Kevin: The SitePoint Podcast episode 18, for Friday, June 26th, 2009: “Internet
Explorer 8 … Percent?”.

Kevin: Hi, there and welcome back to the SitePoint Podcast - news, opinion, and
fresh thinking for web developers and designers. I’m your host, Kevin Yank
coming to you from SitePoint headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and I’m joined
by my panel of co-hosts.

Brad: Brad Williams from WebDevStudios.

Patrick: Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network.

Stephan: And Stephan Segraves from Houston, Texas.

Kevin: On the show today, we will be talking about Microsoft’s latest efforts to
market Internet Explorer 8. We’ll also be talking about whether New Yorkers even
know what a browser is. We’ve even got a question from a listener from a
previous episode but we’re starting off today with Opera Unite.

Opera has released a new beta version of the Opera 10 browser with this new
Opera Unite component built into it.

Brad, you’ve had a look at this?

Brad: Yeah. If you check out http://unite.opera.com, they have kind of a nice
little write up about it and a couple of videos, which I love because you can
just watch them, but it’s a really cool concept. Essentially, it’s all about
sharing from your computer that has Opera installed on it with other computers
that have Opera installed in it, whether it be someone in the next room or
someone in the next city, and they’ve kind of made these easy plug-ins that you
can add right into Opera to share files, photos, media, you can even actually
run a web server through your browser. So it’s definitely an interesting idea.
It’s obviously fairly new but it will be real cool to see how this grows over
time.

Kevin: Yeah. Their marketing pitch seems to… actually let me play a short clip
of their video here.

[Start of video]

Narrator: We start our story with the invention of the modern day computer. Over
the years, computers grew in numbers and the next natural step in their
evolution was to connect them together, to share things. But as these little
networks grew into huge networks, some computers gained more power than the rest
and called themselves servers.

[End of video]

Kevin: Servers. And then they go on to say that servers have all of the control
on the Internet, and they’re taking away our personal rights and freedoms, and
that now you can have a server built in to your browser, and it’s going to level
the playing field.

As a web techy guy, I have to say the first time I watched this video I thought
it was pretty cool but is anyone – are regular users, the people that Opera
really needs to capture with their browser, are they going to be swayed by this,
this claim that now you can have a server in your browser?

Brad: No.

Kevin: Patrick, is that what you want in your browser?

Patrick: No, not really. I want a server in my server and a browser in my
browser.

I would think this would appeal to what I would maybe call like
micro-connections, one to one, like a small group of people, maybe an extended
office, something like that and the question really is, is this going to make
people want to use Opera? I guess, that’s the end game, isn’t it? It’s to get
people using Opera. Is this a feature that’s going to convert the rank and file,
so to speak?

Kevin: What they’ve done here is build yet another platform for building
applications that you use online. I guess like any other platform, what it’s
going to need to succeed is a killer app. The four or five applications – I
think they may actually have eight applications that they have at launch – are
just really tech demos; they’re just samples of what’s possible. They’ve got
like a file sharing app and an app that will expose your music collection so you
can listen to it when you’re away from your home computer and they’ve even got a
‘Leave a Note on my Fridge’ application but they’re all really simple and I
don’t think that anyone is going to switch to Opera to get access to one of
these things.

That said, if you read some of their blog posts about this stuff, they have
grander visions. The example that they give is more collaborative where several
users of Opera Unite could get together and build up a playlist made up of songs
that they each have on their own computers and sort of like a shared playlist
and then they could all listen to that playlist together and so the songs that
are on your computer, your hearing from your own computer but the songs there on
one of the other players’ computers is coming over the wire and then as you go,
you could rate each track and at the end, the application will tell you who had
the best musical taste as judged by the group. And so this is an example of a
more interesting application that could be built on this platform, but will it?

Patrick: Is that what they want to be known for? With everything going on in the
world, with the RIAA and obviously music rights, content creator rights, I mean
that seems like kind of an odd example to pull out in your introductory blog
post, but maybe that’s just me.

Kevin: Yeah. When you fire up their media player sample app, there’s a very
conspicuous message on the homepage saying do not share music that you don’t
have the rights to.

Stephan: Opera, the new Napster.

Brad: You know where I could see this really taken off is in the corporate world
and - well, if the corporate world ever starts using Opera. But as far as the
service and the features, I think this could really beneficial in an office-type
environment between file sharing with docs and slide shows and photos and images
and even web servers. But again, will the corporate world ever switch to Opera;
it’s a very slim chance of that happening. They’re still in IE6.

Stephan: There are two things. Like we talked about last show, they don’t really
care about making a browser that everybody wants to use; I think they’re just
playing. It’s like this looks fun, let’s make a server in the browser and just
see what happens. And then what happens then when viruses start getting passed
around on this thing, then they’ve got a really bad name.

So I don’t know if it’s really a good move for Opera. I think Opera makes a
great browser but I think this is kind of a bad move. I don’t know.

Kevin: Well yeah… I guess… I don’t know. Maybe, they’ve decided they can only go
so far with their browser and if they want to break through as a company, they
need a leg up, do something different and this is something along those lines.
If a killer app that everyone wanted to use did get built on this platform,
Opera would have it made. I mean whether you ended up using Opera as your
primary browser or not, people would be using Opera as their interface to this
killer app. I don’t know what that is though and I’m not sure they know what
that is. It’s kind of a long shot, if anything.

Patrick: Right and when you mentioned apps and that app brings to mind things
like the iPhone and Facebook and some of the greatest apps come from outside of
the company so I guess, are they positioning themselves to encourage app
development for this and the second part of that would be, is there enough base
in Opera to make an app developer say okay, let’s get on the ground floor of
this and try to benefit from this audience.

Kevin: Well, from the developer’s standpoint, the platform is a really simple
one. On the surface, it looks like they’ve done a whole ton of work to bring out
this Opera Unite that may or may not succeed but in fact, it’s built on a lot of
technology that already had in hand. Opera has always had this feature called
Opera Widgets built into their browser and they’re kind of meant to be these
mini apps that are built using web technology, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and these
mini apps would have access to the web. Opera Unite uses this same widget API to
allow developers to build applications but adds a few APIs that provide local
access to the hard drive and things like that so that you can leverage those
local resources and also bits and pieces for communicating with other Opera
Unite users over the wire.

So really on the technology level, it was a little bit of work for them on top
of what they’ve already done. I think if this fell flat, they’d lose a few
months of development time that they put into it but not much more; but at the
same time, this programming environment that they’ve provided is extremely
vanilla. It’s really simple. If you want to build something complex, you’re
doing it from scratch or you’re using existing libraries that are out there for
web developers so if you want to do fancy graphics, you’re going to have to use
the <canvas> tag or something like that. You’re really building on the browser.
There’s not much more there for developers to use. But if any developers in the
audience have tried it out and have something to show us, please let us know.
We’d love to break the news of the big killer app for Opera, which takes us to a
question from one of our listeners.

Dale McGladdery writes in following SitePoint podcast episode 13, where he says
“The Digg toolbar framing issue and Digg’s response was discussed. The latest
version of this practice that I'm seeing is Twitter URL shorteners like Ow.ly. I
was told by someone producing these URLs that Hootsuite does this and she
doesn't want to give them up because of the stats.

“I find it interesting that Ow.ly hasn't drawn the fire that Digg has, perhaps
because they aren't on the same scale as Digg, or perhaps the Twitter users
consuming the URLs aren't as sensitive to the issue. Or perhaps I'm incorrectly
associating two different practices and they aren't equivalent.

“I'm interested in the group's thoughts, if any, on the matter.

“For myself, if it doesn't harm the target site's stats, it doesn't matter to
me. If it does, I think it's a practice to be discouraged. Unfortunately, I have
no way of knowing one way or the other.

“Enjoy the podcast, count me a fan.

“Best regards, Dale”

Brad, do you want to take that?

Brad: Sure. I think it’s real similar to what the DiggBar was doing back when we
first discussed it. It’s not a redirect. It’s actually Ow.ly. Is that how you
pronounce it?

Kevin: Yeah, Ow.ly. It’s O-W dot L-Y is the site.

Brad: Ow.ly, that’s a good domain name. I think the reason they’re not getting
much heat is because they’re not really that well known. This is the first I’ve
heard of them and I haven’t seen them come across any Twitter updates. I’m sure
people are using that. I just haven’t seen it but it seems very similar. It’s
obvious that the reason they’re doing it is because they have kind of a rating
system in place, so if I submit my website Ow.ly tacks a little toolbar on and
serves my website through theirs. It allows me to re-tweet it or share it or
vote up or down.

So in my opinion and looking at the source behind it, it looks pretty similar to
DiggBar and not something that I’m a real big fan of.

Patrick: So it is similar to DiggBar but a couple of things about HootSuite that
are different are first of all, you don’t have to use Ow.ly to use HootSuite;
you can find plenty of HootSuite users who use the service but don’t use Ow.ly.

HootSuite is a Twitter client of sorts. You can manage multiple Twitter
profiles, schedule tweets, you get statistics, and so on and so forth. I’ve
never used it, but that’s my understanding.

Has anyone here used it? No.

So I haven’t used it either but some people do it. Steve Case uses it,
ThreadList uses it, Revision3 uses it, and Revision 3 is one of the accounts
that actually utilizes the bar and I guess like Mr. McGladdery’s friend, they
like the statistics and similar to the DiggBar, they give you the opportunity to
close it and to hide it forever and they have actually a FAQs caption that comes
up when you try to close it or when you hit the arrow next to the close box that
they mentioned that Ow.ly is designed to let Google and search engine spiders
through it, so it won’t hurt your site’s SEO. It says webmasters have reported
100% improvement in traffic when their links are shared with the Ow.ly social
bar (no source for that). They say that the publishers benefit because of the
bar’s stickiness and sharing capabilities and 95% of the users love the bar.

So, I think it’s a part of the whole opt in thing and also, to me and again, I
think the listener’s friend shared this is if it doesn’t – or he shared it – is
that if it doesn’t affect the search engine rankings then I don’t really have a
problem with them myself.

Kevin: Yeah. The objections to the DiggBar were twofold. First of all, it didn’t
redirect the way that other URL shorteners like bit.ly or tr.im. Tr.im is the
one I use, and other people like bit.ly because it’s got – all of these services
have nice stats associated with them now but most of them will just redirect
through to the site. The DiggBar and Ow.ly both put a bar at the top and the
user doesn’t see the address of the site that they requested. They see the Ow.ly
URL. So it’s twofold.

The passing the search engine rankings through is one thing, but showing this
bar to people who didn’t request it is the other issue, and DiggBar got them
both wrong. I would say it looks like Ow.ly is doing the right thing with the
search engine traffic but they are still putting a bar at the top of the page.

Patrick: The one difference I think would be that the link creator can actually
decide. I think that might be one of the things with Hootsuite…

Kevin: Ah, that is a big difference.

Patrick: …that’s different from Digg because with Digg it was what the user
preference was or if they weren’t logged in, they got it automatically. With
HootSuite, the person creating the link can choose whether or not to use that
service.

Kevin: Right. The one thing that both Ow.ly and DiggBar do though that really
annoys me is that if you go to a site with the Ow.ly toolbar, navigate around a
bit and then close the Ow.ly toolbar, it takes you back to the first page that
you arrived on rather than the one that you have navigated to and that’s a bit
of a usability blunder in my opinion.

So yeah, if I was face to face with your friend, Dale, I would be recommending
one of the alternatives like bit.ly or tr.im but Ow.ly is not quite as bad as
the DiggBar was. Dale makes a good point that it’s difficult for people to tell
the pros and cons of these different services. The differences between them are
really technical and hidden, and so it’s difficult for users to know which one
to use to make an informed choice.

Patrick: I actually have a question for you Kevin. That’s an issue with them
closing the bar and going back to the original page, is that something that can
easily fixed where they can make it go to the page that they’re currently on; is
that something they could insert a little code and have that remedied?

Kevin: I don’t think so actually. I think that if they could do it, they would
have solved it but what it looks like is that the frame – because these things
work with frames, so you have a frame at the top of the page for the bar and you
have a frame showing the site, and because of the frame showing the site is on a
different domain than the frame showing the bar, the JavaScript in the bar
cannot see what page is loaded in that frame for security reasons and so yeah,
that’s the reason why it can’t keep track of where you’ve gone and drop you
there. Yeah, I guess it’s highlighting the fact that these bars at the end of
the day are a hack of a browser feature that was never intended to be used this
way and therefore, what they can do is limited.

And speaking of hacks, we have Microsoft’s ad campaign for Internet Explorer 8.
A few episodes ago, I said that web developers are going to be waiting for users
to move over to Internet Explorer 8 so that we can take advantage of the
improved web standards support in that browser and I said that web developers
have a real ally in this and that’s Microsoft and that Microsoft are going to be
doing everything they can to get users off of older Internet Explorer browsers
and onto Internet Explorer 8 and I was willing to bet that they had a great ad
campaign up their sleeve that was going to get these users up-to-date and it
seems like that these ads are now hitting the Internet and they are not quite
what we expected.

The first one I saw was the “$10,000 is buried here” ad campaign.

Stephan, did you see that one?

Stephan: Yeah, I saw it. Not a big fan.

Kevin: Stephan and I are the Mac users on this podcast so naturally we are going
to look at this with different eyes. You’re using Safari these days, right?

Stephan: Yes. Yup, using Safari.

Kevin: So am I, and the original of this ad has a special message for Safari
users. They have changed it now but the screenshot that I have, that I took at
the time, says, “We’ve buried $10,000 somewhere on the Internet and if you’re
the first one to find it, you get to keep it, but you’ll never find it using
boring Safari so get rid of it or get lost.” And depending on what browser you
came to the ad with, it had a different name that it called your browser so I
know Firefox was “old Firefox”, and there was another one for Chrome as well.

Patrick: Yeah, “tarnished Chrome”.

Kevin: “Tarnished Chrome”, there you go. So yeah this – I don’t know. It was
ballsy, I’d give them that. Word has come out that this came out of the
Australian branch of Microsoft. So they were doing their own thing a bit and
came up with this. The idea was that you had to go on a treasure hunt on the
Internet and if you were lucky, you would find a website that initially could
only be viewed by Internet Explorer 8 that would tell you you’d won the $10,000
and they were posting clues to where you could this site and those clues
initially were only visible to Internet Explorer 8 users, at least if you looked
at them through this ad site.

Patrick, as an IE user, what do you think?

Patrick: Well, I’m a Firefox user, and I have been for awhile.

Kevin: Oh, that’s right.

Patrick: But here’s the thing, I didn’t think this was really that big of a
deal. It’s just kind of a jab; there are these subtle jabs that go back and
forth between Apple and Microsoft, between browser makers and Microsoft. If you
look at the Apple, “I’m a Mac” commercials, the guy on a PC, he’s an old,
boring, tarnished man. So I mean, I don’t know. It wasn’t that big a deal. It’s
just words, copy, it’s a little giveaway. It’s World War III online, of course,
but on some level, web developer outrage is kind of easy to come by sometimes
and browsers tend to be just this heated debate area that I kind of throw in
with religion and politics and it’s kind of really heated, and it’s kind of a
little too serious. I mean it’s just software.

Stephan: I think the whole thing is just stupid, don’t you? It’s like, I don’t
know… I guess I don’t get it because who are they trying to target with these
ads?

Like if you’re a Firefox user and you’re a web developer, are you going to drop
what you’re doing and go and use IE8 now because they promised that there’s
$10,000.

Patrick: No.

Stephan: And if you’re a normal user, are you actually using Firefox? So did
they waste just a bunch of money to do this?

Patrick: Well, more and more normal users are using Firefox and Chrome, I think,
and that’s part of it.

Kevin: That’s definitely true.

