October 18, 1996

Browser War

But wait....

Reading the fine print would lead you to a different conclusion. Here's some examples:

Web Navigation: "Internet Explorer comes out ahead on interface customization, while Netscape Navigator offers better options for low-bandwidth users." A lot of people will argue that 28.8K is "low bandwidth" but that's not what they mean. So who's surfing with anything less? Winner: IE.

HTML Standards: "Internet Explorer's adoption of the powerful Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 standard will give Webmasters typographic control they've never had before, but Netscape Navigator is the faster of the two at actually rendering pages." Oh great... Netscape can't do the latest cool stuff but it renders obsolete HTML pages faster. Winner: IE.

Virtual Reality: "...available through both browsers.... Internet Explorer goes one step further with ActiveMovie...." Winner: IE.

Plug-Ins: "Internet Explorer's [Netscape] plug-in support is less than perfect. Microsoft's ActiveX technology is a powerful alternative." So IE doesn't support the competition's plug-ins, but offers a much-better alternative. Anyone who's ever installed a Netscape plug-in then watched as IE automatically downloads and configures an ActiveX control can tell you who the clear winner is here. Winner: IE.

Collaboration Tools: "....Internet Explorer also offers application sharing, a powerful feature for linking remote coworkers." Winner: IE.

Multi-Platform Support: "Internet Explorer stresses a Windows look and feel, while Netscape Navigator is remarkably similar across all the platforms it runs on." I'm really glad to know that Netscape for Unix works really well. Who cares? Winner: IE.

Typography, Graphics, Multimedia, Page Layout, Frames Support: Internet Explorer "Excellent" on all counts. Netscape "Fair" to "Good". Winner: IE.

Intranet Applications, Programmable Objects, Browser Extensibility, Java Support, and ActiveX Support: Internet Explorer out-performs Netscape on all counts. Winner: IE.

Speed: Reading the headlines and even into the article, you'll get the impression that Netscape dramatically out-performed Internet Explorer. But take a look at the chart: In speed-critical areas like rendering GIF's and JPG's downloaded over a modem Internet Explorer was as much as twenty times faster. Text rendering was pretty much the same between the two. Winner: IE.

Internet Mail and News: Internet Explorer outperformed Netscape on most counts. Winner: IE.

We all know the media shares a liberal bias. Could it be that they also have a Netscape (or better yet, an anti-Microsoft) bias? Or could it be they think like my friend David: "I know resistance is futile, and that I will be assimilated. But until then I'm using Netscape."