In October 1998 Zona Research released a survey of browser usage in over 100 companies. It found that 60 per cent of respondents were using Netscape Navigator as their primary browser, with 40 per cent using Microsoft Internet Explorer.
This was the first time since the company had started monitoring the browser wars in January 1996 that no respondent indicated a third-party browser.There are undoubtedly people using browsers other than the big two, but not enough to register in this survey. [Zona's research is confined to US companies, and its sample sizes have been small and inconsistent, presumably because of varying numbers responding to its questionnaires.]
Nevertheless, the results showed that Netscape had increased its share of the market from 54 per cent to 60 per cent since Zona's July survey, while Microsoft's IE had dropped from 45 per cent to 40 per cent. In three months, Netscape had increased its lead from nine percentage points to 20. This was a reversal of a trend that had begun in April 1996, when Netscape had 87 per cent market share to Microsoft's mere 4 per cent, and a significant thirdparty presence at 9 per cent. Netscape's share steadily dropped while Microsoft's star rose.
Was this the beginning of an upturn in Netscape's fortunes? Many Netscape fans hoped so.
As Zona's figures for May this year show, the upturn was only a temporary glitch, with Microsoft taking the lead for the first time, with 59 per cent share compared with Netscape's 41 per cent. But for a single percentage point, this looked like a reversal of their relative positions in a mere six month period, at a time when goodwill towards Netscape could reasonably be expected to be quite high.
Statistics show that goodwill towards Netscape is higher among private users, especially among those who have been on the Net since its early days. The corporate sector, however, has come down firmly on the side of Microsoft's product. There are a number of reasons for this. Many companies have a policy where one or other browser is locked down on the employee's desktop. Among companies that operate a browser policy, Internet Explorer has been the dominant choice since January 1998, even though at that stage it lagged significantly behind Netscape in the overall browser market. The reason is that the companies are likely to already have other software from Microsoft, much of it shipped with the latest version of Explorer inside.
"Corporate browser policies continue to greatly impact browser usage within the enterprise, and we see from this study that 84 per cent of Internet Ex- plorer usage as the primary browser is policy driven" said Clay Ryder, chief analyst at Zona Research, of the October 1998 survey. Since then, more and more companies have adopted corporate browser policies as part of their Y2K compliance programmes, and an increasing percentage of them have opted to specify Internet Explorer.
A second reason has been the increase in the Web functionality of Microsoft's flagship Office 2000 suite. With over 100 million copies sold, the application has massive market dominance, and Microsoft in the latest release has enabled users to save Excel data sheets as web pages that will retain the Excel functionality in the browser window.
This requires Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX controls. Basically, Excel worksheets saved as web pages will behave like Excel sheets only if viewed with Internet Explorer, not with Navigator. Netscape may reply with a plugin, but patches and plug-ins are not what companies want to hear about when the features are built into another browser.
Zona is not the only site to monitor browser statistics. Statmarket.com monitors the browsers used by visitors to certain sites. Claiming to sample from 33 million hits, Statmarket puts the average usage so far this year at 70 per cent Explorer against 28 per cent Netscape.
Browserwatch gives a less gloomy picture for Netscape, putting the score at 51 per cent IE to 34 per cent Netscape, based on over 100,000 hits in the month of September. Despite the variations from source to source, one fact emerges and that is that all observers have Internet Explorer in the lead and gaining.
So what does the future hold for Netscape? That would appear to depend on the performance of its new Gecko browser engine. Called after a South American lizard noted for being small and fast, its developer claims that Gecko will be just that.
At under 2MB, the engine - the core of the browser - is about one-fifth of the size of current browsers. Netscape foresees that it will be much faster to download and will lend itself to being incorporated in handheld devices such as cell phones and personal organisers.
It is also being built on open-source development principles, with its code being made available for developers to play around with and hopefully improve on in the course of its evolution. It is planned that the new engine will be incorporated in Netscape Communicator Version 5. A realistic date for its release would be early in 2000.
Netscape is still quite strong at the server end of the business, and for the sake of a healthy market there are many out there who will be rooting for the newly hatched lizard.
fintang@mailcity.com