What Would You Feed Your Dog: Firefox, Safari or Canned IE 8?



2009 June, 14th
Mihaela Lica
Mihaela Lica
feature photo

My colleague Liliana Dumitru-Steffens posted a series on browsers – with emphasis on Windows and Safari, to be exact. She stated in one article that Microsoft is losing the browsers war – a statement anyone can assert as accurate considering that from a global perspective IE (all versions together) occupies a well deserved (?) second place. In short: if you are not number one, you are not a winner.

Hoping that this is clear for all, I’ll take the liberty to rant further, analyzing now not two PR approaches (Apple vs. Microsoft) but three: Mozilla vs. Microsoft and Apple. As far as the other browsers are concerned (Opera, Chrome, etc) – it is not my intention now to analyze them. This is not about which browser is better, this is not about me being a Firefox fan – this is purely about how these companies choose to present themselves in front of the customers.

Apple focuses its PR campaigns for Safari 4.0 on the idea that Safari is the fastest browser in the world (?). I am not here to debate the veracity of this statement. This is what Apple says, and I will continue this analysis starting from the premise that no company of Apple’s magnitude would ever base a PR campaign of this scale on a lie.

Microsoft tries to “feed America” – Microsoft doesn’t even dare to blow its own horn. Their recent issues with the European Commission do no help their PR efforts for promoting IE 8 either. So what can Microsoft do? A charity campaign for Feeding America makes sense for the US users, but like Liliana, I wonder: how does Microsoft plan to persuade consumers from other continents? An important question from a marketing perspective. Does anyone have a viable answer?

Respecting the “my dog’s better than your dog” principle, Firefox, reported 150 million downloads in 24 hours as Asa Dotzler reports.

If Safari, as a commentator on Liliana’s latest post implied, reported “forced downloads” from people who have Safari’s updater (Safari 4 got pushed out to Safari 3 users via their software update tool (?)), and if Firefox’s numbers are also “automated updates”, 150 million downloads is still an impressive figure. Besides, it doesn’t matter how they did it, what matters is the result in this PR campaign. Everything is fair in love and war.

So far Microsoft made no reports of how many IE 8 users downloaded the browser in the US, but for your information only, if you want to download IE 8 as a European/living in Germany (for example) user, the price is 3,90 € per CD, as you can see in the screenshot at the left (click to enlarge).

IE 8 for sale in Germany at $ 3.90 per CD.
Yes, the same product is for sale in the US too ($ 5 per CD) but does anyone ever buy it? Guess what: European users will be now forced to buy it, since IE no longer comes preinstalled on their PCs. Not many users will know how to install a browser for free, not many users are savvy enough to know what alternatives to choose.

With the risk to be called an “Apple head”, or a “Firefox fox” by any Microsoft advocate, I’d like to express a personal opinion in this matter: Safari and Firefox are better browsers for a number of reasons, being free for European users adding to the list right now. However, this is hardly the point.

Windows 7 is not due to release in Europe till October this year, but Microsoft is already making money by exploiting the ignorance of the less savvy web users, and charging them money for a product that should be free at least till the Windows 7 release. 3,90 € per CD plus shipping costs (almost always about 5 €) makes IE rather pricey in the EU. Not a big deal, you could say, if you already have a preinstalled (free) browser on your PC, but October will bring PCs without IE 8 to Europe. I guess all European users will have to purchase a CD of sorts (from Microsoft, Firefox, Apple or anyone else) if they want to access the Web.

In this situation, my question is: how much of the revenue goes to the European Commission? Under the pretense that they want more choices for the users, the EU forced Microsoft to pull out IE 8 from the Windows 7 bundle. Should the EU give Microsoft a fine for this move, the users will still be the injured parties.

As far as I am concerned, I don’t care whose browser is better, what I do care about is fair play. Right now I think that the EU and Microsoft have closed a deal under the table to boost Microsoft’s revenue from Europe, using the very tool anyone who wants Internet access needs the most: the web browser. This is how I see things, and what surprises me the most, is that no one else wonders what triggered EU’s fury on IE, and why instead of accepting other browsers Microsoft chose to pull out IE from Windows 7 in Europe.