Brad: This ad campaign I think is so stupid that it’s genius because I mean like
Kevin, you said this was an Australian-based ad campaign and this thing flooded
the entire Internet, no matter where you’re at. You heard about this $10,000,
where is it buried, where is the treasure buried. All over the world, everybody
is talking about IE8 now because of this ridiculous campaign. So whether it’s
stupid or not, I mean everybody is talking about and at the end of the day,
that’s what’s marketing is all about. So I think whoever came up with should get
a nice fat raise.

Kevin: Well, someone got in trouble because the ad was changed. Initially, it
did have all these restrictions that if you weren’t using Internet Explorer 8 to
participate in the treasure hunt, you weren’t going to find it because all of
the pages were IE8 only, and the new version of the site, first of all, it gets
rid of the name calling and “get rid of it or get lost”, it just says, “We have
buried $10,000 somewhere on the Internet and the first one to find it gets to
keep it.” And the clues are now visible to non-Internet Explorer 8 users as
well. So someone got in trouble and forced the change here. I thought it was
ironic that… I’ll be the first to say this is a cheap shot but all during the
development of Internet Explorer 8, all we heard from Microsoft is that they
didn’t want to break the Web and that compatibility was everything, and then
this ad campaign comes out that is by design only viewable in Internet Explorer
8. It was like, “Look, we can break the web!” Yeah?

Patrick: There was a post by Microsoft Australia’s Gianpaolo Carraro, he talked
about the campaign having some responsibility and he said that it was “Initially
targeting the student audience, the decision was to make it a bit edgy, throwing
some  punches at the competition. The intent was not to be arrogant or offensive
but just to use some level of emotional tension to cut through the clutter and
create some noise and buzz in the online community.”

And he cites emails that they have received both positive and negative and like
you said, it’s open to all people now and just myself, I would say that I can
see changing the wording and I know breaking the Web, it’s a good point too, but
if it’s to promote IE8 I don’t know if I would have changed it so that they
could see everything – every browser could see everything, since the part of the
issue is to get people using IE8 and then maybe if they use it, they’ll like it,
maybe they won’t, but at least they’ll have downloaded it.

Kevin: Well, this isn’t the only ad campaign from Microsoft about Internet
Explorer 8 that made the news in the past week, they’ve got another one. It’s
their Get The Facts campaign. You can’t blame Australia for this one; this is on
microsoft.com. It’s a few pages but the feature one is this grid, this browser
comparison chart that – talk about marketing spin – it’s one of these charts
that has ticksmarks in the boxes, checkmarks that indicate at a glance it looks
like these are features that one browser has that the other ones don’t. So if
you just glance at this chart, it looks like they’re saying Internet Explorer 8
has security, Firefox and Google Chrome do not. Internet Explorer 8 has privacy,
Firefox and Google Chrome do not. Ease of use, reliability, compatibility, and
manageability are all apparently Internet Explorer 8 only features glancing at
this table. If you read it in a bit more detail, what they’re actually claiming
is Internet Explorer 8 come out on top on all of those points and there are a
few points where they concede they are on even ground with the other browsers:
web standards, customizability, and performance, apparently.

What do you think of this table, Brad?

Brad: It’s interesting, I mean, you know when they put this together, they knew
they were going to get some heat. The Internet is dominated, at least it seems,
in the neck of the woods that we all hang out in, is dominated by Firefox users,
Chrome users, Safari users and not IE users. So obviously on Digg and Reddit and
the other sites like that, they’re going to bash a chart like this.

It definitely is marketing speak too, like the privacy with InPrivate Browsing;
that’s a really cool feature for IE8. I’ve used it and I like it but you can
turn off all the privacy options that you want on Firefox and I’m assuming it
came on Chrome. I haven’t actually tried but see I think that it’s putting a
spin on stuff. This would probably work for our parents who don’t really care
one way or the other, they just want to get on the Internet. They’re going to
look at this and probably get something out of it, everybody else is probably
going to see right through it.

Kevin: So the page is divided into three tabs – Reasons to Install, Browser
Comparison which has this chart that we’re discussing, and MythBusting. At the
top of the Browser Comparison page, there’s a Here’s the Buzz Section and
depending on – it seems to load a random quote about Internet Explorer 8 and the
one I’m seeing right now is “Internet Explorer 8 breaks the mode with what may
be the best written privacy policy for any software product ever.”

