In my role as in-house/at-home IT support staff, I’m regularly called upon to respond to user trouble tickets, usually delivered verbally from my wife’s desk.   This latest one was particularly interesting – our bank’s website form for making online payments (nobody sends checks in Europe) was hanging in mid-transaction.  My wife, being pretty technically astute herself, had already tried deleting the cache and all her cookies – but still not go.

She had just updated to FireFox 5.0 a day or two earlier (we’re a Firefox household, tried and true) – so I suspected the new browser might have something to do with it.  Who knows, maybe our bank’s website is doing something in a slightly nonstandard way that this latest Firefox release is just being picky about.  It could be a JavaScript or an HTTPS issue, or maybe it’s something to do with FF5′s increased support for IPv6 – it didn’t matter, really: our bank’s website wasn’t working anymore, and it was up to me, as senior home help desk technician, to get ‘er done.

Hitting the same website from another browser on the same machine was the obvious thing to try… and lo and behold, everything worked just fine using the Apple Safari browser that shipped with my wife’s Mac.

After I blew the imaginary smoke off the tip of my extended index finger (why does my wife roll her eyes when I do things like that?), I started thinking about browsers, updates, and compatibility…

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Microsoft has a web browser – Google comes out with a browser.

Google has a great search service – Microsoft comes out with a great (bing) search service.

Microsoft has an operating system – Google plans an operating system.

Google’s recent announcement to have a Chrome operating system available in about a year has generated a lot of chatter lately – but is it really a Windows-killer?  I think not – not anytime soon, that is.  Although the era of Vista will soon be behind Microsoft and Windows 7 (still in beta) is earning favorable early reviews, the primary reason Google’s OS won’t vanquish Microsoft’s Windows operating systems is that while the two companies’ browsers and search engines fulfill exactly the same roles, a direct Windows-Chrome OS comparison is a lot less apt.

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