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WWW Inventor On Microsoft's Browser Tricks
Unipuma writes: "Tim Berners-Lee gives his views in an interview with Silicon Valley about the latests blocking of the MSN website for most other than Internet Explorer browsers. 'I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.'"
It would probably be a good thing if browsers followed the HTML standard. I can't tell you how annoying it is to make a decent looking website only to find out that your Netscape 4.7 users see garbage.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
I wonder what his opinion is on needing a plug-in to view some content--it basically amounts to the same thing.
The problem is that in order for all browsers to see everything, a web site would probably have to use HTML 1.0, resulting in a very boring web. More current technologies aren't standards based since they are so new. Where does it stop? Everything must be compatible with Mosaic 1.0?
I don't agree with the MSN lockout, but there are instances on the web where a program is required to view certain content, and I don't see any sites getting rid of Flash just because Lynx doesn't support it.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
I don't think that Microsoft ever really planned on blocking browsers. At least not yet, and at least not for the long haul. Oh, I think eventually they will block other browsers for real, but just not yet.
/. even posted this story...?
So, why did Microsoft block some folks from MSN? What were they so "foolish" you ask?
The answer is obvious. Microsoft are great at marketing. This was free publicity. Tons and tons and tons of free press....
After an Online Ruckus, Microsoft Opens MSN Site to All
What a total win! They have the NY Times giving them a great headline. Oooh, Microsoft the kind, the gentle, the good. Microsoft, so good for people. So willing to bend over for people.
What a crock. Wake up. It is sad that even Berners-Lee was suckered into this whole thing. People are always taking their eye off the ball. Microsoft knew they couldn't keep people out very long, but they knew it would stir things up. Free publicity.
Microsoft = marketing wizards.
By the way, given what I have said, isn't it a shame that we'll spend more time talking about Microsoft? And, isn't it a shame that
How to Download YouTube Videos
Tell me, what standards does IE support that, say, Mozilla and Konqueror don't?
It was my impression that standards compliance is better in Mozilla and Konqueror than in IE, and that Opera is not significantly worse.
The only reason you would make your site IE-only is that it does not support the standard correctly in some cases, and that you want to work around its bugs without having to worry about how your hacks look in minority browsers.
That may be a valid argument if you are strapped for cash and are not very ethical about supporting monopolies. But to say that IE is ahead of other browsers in standards support is simply untrue.
The two problems with this are that A) Mozilla (and certainly W3C's own reference browser, Amaya, which was also blocked) is arguably at least as standards-compliant as IE6, and B) MSN's site wasn't standards compliant anyway.
After changing my User-Agent string, I was able to access MSN's site with the latest Mozilla nightly; to my eye, it rendered MSN identically to IE5.5, a fact of which MS must surely have been aware. Toss in B) above, and it becomes obvious that the whole standards claim was a smokescreen.
The browswer lockout, IMHO, was simply a piece of the Microsoft package. With all the links in WinXP driving users to MSN, the next step is to cajole, encourage and lock all this new traffic into Internet Explorer. If everything from Office to IE to Windows Media Player to keyword searches to online help is going to throw MSN up on my screen, only to remind me how inferior my current browser is, I can either figure out how to decouple XP from MSN (a hopeless quest), or simply ditch my browser. No rocket science here.
> ... but the owner of a website can decide at ANY TIME who will get access to which data, not Tim.
That sounds obvious, but let's look at it more closely.
First it isn't necessarily true; there are limits under the law for the actions that parties may take; e.g. a monopoly that has been convicted of monopolistic practices may not be allowed by law to restrict accesses that are likely to extend their monopoly in an illegal direction.
Secondly, Microsoft wasn't restricting the users that access their site, they were restricting the software that they accessed it with. That's quite different.
Finally, we want a person on a standards commitee to be fairly unpragmatic. He needs to come from a point of view that competitors should actually cooperate together; this is not a natural position that competitors take- even when to do so would often be to their mutual advantage.
Actually, I think Tim gets it exactly. He's not exactly stupid.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Yes. Yes. Yes. Do get angry at these web people. I used to be able to dial directly into my bank and download my transactions, and pay bills, all without a web browser. And it was faster. I don't care what you web people say. Life is faster when you don't spell everything out in plain text and use pretty graphics and javascript and such.
Yes. Get rid of the excessive javascript, or even better, don't use it at all! Get rid of the excessive pictures. Don't put a back picture when I could use my back key! Don't create popup menus, just use links. Don't put up ads on bank account pages, especially after the customer has paid you $6.95 per month.
And give the information! Don't make us email you for it. Don't make us call some 800 number and talk to a salesperson. If you have prices, put them up! Don't hide them unless you're ashamed of them.
Have honest links. If you have a download link for an application, for instance, don't make us go through 10,000 slow, image laden web pages just to download the thing. A download link should take us to a downloadable file! (Or a page with the OS selection and such). Forget the mirrors crap. Just ask us a location and direct us to it.
To the web developers: Make life simpler, and faster. Not slow and annoying!
You're all overlooking something very important, something absolutely critical to the game:
Microsoft is not interested in playing nice. Everything they do is geared towards locking in more customers to gain more control and thereby more money. They pay lip service to standards and open-ness when it doesn't hurt them, but they have absolutely no hesitations about violating standards, breaking the law, or otherwise Not Being Nice when it suits them to be.
The sole and entire purpose of Windows XP is to lock people into using the msn.com web site for all their needs, and to force them into using Windows Media Player for video and audio files. Their goal is divisiveness and incompatibility from anything that's not Microsoft-made. They want to leverage the Windows market share to make their standards and their services so necessary that people will have to be able to access the msn.com web site, and so therefore it'll just be too much trouble to bother using any browser other than IE, or any media player other than WMP. MP3's will be too much of a hassle because Windows XP doesn't support them nearly as nicely as it supports WMA files. (XP's media player has crippled MP3 features, including limiting the bit rate at which the MP3 codecs can record music.)
Stop trying to make sense of Microsoft's actions in terms of what's best for competition or for the web. Microsoft doesn't care. They will play nice when it benefits them; they'll play dirty when it suits them; and there's nothing anybody can do about it, because they've shown they're capable of tying court cases in knots for years until long after they've won the battles in question and crushed their opponents into oblivion.
Notice, by the way, that they're doing their best to make absolutely certain that they own all the file formats they're using; they only push for open formats when they don't own the market in question. You can bet it'll be a cold day in hell before Linux users ever get to use Windows audio and video file formats without getting sued by Microsoft, and the formats which Linux supports will continue to be deprecated in Windows -- thereby relegating Linux to become an 'incompatible' operating system which even fewer users will have an incentive to use.
Microsoft's actions are extremely bad for the industry and for the future of computing. They have far too much power and there's no clear way to stop them.