Enterprise open source Toolkit

Story: UK government wakes up to Firefox

• 
• 

Interesting dilemma. Managers that are stuck on IE face the possibility that in time their customers will find competitive sites that are more to their liking. Until then they save time and money by only maintaining a single browser specific website. But if they react to late to changing market trends (some of) there customers will already have walked away and are thus not likely to return.

However. IE7 will one day come and the question is what kind of impact that'll have of market trends. It's for certain that some will want to make the most use of IE7 as fast as they can. But a significant amount will stick to IE6 (also because their OS simply doesn't support IE7). And it's also likely that future Windows OS won't tolerate IE6.

So managers stuck on IE will have to maintain multiple single browser websites sooner or later. One for IE6 and one for IE7. Or maybe put in extra effort to maintain a single website that somewhat can handle both at the loss of that what still needs to be (constantly) determined. But in a way that won't let (too many of) their customers walk away.

In short. It's more then likely that a growing number of companies will have to maintain multiple browser specific websites sooner or later. The question is when they want to dive into the learning curve to come out experienced and prepared some time later. And with what product(s) they want to start that learning curve.

Another question is if they shouldn't find common ground between IE7, IE6 with some add-on and alternative browsers. In other words, maintain a single industry standard website rather then a single vendor certain browser version website. Or several of such sites at the same time.

I would prefer a single industry standard (which could represent multiple formats, styles and what not) website that works the same for most in one go and providing text-only or something much less feature rich for the significantly less rest. That way I should be able to balance maintenance cost versus market share the best.

So all those vendors of web browsers need to do is to agree on an industry standard that's free to use and stick to it until at least most of them (say, representing 95%+ of total market share) can move on to a new agreed upon industry standard that's only backward compatible with the previous version.

Yes, that also means that those vendors will have to think hard about dealing with possible security issues and aspects right from the start. Which is what we want. Lasting secure, industry standard, functionality that doesn't cost an arm and a leg (to maintain) but works well with (future and previous) others.

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread