January 4, 2009 by Matt Thomas
We always knew that 2009 was going to be the year that the browser war kicked off in earnest, and with 09 not even a week old the opening shots have been fired. Well, actually the first punch from Google was landed in the final days of last year, though the effects may prove to dominate the browser debate this year and beyond.
What happened was Google began urging Gmail users to dump Internet Explorer in favour of either their Chrome browser or Firefox and it appears to be working. People are taking the advice more and more, leaving IE in droves.
The main reason for this, in my opinion, is that whilst most people still use IE, the browser enjoys little real support. I’d wager that most of the 68% of internet users that use the browser do so because it came installed on their computer and didn’t really have any notion that there was a choice.
We, in the online industries, are prone to forgetting that not everyone knows a lot about computers. For many, if not most, computer users PC use amounts to word processing, email, basic web searching and maybe Facebook. Therefore, Google reasoned that all it would take to for a large proportion of IE users to jump ship, was simply being told that there were other options, and what the benefits would be i.e., you’ll be able to get to your emails (the backbone of casual internet use) easier and faster.
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