The McKinsey Quarterly has 6 amazing interviews with Eric Schmidt (the CEO of Google).

They definitely worth listening!

There are some people who claim that the browser war between Netscape and Internet Explorer had negative consequences on innovation on the web. Actually, I doubt this statement, and was thinking how to come up with a well-funded reasoning behind.

The argument of those who claim the browser war was costly for the society states that as a result of the war browsers were packed with features while they lacked both standards compliance and were full of bugs as there were not enough resources to keep up with features and quality as well, and it was easier lead the market by incorporating non-standard by fancy technologies (like the marquee tag). Moreover, as a result developers had to spend their time on insuring compatibility for both browsers, instead of innovating on the web.

Actually, I created my first website in ‘99 for my University group. At that time Netscape still had a reasonable market share and I really suffered to make my website working on Netscape and IE as well, but this is what I do today as well! The only difference is that now it’s a great pleasure to develop complex look and feel for Firefox, as it was a pleasure to develop quite fancy javascript animations to any of the two browsers that you decided to learn properly. In this respect I think not much has changed!

Moreover, the main reason behind the costs of not complying with standards is dynamic; simply standards assure that your website could be read even after every company that created the standard goes bankrupt. This is definitely not the case with the proprietary extensions that were introduced during the standards war. Besides this I have never felt that standard setting for the web had ever weakened.

What we can today is a similar phenomenon. The big players (still Microsoft on one side, but now it’s Mozilla and Opera on the other, and we know that they are backed by Google, IBM as usual) are again including into their browser new and for the time being non-standard technologies. Even though the way they do it differ, the intentions are the same.

For the previous two reasons, analysts shouldn’t claim that the browser war was ever over, and they should complain that it is still extremely costly to develop for the web. But actually this doesn’t matter. What matters are the consumers, and this is clearly shown in Firefox’ success. For the developers the appearance of Firefox did not gave much relief. We still have to develop everything for the market leader IE, and Microsoft stated many times that he does not intend to make largely backwards incompatible changes to IE, that would be required to support the World Web Web consortium’s HTML specification. As a result today the weird outcome is that developers do everything first for Firefox, and then fix the design in IE. On the other hand users gain a lot with Firefox, because it simply beats IE in usability terms! It’s fast, more secure and extensible. This is what matters, and this is where IE now tries to catch up.

But actually, Firefox changed one more thing that might have a large impact on the innovation on the web as well, and this is customer feedback. If you have ever used the Better Gmail Firefox addon to make your Gmail experience more secure and fun, then you might not notice that Gmail today uses the secure httpS protocol by default. Something that was first “asked for” by the users.

This means that today you can give direct feedback to the websites you use by making them better for yourself with a Firefox addon. Of course, one might argue that if we the users can customize a website’s look and feel as we see fit, that even if the website can learn our preferences its developers have no reason to re-innovate on our customizations. Actually, this is true only as long as our experience goes, but there are still thousands of users (especially the ones stuck to IE) who don’t customize the web, and their experience can be largely improved by learning from the others.