Can the giant IE catch the quick red Firefox?

I know how cheesy that blog title is, so you don’t need to remind me.

The old saying “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a favourite for primary school English lessons as it uses every letter in the English alphabet.

The phrase is also strangely applicable to how the Web browser landscape has changed in recent years since the advent of Mozilla’s Firefox.

In a dramatic turnaround since the Netscape air supply days, millions of people have chosen to go out of their way, download and install an independent browser and use it in preference to IE, the one that ships with Windows.

The pace of innovation of Firefox on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X has been a shining testament to the open source development process.

Not only has Firefox garnered a significant share of the casual browsing public, it has also spawned an ecosystem of add-ons, and integration tools that make Web browsing more dynamic and meaningful that it has ever been.

All the while Microsoft, as expected, has stuck to its guns with IE and is now on the cusp of releasing one its most anticipated updates since the Firefox tsunami – IE8.

News is beginning to circulate about the “New IE” and how much better it will be than its predecessors.

The big question for Microsoft is whether IE8 will be able to take lost market share back from Firefox.

With a swag of new features, IE8 may sway some people away from Firefox, but there are a few things that will continue to hold it back.

The biggest problem for IE is that it’s not cross-platform, and that’s not about to change anytime soon.

Firefox gives people the opportunity to have a harmonious Web browsing experience at home (possibly a Mac) and at work (most likely Windows XP).

Moreover, Firefox 2.x or 3.x can give a (mostly) harmonious experience across Windows XP and Vista, which leads to IE’s second biggest problem – Microsoft’s laggard release cycles.

The last major version, IE7, was released about two years ago now which means IE users are having to wait a while for new features and other enhancements.

This will have to improve.

The nimble Firefox is sticking to the open source community’s “release early, release often” mantra and that’s attractive to people who spend a lot of time on the Web.

Like the Web sites and applications themselves, the browser is a focal point for new and exciting ways to manage information.

Through a more rapid turnaround in features and updates IE can still become “sexy”, there’s no doubt about that.

I just hope Silverlight doesn’t become the only excuse to use IE where other browsers fail – but hey, is there another reason to throw millions developing proprietary RIA technology?

But that’s the topic of another blog – for now, long live browser competition!