In a recent blog post by the folks at Microsoft, it lists which browsers its Office Web Apps officially support. The list includes only very popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux, and Safari 4 on Mac. Both Google’s Chrome and Opera will not be compatible with Office Web apps which is a part of a strategic companywide shift toward embracing web-based solutions. Announced in October 2008, the Californian-based tech giant has planned to deliver lightweight versions of Office through web browsers because the then computer-savvy people have become internet-savvy now.
According to the blog entry, “The Office Web Apps Love Your Browser”. Too good to be true? Well, this love only applies if your web browser is either really recent, really popular or really made by Microsoft. To my dismay, the list of supported browser was surprisingly short. All of them are the latest versions of popular browsers and it doesn’t even supports Firefox 3.0 despite the fact that it (June 17 2008) isn’t as outdated as its Internet Explorer 7 (October 2006). “One example of this is copying text by pressing the ‘copy’ button on the ribbon. In Internet Explorer this will work (after a prompt), but Firefox doesn’t support copying to the clipboard through mouse actions.”
This obviously shows that Microsoft is indeed a “noob” when it comes to developing web apps and couldn’t solve the browser compability issues. Although it may not be their fault, but at least they should find other alternatives to curb the serious problem. It’s rather crucial for the team at Microsoft to consider those non-tech-savvy people who are still on IE 6, Firefox 2 or 3.
The exclusions of both Chrome and Opera could be due to browser compability issues, as claimed by Microsoft. However, they are still some underlying reasons such as low market shares, ‘taking revenge’ against the recent European Union Microsoft competition case or even trying to kill the mighty Google Docs. Will Office Web Apps succeed? Well, only time will determine its success.