March 2011 – Zubin's Web Log

Internet Explorer 9: A better browser than earlier

It was not long before IE6 ruled the landscape and had complete market domination. IE6 did not follow the web standards and developers were having a difficult time developing web applications that work seamlessly on IE6 and Firefox. But then came along Chrome, which tilted the balance towards web browsers that followed the web standards like Firefox.

Microsoft quickly went to damage control mode and released IE7 where they fixed some bugs. IE8 was released by Microsoft in quick succession which fixed more compliance violations, but not all. Then came IE9 where they follow most of the standards and added support for newer standards like HTML 5.0 specification.

Even though I use Firefox exclusively, I recently installed IE9 on my Windows 7.0 computer to see how it fared.

The installation was very easy. It was a one click install.

As with most Microsoft installations it required a restart at the end.

Being a web developer myself, I have to deal with different web browsers and different versions all the time. IE9 amazed me, it fared almost on par with Firefox on user experience, if not a tad better.

The user interface is very minimalistic like Chrome and now Firefox 4.0. See a screenshot below. It is much easier to use than any of its predecessors. A good job done by Microsoft.

Browser Wars

All the 3 major browsers, IE9, Firefox 4 and Chrome are has done very good and is improving with every version (I left out Safari explicitly, as I have never used it on a Windows machine.).

Here’s a benchmark study conducted by CNET recently with these 3 browsers:

	Chrome 10	IE9	Firefox 4
SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms)	336.20	250.60	292.37
Kraken (ms)	8,806.30	15,606.77	7265.13
V8 v6 (higher is better)	5,173.67	2,235.33	3540.33
JSGamebench 0.3* (higher is better)	322.00	1,156.00	1,482.00
Boot time (s)	26.22	21.86	17.80
Memory (kb)	390,532	205,616	148,020

Credit: Chart by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET

See the full report here.

The Social Networking Bubble

If you are in the habit of reading the technology page of your newspaper (aka. online newspapers), you might have noticed the bulge in reporting of new online services or sites, especially that relates with social networking. There is also a growing number of these companies trying to cash in by going public through the IPO (Initial Public Offering) route.

It appears as though a repeat of 1999, when every startup was an e-commerce company trying to sell ‘something’ on the internet. The only difference now is that every startup is a social networking company trying to collect personal data from the users.

I do not disagree with the fact that the social networking space holds enormous potential. If you look at how much of an individual’s personal data is held by companies like Facebook and Google, it is quite staggering.

However, I do think that the stock price valuations that they get is way disproportionate to how much money they can make in the future with these data. To me it feels like an exact repeat of 1999, but instead of e-commerce space, it is the social networking space that is heating up this time.

See the current valuations of some social networking sites:

Facebook – $60 Billion

Twitter – $4 Billion

Quora – $86 Million (a question and answer company)

Color.com – $41 Million

Groupon (online coupon company)

Zynga (Creates games like Farmville and Cityville for Facebook, who are valued more than Electronics Arts, who used to be the leading game developers for the PC.)

There are many more in this list which does not warrant the high stock price valuation that they are currently enjoying. However, only time will tell which companies will survive a social networking bust.

Update (28-Mar-2011):
Here’s another story that came out yesterday in NY Times. Investing Like It’s 1999.

AT&T, AT&T, what have you done?

T-Mobile cannot be classified as one of the best cellular providers in US, nor it had the best coverage in the country. However, it was one of the only 2 service providers which offered GSM mobile services, the other 3 major providers being CDMA players.

AT&T has struck a deal with T-Mobile to buy them for $39 Billion. By agreeing to buy T-Mobile, who is currently an innovative, low cost carrier, AT&T will be eliminating their only competitor running on a network with the same technology as theirs. With all the providers moving to the 4G network, how much of this will have a positive impact on AT&T remains to be seen.

T-Mobile had very aggressive pricing, which AT&T was forced to match all this while. With this deal, AT&T will have a monopoly in the GSM arena. It will be the consumers who will be paying the price if this deal goes through.