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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Question: Name a market in which Microsoft does 57 times better than Google…

Answer: Web browsers: according to recent numbers from Net Applications, Internet Explorer has 66.1% of the market, while Google’s Chrome browser sits at a meager 1.4% (in between are Firefox at 22% and Safari at 8.2%).

While 29% of North American households connected to the internet via broadband connections in 2008, Forrester expects that to more than double to 62% by 2010.  We’re also expecting consumer buy-in of cloud computing and netbooks to increase dramatically over the next few years.  As these trends play out, the web browser will assume an ever more important role: the operating system for the cloud.
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