lights turned out.

The justification (and the excuses) usually boils down to cost and its conjoined twin - effective. If most of the world is using some version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer then why bother with the hassle and expense of meeting the needs of little-used browsers? Which is fine and dandy until the situation changes. Then what?

What kind of expense and effort will be involved in retro-fitting a website to comply with the myriad of other browsers being used?

I spent an afternoon last week trawling through Irish websites for car insurance quotes. Quite a few had to be abandoned when some error or other prevented progress.

My attitude, and I'm not alone here, is to pass on by. Nothing to see here. A company's website is not necessarily an accurate indicator of how reputable the business is, but a poorly laid out and inaccessible shop window doesn't exactly help with matters. Those businesses will never even know because it would be a waste of electrons to tell them.

But these companies could soon be paying a high price for catering only to the majority and ignoring everyone else. With the sidelining of Netscape, Explorer became the winner in a one horse race. Then it got fat, bloated and lazy.

A number of new browsers began to nibble at the hair on IE's heel. The likes of Apple's Safari and Opera are inching upward in use but the biggest contender is Mozilla, which recently released its latest open source browser called Firefox.

It's hard to get solid figures for browser usage but there is strong anecdotal evidence that Explorer is slipping in its dominance. In the last three months it's estimated that Explorer has lost about 2%, down from 95% to 93%. Firefox is up by the same amount and had 2m downloads in the first ten days of its release. Other estimates point to Explorer slipping to as low as 70% but that may be wishful thinking.

The security of Explorer is probably the single most important factor affecting its slippage, which wasn't helped by the US Computer Emergency Response Team issuing a warning last summer urging people to switch away from Explorer. Most websites know what browsers people use when visiting.

These sites' logs reveal that other browsers may be gaining momentum with some sites reporting a drop between 8% and 18% for Explorer.

The situation is volatile at the moment and likely to remain so. Rumours that Google is considering launching a browser have been circulating the web, based on the registration of gbrowser.com by the search engine giant.

If that were to happen, those businesses which have welcoming websites compatible with the widest range of browsers can relax. For those who've put their eggs in the one basket, chickens will come home for an expensive roost.