Happy Customers Don't Change Web Browsers

Sam Gustin asserts: Many people underestimate just how "sticky" Web browsers are for most people, and how tough it will be to pry hundreds of millions of internet users from their reliance on Internet Explorer, which comes bundled into over 80 percent of the consumer PC's that are sold.

Yesterday, my colleague Kevin Maney wrote:

Chrome will highlight one factor in the browser wars: There really isn't much of a barrier to people switching browsers. We don't pay anything for a browser, or store personal information on them or do anything that makes a particular browser "ours." There's not steep learning curve. You can discard one browser and start using another about as easily as you can change the brand of frying pan you use. Firefox already opened that hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Chrome will drive a truck through it.

Kevin makes a good point, in the abstract. But when was the last time you changed your brand of frying pan? As long as the most popular brand of frying pan works reliably -- and doesn't spontaneously explode -- why would anyone change brands?

Google enjoys a similar sort of stickiness with its dominant search engine: It's familiar, it works well, and it doesn't break. Web users favor IE because it's what they know and use everyday. As one tech analyst told me yesterday, "People typically don't switch browsers unless they are really unhappy with the one they are using. Happy customers don't move."

I see no evidence that the hundreds of millions of Internet Explorers users are unhappy enough to switch. If they were, they would have moved to Firefox.

Web browsers are designed to be transparent -- a means to an end -- and as long as they stay out of users' way while enabling people to easily navigate the Web, I don't see why people should switch from what they know and have relied on.

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Laura Rich is a co-founder of Recessionwire, which provides news, advice, perspective and humor about the recession and the recovery.