Comment by aneesh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aneesh | Hacker News Reader

To stop their slide, and grow their market share again (which is, I presume, the goal of the IE team at Microsoft), Microsoft basically needs to get Firefox users to switch back to IE. Everything becomes a lot simpler when you think about it like that.

Firefox made it dead-simple for people to switch from IE to FF. The whole install process for Firefox takes maybe 120 to 180 seconds, from the time you click "Download" to the time you are up & running. And Firefox imports all your IE data in one click, and also recognizes common IE shortcuts. Ctrl-E is IE's shortcut for the top-right corner search box -- it also works in FF, try it!

The reverse is not true. It's hard to switch from FF to IE. IE takes 10-15 mins, plus a restart to install (at least it did when I installed IE8 it a couple months back). It doesn't let me import FF data, and it doesn't recognize FF shortcuts. By making it so hard to switch to IE, they have basically made it impossible to grow IE's market share. Is it any surprise then that IE is dying?

I agree they need to work on the installation/transfer process, but to their credit, they have made some big changes and even innovations in IE8. The kind of thing that will probably slow the trend but not reverse it.

Firefox also gets you more hooked with its add-ons. This is getting worse with time.

Little things can make a big difference & FF leads the way in little things. Big things (big add-ons like firebug or colorzilla) are obviously deal-makers, but the little things are big friction points.

For example, the main reason safari irritates me is that they don't have the bottom of the page chrome. I like to see the URL of links before clicking.

I used to feel the same way, but alas command-/ turns it on and leaves it on for future sessions.

hooray!

The bottom-of-the-page bar in Safari can be toggled with CMD+/

Thanks.

I'll make a small correction. HN is in the lead for small things. I learn so many of these on HN.

Where would I be without CMD-shift-t in FF?

besides this, does anyone else find the "Tick,Tick" sounds in IE as annoying as I do?

You can turn those off, but yes, they are incredibly annoying and most users don't realize they can be disabled. If you do something like MS Update, where there are a lot of redirects, you'll hear 15 or so clicks in rapid succession. It's like they've never even used their own browser.

I had a job once where I had to use not only IE but also a "thick client" that was .NET based and had similar audio feedback. I kept my computer on mute the whole time because it sounded like a goddamn slot machine.

I don't because I always turn off all system sounds on my computers, and others' computers at work rarely have speakers anyway.

That might be the specifics of being a power user: you may not understand problems of common users because you do things very differently anyway.

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