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.'"

Comments

Compatibility? What about standards?

[don_carnage]

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.

Look Beyond, Look Beyond

[webword]

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.

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 /. even posted this story...?

Re:Let's be fair: this isn't IE specific.

[Kaiwen]

IE may extend the standards, but at least it supports them.

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.

Re:Unreadable sites and poor design

[MrBoring]

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!