Evolution of the User Experience.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the so called "browser wars" between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and other web browsers. All of these are essentially going for the same thing but each have had a different impact on users.

The recent drop in Internet Explorer users is no doubt related to the EU leglisation which affect some copies of the new Windows OS, actively letting you choose a browser rather then being left with Internet Explorer.

But, overall, and why we're talking about this, is because this is all to do with the user experience.
Internet Explorer has been around for as long as Windows itself. Even in the old days of ISPs that provided their own browsers on dial-up, there was a version of Internet Explorer available. This is a good browser as it allows you to use all the essential parts of the web browser with no hassle, no fuss. However, for coders there's a specific dislike for the way that IE butchers some of the scripts.
On the other hand Firefox is kind of "Internet Explorer and then some" as it has a lot more features and even neat little innovations (like an addon loader process), but at the same time many users find it hard to get on with some of the features and apparently it crashes a lot too!
Chrome and Safari are browsers I've never personally used but they are reputed as being a easy to use and low-memory browsers. Some of the fancy bells and whistles- none of the memory and processor draining errors and memory leaks.

These four browsers all do the same thing- they view the internet.

Yet, as the years pass users are all aiming for different things. For business and general computing purposes something like Internet Explorer gets the job done, while for those who want a bit more functionality you might want to opt for Firefox- likewise, if speed is your thing and you just want to view the site then Chrome is probably the one for you.

A direct relation to how we have a whole range of different computer users and a host of options available to them now. Which is an interesting side note of how far technology has evolved that now we have a greater portion of Mac users, as we have Windows users and even some Linux users.
In each of those cases, for each of those operating systems, there are similar reasons why some users choose one over the others.

This just goes to show how one thing that (almost) everyone uses can have such profoundly different effects and is a good lesson to those who do online networking- user experience is key!
Although we have already noted something quite similar in the Corporate e-Networking document we have uploaded this is, much like the statistical analysis, this is a practical explanation of how something so simple for most users can differ so much.

Thank you for reading.
And feel free to share any technology tidbits you have!

All information presented here is © copyright Carkean Solutions Ltd., 2010 - Not to be used without our permission - The views expressed here are the views of an individual not the corporation