Instead, the Microsoft fans shout loud and clear “you don’t know Microsoft” when anyone dares to question Microsoft’s supremacy in any field. Well, guess what, we know Microsoft and we also know that they would sell their grandmothers to make money. Microsoft never gave away something for free, not even for branding purposes.

Everything they ever do – including the all hailed Bing – is there for a reason. A normal marketing approach, I know, but it is time to set the hypocrisy aside: there are no heroes online. All businesses are there for the ROI. “Free” is an obsolete and relative term. “Free” (of charge) is an illusion. Chew on this for a change!

Below a video that illustrates the whole “browsers war” idea in my view. Maybe you could answer this: what makes Microsoft’s dog better than Apple’s? Your personal experience? What you heard from the media? Your commitment to the brand? Can you really express an unbiased opinion? And if you do, do you give an damn on the users in Europe who are now deprived of even seeing the dog because some higher authorities felt it was their place to decide whose dog is better? Chew on this too!

IE 8 “evil” logo courtesy voodish.co.uk.

About the Author

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Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 8 years in online PR. Mihaela writes occasionally for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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There Are 10 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Bjorn on 14 June 2009:

    I used to use Safari on the Mac but it started to run slow. I made the switch to Firefox and I’ve been very happy with it. The “tabs” function allows multiple websites without slowing down the Mac-OS.

  2. Comment by John Raul Joven II on 14 June 2009:

    I noticed IE is heavily attacked in the EU. I mean, it is meticulously criticized — though I understand the point that EU tries to neutralize the browser market for fair and healthy competition. Your point of view is interesting – makes me think EU and Microsoft “could be” working together behind-the-scenes pretty well. O.O

    Personally, my main browser is still Firefox (some plugins are precious to me as a web developer) and they are things I cannot find on other browsers as of yet. Also, I trust FF with my passwords more than ANY browser. My only complaint with FF is that it is increasingly becoming a resource hog on my system and it’s rather slow sometimes (it could be the plugins but I’m hoping that Mozilla will release a browser version that is optimized for multicore CPUs — they are tad behind other browsers in this arena).

    My secondary browser is Google Chrome and it is very fast (pretty much like the Safari but I prefer the Chrome). I use it for normal browsing. Its speed is very addicting.

  3. Comment by Costin on 14 June 2009:

    “Everything they ever do – including the all hailed Bing – is there for a reason. A normal marketing approach, I know, but it is time to set the hypocrisy aside: there are no heroes online. All businesses are there for the ROI. “Free” is an obsolete and relative term. “Free” (of charge) is an illusion.”

    Of course it’s all about the money, otherwise they’d not be here now but lost somewhere in the open source swamp praying for a few visitors/maybe customers per day…

    Also, you should know that MS has been released more than 150 FREE tools you can use on your computer. yes, free.

    How they do their marketing campaigns doesn’t interest me very much because I’m not in that ‘war’ so I don’t care how many users exist on the planet, not other ones. I couldn’t care less if Apple announced 20 million downloads yesterday and Mozilla 1 billion in just one hour today… I just don’t care because I don’t switch/use the browser that’s supposed to have the most downloads per day/week/month/year. This statistics should be a concern only to the manufacturers sales representatives(or whatever the person in charge with sales is) not to the common internet user.

    Microsoft has its good and bad parts as every other giant corporation that does everything to survive nowadays, and so is Google, Mozilla(and everyone else) but I’m not the right person to criticize their actions…

  4. Comment by Costin on 14 June 2009:

    “How they do their marketing campaigns doesn’t interest me very much because I’m not in that ‘war’ so I don’t care how many users exist on the planet, not other ones”

    Here, I wanted to say that I’m not interested how many MAC/Windows users exist on the planet(but because of the small size of the edit area…you know…)

  5. Comment by Karsten on 18 June 2009:

    I think we can understand the difference between “Microsoft fans” and astroturfs and a misleading hate campaign against the Commission that suits the past arrogant behaviour of Microsoft very well. The commission did not ask Microsoft to do but be sure they, the poor victims of European competition law enforcement, will implement their own remedies in a stupid way and blame it on the Commission. Very funny.

