Microsoft's upcoming software suite Office Web Apps, the company's answer to free online competitors such as Google Docs, will only be compatible with certain web browsers, the Register reports.Office Web Apps, intended as a lightweight online counterpart to Office 2010, will not be compatible with competing web browsers such as Google Chrome or Opera. When it announced the upcoming service last October, Redmond stated that Web Apps would "be compatible with familiar web browsers."
This familiarity evidently does not extend even to older versions of Microsoft's own software. Neither Internet Explorer 6 nor the Windows version of Apple's Safari browser is included in the list of supported web browsers recently posted by the Web Apps team.
The list limits the new applications' compatibility to Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox 3.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux, and Safari 4 on Mac. The Web Apps team encourages users to try their browser and see for themselves, claiming: "It is a goal of the Web Apps to have broad compatibility and reach."
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is still the most widely used web browser according to the most recent figures from NetApplications, with 27.21 per cent of the browser market share. Second is IE 7 with 23.09 followed by Firefox 3.0 with 16.21 per cent, IE 8 with 12.46 and Firefox 3.5 with 4.54. The latest version of Google Chrome, version 3.0, holds only 0.13 per cent of the market share compared to 2.37 per cent for version 2.0, and Opera comes in at a similarly low 1.73 per cent.
It's clear from these NetApplication figures, however liberally they need to be taken, that Office Web Apps would only be supported by just over 40 per cent of browsers currently in use. The current dominance of IE 6 could present a problem when Office Web Apps is launched, but Redmond's decision not to support that browser may finally push lagging internet users to update to version 7 or 8, removing the need to adapt the software to a slower browser.
It has been speculated that Web Apps' incompatibility with rivals Google Chrome and Opera could be a deliberate tactical decision on Microsoft's part. However, owing to their comparatively small browser market share, it's likely that Web Apps developers simply didn't consider them to be worth the effort.
