May be one of the smartest business decision in the last decade was to embed Internet Explorer in Microsoft Windows. The browser was really a bad piece of software, but users did not need to install an extra application like Netscape -and configure it-.
Nowadays Internet Explorer dominates the browser market with more than 80% of the share. It scored 95% just a couple of years ago, but now new players are in the arena. And they are doing very well.
All our Web developments are trying to get the most of the AJAX-style application. And we feel that Internet Explorer is not prepared for the forthcoming AJAX applications: The Applications in the Browser. These applications will use the browser as Java application uses the Java Virtual Machine. And you know, it really takes a lot of resources from the desktop.
We have recently built a mash-up application with heavy use of AJAX techniques, and Internet Explorer needs special optimizations because of its poor memory management, bad performance creating objects, and poor event performance. We did not find these problems in Firefox. Firefox is more efficient than IE, even with all the problems reported of memory leaks.
I think that in the months to come a new breed of web applications will arise, and some of them will start to ask their users to not to use Internet Explorer for a better user experience.
The promising Internet Explorer version 7 should be adapted to these new applications, but I think it is not. And it can make Microsoft to be out of the new wave of Internet Applications. So, if the Operating System is not necessary anymore, and the browser that should substitute the Operating System does not perform very well with the new applications, why should I migrate to the bloated Windows Vista?
But this last assertion will take me a new post...
-- From Diego