    It is very clear that no user is harmed from Antitrust enforcement and unbundling, but there is much to win. Microsoft is an extremely noisy and annoying party in competition law proceedings but that won’t save them from a verdict.

  6. Comment by gjperera on 21 June 2009:

    Let me premise my response by stating that my loyalty to one brand or another stems from their ability to deliver a product I can use hassle free and offers the conveniences I seek.

    I use neither IE or Safari as my primary browsers. I use Firefox not for the speed or the footprint of the application, I use it for the number of add-ons that are supported and are available for the browser. To me it’s a matter of convenience and ease of use. At the moment Firefox on my computer has approximately 15 add-ons enabled, each making my browsing experience better.

    I mainly use IE, Opera, and Chrome to verify the compatibility of browsers for my website…my .02 cents

  7. Pingback by More PR for Bing: "Will Code for Green" on 23 June 2009:

    [...] — Microsoft, You Got BingedJune 22, 2009 — Apple Announces – No More BiteJune 14, 2009 — What Would You Feed Your Dog: Firefox, Safari or Canned IE 8?June 12, 2009 — Microsoft Has Spoken: No IE with Windows 7 in EuropeMarch 2, 2009 — The Tao of [...]

  8. Comment by Sueblimely on 23 June 2009:

    Any new PC will come with a browser installed – Is there to be a one PC user licence for an IE CD? If not there is nothing to stop a PC manufacturer loading IE onto any new machine for free. They would not even need to buy it as they can download it for free. If there are licencing issues I imagine a free browser would be installed – most likely Firefox.

  9. Comment by Mihaela Lica on 23 June 2009:

    Right, but I don’t think the manufacturers will load IE if given a choice.

    As for IE, I suspect is a one PC license – Microsoft wants to make money with this, I bet.

    But in my opinion, it is not fair for the manufacturer to make the choice. A precedent for unfair competition is presented here: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari and Opera are not the only browsers available.

  10. Comment by Ladislav Kocbach on 24 June 2009:

    I find your article interesting, but I wonder if you really mean this:
    “Under the pretense that they want more choices for the users, the EU forced Microsoft to pull out IE 8 from the Windows 7 bundle. Should the EU give Microsoft a fine for this move, the users will still be the injured parties.”

    I would like to add some information. The issue is not only the “user’s choice”. The original issue is the fact that Microsoft uses the monopoly to create own formats and sort of standards, which destroy interoperability. The internet exploader (as you nicely call it) No. 6 was especially bad about it. There are still pages coded only for IE 6.

    This is the first issue: if IE comes on all PCs, Microsoft prevents the choice, but due to the prevented choice it is made possible to spread silverlight (a new attack on the mankind) and several new secret weapons (like new jpg-like image format, new replacement of PDF,etc etc). These practices
    hurt all the open source commitments, important for governments in many parts of the world, not only Europe.

    EU definitely does not help Microsoft to increase profits. All this about the necessity of using CDs are simply lies and what we call FUD spreading (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, Microsoft’s old speciality).

    Every just a little knowledgeable computer user can set up an icon on the desktop, which when clicked starts so called “ftp” download of firefox and puts the firefox installer on the desktop. “ftp” is a tiny program which all operating systems today have. To install this takes any Microsoft engineer about 10 seconds. They were asked to implement something like this, but instead they started the FUD campaign.

    Another solution is the portable firefox, which many people have on their memory sticks. A version of firefox which is not to be installed if you want to keep it portable.

    Naturally, Microsoft will not recommend Portable Apps! They ere breaking the jail which Microsoft started building in 1994 by inventing the “registry”.

    I summarize:
    1. EU is not working for Microsoft. EU in this connection means support to Open Source movement.

    2. CDs and similar “problems” discussed are simply FUD. technical issues do not simply exist. These are strategic marketing FUD practices.

    3. You might be interested in portable apps if you use PCs with windows either regularly or just occasionally. You find Firefox Portable on wikipedia,
    but the easiest is going to portableapps.com, with a whole set programs you might find useful, and which will work on any PC with windows.

    Otherwise, thank you for inspiring writings!