Does anyone else feel like Microsoft is grasping it’s straws for nice things to
say about Internet Explorer 8?

Stephan: Yeah, just a tad.

Kevin: The privacy policy, seriously?

Brad: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone brag about their privacy policy.

Kevin: As a developer, I’m actually really impressed - I think I mentioned it
last issue - with the performance strides that other browsers are making and
Internet Explorer is definitely being left behind, especially in the JavaScript
performance stakes. But this table claims that Internet Explorer 8 is on level
ground and they’re saying on the MythBusting tab, they actually addressed this
in greater detail.

They seem to be claiming that it’s performance that occurs in the blink of the
eye is not important and what’s really important is how quickly a browser will
let its users get to the information they want online. Whereas Internet Explorer
8 may not be as blazing fast at running JavaScript benchmarks as the other
browsers, its innovative tools that have been built in to this new version are
more significant because they enable users to get to the information they want.
They’re talking about their Web Accelerator feature, for example, that lets you
right click on a piece a piece of text and do something like map it on Google
Maps with a single click.

Stephan: Yeah, but if the information is hidden by an AJAX call and that’s
dependent on JavaScript then they’re wrong, right? I mean I don’t know. It just
seems like they’re just… I don’t even know how to describe what they’re doing,
it’s like they are trying to put down something by saying that they do it better
but then saying that that thing is not important at all. Maybe I’m just
misinterpreting it, I don’t know.

Patrick: Yeah, I mean the table here is out there. It’s absurd; the checkboxes
and the table, it’s just a poor way to represent that data, but the MythBusting
thing I don’t really have a problem with because I see this as more of what they
should have done versus the checkmarks because at the end of the day, whether
you agree with it or disagree with it, at least they’re talking about what it
is. They’re not saying okay we have this, no checkmark, no checkmark. That’s not
helpful; they’re talking about, well this is what we see for speed, this is what
our results have shown, and you can either accept that data or not. It’s kind of
the same as the Apple conference we talked about I think last show where the
person on stage talked about the speed of Safari as a multiple of Internet
Explorer speed. They did their research, they presented it in that way. It’s
kind of a jab, but at the same time, it’s true to them. You choose who you want
to believe.

Kevin: Yeah, like I said last episode, Microsoft seems to be making very
different decisions about their priorities in developing their browser and this
MythBusting page seems to be the closest I’ve seen to a defense of that approach
and it states their reasons and what their working theory is and if you agree
with it then maybe Internet Explorer is the best browser for you. Personally, I
don’t agree with it and that’s why I use a different browser but still, it’s
good to see them at least stating their case and telling a compelling story. I
don’t think bragging about the privacy policy of your browser is the smartest
way to go though.

Patrick: One thing strikes me here is they make a point of mentioning Chrome and
I just wonder if at this stage in Chrome’s development, it has gained some
market share but is it helping Chrome to put okay, here’s an option, here’s
Chrome, you can go download that and try it. Microsoft has a huge audience, are
they promoting Google inadvertently there while making people about it? I don’t
know.

Kevin: And more interestingly, for me, Safari and Opera completely absent from
this table. So I don’t know if Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome are the
big three now. I don’t know if Chrome has a bigger market share than Safari at
the moment. If you’re on a Mac, you’re almost certainly using Safari but then if
you’re on a Mac, you’re not going to be able to switch to Internet Explorer so
maybe the comparison is less valid there. Safari does have a Windows version but
I haven’t heard of a lot of people using it yet.

Patrick: Net Applications says that Chrome market share in May 2009 was 1.8%,
that’s behind Safari’s 8.43. So that’s one statistic.

Kevin: Is there a Chrome number in there at all?

Stephan: Chrome is 1.80, yeah, and so it’s below Safari’s 8.43, Firefox 22.5,
and IE is 65.5.

Kevin: Alright. Well, I guess there’s only so much room on the page but yeah, I
think there might have been a better choice than Chrome.

Brad: I think Microsoft would rather promote Google than they would Apple at
this point.

