Browser wars. Still no paradigm

Inspired by someone’s tweet from yesterday, I set off thinking about the current state of the competing web browsers out there. Yes we may have gotten over the Netscape/Internet Explorer wars (embarrassingly for Netscape, but also a greatly iconic moment in the demise of the dotcom bubble), but this did remind me of a paper by Paul Wernick and Tracy Hall in 2004 where they tried to make a point that there are no paradigms in the software development world. Yes, there may be Java vs .Net vs the rest of the myriad of tools out there, but there is no ‘one paradigm to rule them all.’ Or at least dominate the others. It would seem, the internet browsers we love and hate would be still in the same stage of their life-cycle. I thought it might be interesting to have a ‘pinch of salt’ meditation about this.

Paradigms Revisited

Yes we may have heard this term a painfully large amount of times during college/university/etc, and/or especially in the working world where the term is thrown around almost as if it makes one sound smarter the more times it is blabbered. Problematically, and not surprisingly the term is of course hardly used in the correct context. The context of which is as the original coiner of the term, ‘Paradigm Shift,’ Thomas Kuhn, intended.

So what exactly is a paradigm then?

Thomas Kuhn, in his 1968 ‘essays’ entitled ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ identified clear stages that compose the make-up of a scientific revolution. In short, those were 1) a pre-paradigm stage, where there are multiple, conflicting views on a phenomena 2) a period of ‘normal science’ where a the dominating paradigm is agreed upon by practitioners of the science and 3) ‘revolutionary science,’ where new ‘out of the box’ thinking is needed, and new ideas generated, to deal with anomalies that may have occurred, of which the current scientific thinking cannot answer for. At stage #2, it can be considered a ‘paradigm.’ Put 2 and 3 in sequence and you have got yourself a ‘paradigm shift’ in your hands. Web browsers seem to be not even out of stage #1 yet.

Pinch of salt

Okay, yes I’m diluting the pure sense of a scientific revolution here, but this is of course a ‘just for fun’ exploration. Now let us imagine for a while that instead of scientists, we have browser users. Can we identify the reasons why people stick to the browsers that they use? In my completely unscientific observations I have noticed the following trends:

Internet Explorer: Most people use this browser because it is ‘just there’ and is often set to be the default browser on a windows system.

Safari: Likewise, this browser is the default on the Mac. Although it does indeed have an awesome RSS parser.

Firefox: Most business users I’ve spoken to have decided to use Firefox because they have read somewhere that there are security flaws with Internet Explorer. Firefox users on the Mac feedback to me that it renders pages much better than Safari (does it?). Firefox is starting to move in the direction of bloatware though. Scary.

Google Chrome: A nice toy. Loads YouTube videos well. I haven’t used it since the day I installed it.

Opera: Had the great feature of tabbed browsing. Then everyone else came along and took the idea away.

Others: Yes, there are lots of other browsers out there being used. Especially obscure ones like Lynx. Which I personally use when a text based browser is needed (such as downloading things via putty on a remote system).

Browser wars

So, sorry guys, as much as a leader of the pack might stake the claim to be the most heavily used browser out there: if we try to analyze it through terms of a Kuhnian paradigm shifts, the mass adaptation of one ‘browser to rule them all’ is still very much opposed by the fact that there are droves of users all using different browsers, for their various advantages. We can’t call it a ‘paradigm’ unless there is a clear leading, and largely uncontested (and not necessarily correct) scientific school of thought. Here we can see that the browser wars are still very much in the ‘pre-paradigm’ status.

What does this mean?

We’re going to see the browser wars go on for a long time yet. Maybe this is a good thing, as in most Kuhnian scientific revolutions there will eventually be a winner. Or maybe an anomaly might happen such that we start to see more applications running under Adobe AIR, and such Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) might become ‘the paradigm.’

Just sayin’

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