Jigar Desai

Biggest obstacle that Firefox faces in becoming number one browser is its ability to woo IT managers to adopt Firefox as the default corporate browser or at least convince them to officially deploy within their organization.

However aggressive adoption of HTML 5 and CSS 3 by Firefox and not so by IE might help Firefox to overcome this last big obstacle, HTML 5 represents the biggest leap forward in HTML standard especially when you consider that the last major update was HTML 4.01 completed in 1999, current proposal of HTML 5 standard will make browser based application a full-fledged application platform.

Microsoft’s hard line stand on HTML 5 standards (we are not going to support it until it becomes standard) and their history of ignoring standards (it took 7-8 years for IE to finally catch up with HTML 4 and CSS 2.1) might prove as the beginning of the end of IE dominance as corporate browser.

JavaScript performance is also going to play big role in future corporate browser selection, rich JavaScript based web application which works perfectly in Firefox are sometime unusable slow in IE because of poor JavaScript performance. Following chart shows browser script performance comparison.

 
(Browser comparison shamelessly copied from IE blog )

Following are the game changing proposals in HTML 5 which might make web based application as preferred line of business application development platform .