Kevin: True enough. And speaking of promoting Google, Google went out on the
streets of New York to talk to people and find out whether they knew what a
browser was. This video on YouTube shows the results.

[start of video]

Scott: Hey, this is Scott from Google, we’re here in Times Square New York to
find out what is a browser.

Female: A website that you can search on, I think?

Male: I call it the search engine. That’s what I call it, the browser.

Scott: What is a browser?

Female: Ummm…

Male: A browser is the search engine. Browser is a search engine. Browse …
right.

Female: It’s where I search through, like, to find things.

Female: It’s where you put your search terms, correct?

Scott: What is a browser?

Male: Google, what else?

Male: A browser is what you use to look at Internet web pages.

Female: What is a browser? I use Yahoo!, or is that not a browser?

Scott: Do you know what is the difference between a search engine and a browser?

Male: Not exactly. I mean, no.

Male: I don’t know, I guess the Internet is just where you find anything and, I
guess you browse the same way. Hell, I don’t know.

[end of video]

Kevin: Well, as a result of that video and it does go on and I recommend you go
and check it out because it only gets funnier. They say that only 8% of the
people that they spoke to that day in Times Square knew what a browser was. And
I was surprised that so many people confuse it with a search engine. Maybe the
interviewer said, “Hi, I’m from Google, can you tell me what a browser is?” And
that’s immediately whether their mind goes.

Patrick: I’ll give you a freebee, {wink, wink}.

Kevin: But yeah, we’re spending all this time complaining about Microsoft’s
advertising for their browser, but when only 8% of a metropolitan New York crowd
can tell you what a browser is, is all this marketing pointless?

Patrick: So what I would say is that like I said before, web developer outrage
is sometimes justified and sometimes not but we tend to talk about things that
really only we care about. Like the average person doesn’t care about what the
underlying code is behind a website, they just want it to work and they don’t
necessarily identify a browser is this, a search engine is that, they just press
the blue E or the orange fox, something comes up and they type in their address
or they go right to Google. You know if you check your search referrers,
especially for non-technical sites, you’ll find a lot of results for the site’s
name because people just type it right in there and come to your site that way.
In general, this isn’t something that most people care that much about; they
just use it to get what they need and then they get on with their life.

Stephan: And to add onto that Patrick, it’s like I’ve even seen some of my
search terms www.thesite.com on Google and it’s like okay, well so what they did
was … and I’ve seen people do it, I watch people and they’ll go to Google before
they type in a site, and I’m like you can just type it in the address bar.
“What’s the address bar?”

So I think there’s an education thing there where people are so used to go into
Google because it was the first thing that came up, or going to MSN because it
was the first thing that came up, or AOL, God forbid, that they’ve engrained
themselves into that and so maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as one of those
things come up.

Patrick: Is this really good for the search engines because if they’re the ones
that are thought of as the gateway and maybe the browsers need to do a better
job distinguishing themselves?

Kevin: Maybe, but maybe Opera has the right idea with Opera Unity (sic.) and the
way to break into the browser market is not to build a better browser but to
build a killer feature that people will be forced to try your browser out in
order to use. Maybe that’s the thing – the way to get people on your browser is
to force the issue with not a better browsing experience but something on top of
that.

Stephan: So they should market it as “Opera Unite: not a web browser”, right?
Should that be the tagline?

Patrick: A web server.

Kevin: A web server, a file pirating tool.

Patrick: Free music.

Kevin: That brings our episode to an end.

Guys, let’s go around the table.

Brad: This is Brad Williams from webdevstudios.com and you can catch me on
Twitter, @williamsba.

Patrick: I’m Patrick O’Keefe for the iFroggy network and I’m on Twitter as
@iFroggy.

Stephan: I’m Stephan Segraves, you can find me on Twitter @ssegraves and my blog
is badice.com

Kevin: And you can follow a SitePoint on Twitter @sitepointdotcom.

The SitePoint podcast is produced by Carl Longnecker, and I’m Kevin Yank. You
can follow me @sentience.

Be sure to visit http://sitepoint.com/podcast/ to see all the links that we
discussed in today’s show.

See you next time.

Bye bye.