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AP reports on renewed "Browser War"
An anonymous reader writes "CNN and others are reporting an Associated Press story on "the revived browser war" with Mozilla paired against Microsoft. It seems the 1.0 release is creating some waves out there. " Considering most people consider
the war long since over, I can't imagine this mattering much.
If they say there's a browser war, there's a browser war. When they said it was over, it was over.
So, now it's back. More media exposure for Mozilla (especially when it's quite positive) is a good thing. If Mozilla were bad, no one would care. Mozilla is good, very good, and people notice that.
Go Go Mozilla!
Keep in mind that you can change the User-Agent string for Mozilla for various reasons, from security to working with broken sites. Pretending to be IE with Mozilla (or Konq or Galeon...) is not too uncommon.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Based on secondhand reports, it sounds to me as if IE7 is going to bring *major* advances in CSS support for Windows Internet Explorer. They're going to fix the box model, with bugwards compatibility handled via a DOCTYPE sniffing strategy similar to IE6/Mac's.
This is a hugely significant event for advocates of CSS. I'm eagerly looking forward to this, even though I don't plan on ever using Windows on a regular basis. Given Microsoft's ability to bulldoze Windows users into upgrading, we may soon have a world in which, for the first time ever, *the dominant Web browser* has good CSS support.
This could improve things for CSS in general even if we don't end up with the dreaded Microsoft-only world. Developers of *other* browsers will no longer be able to hide behind claims of industry-leader compatibility when releasing buggy CSS implementations.
Of course DOCTYPE sniffing is going to complicate the situation somewhat, since IE7 will still have a bugwards compatibility mode. I'm hoping that the existence of IE7 will cause enough people start intentionally invoking standards mode that other browser developers notice. While from a theoretical point of view DOCTYPE sniffing makes no sense--it's a pure hack--in practice it's a lot better than no standards mode at all, which is the only likely alternative.
Furthermore, my secondhand source also tells me that IE7 will finally bring full PNG support to IE. This is a major step ahead in InterNet graphics.
And I use Opera, but identify as IE5.
You want a site to fix this in under 24 hours? Just tell them that you're blind and that their site won't let your blide-enabeled web-browser in.
Dreams of ADA lawsuits start dancing in their heads. It works really well for government sites, and moderatly well for medium sized corporations.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Clearly, the consumer.
If I added up all the time spent closing those annoying pop up/under windows with IE, I'm sure it'd more than make up for the time spent waiting for Mozilla to get swapped back into memory (I often run a lotta apps, and Mozilla uses a lot of RAM (who doesn't these days?)...
And then there's the seizure-inducing rapid-flash animated gifs that loop to infinity in IE...in Mozilla I can set them to run just once. Or not view them at all (or only ones from the same server). The savings from not paying those medical expenses...I could put a down payment on a house with that money instead!
The Tabs are a nice feature...when I'm running a lotta apps, there's no room for text on the Taskbar...but my tabs can tell me what page they're holding for me.
If everyone else sticks with IE, at least I know I'm happier browsing now than I was before. Thanks Mozilla!
because IE renders most Mozilla pages fine, but mozilla doesn't render all IE pages fine.
Since Mozilla is the 'better browser' but doesn't accept sloppy coding, IE has an advantage.
There is not a huge difference inbetween the commands that Mozilla accepts but IE doesn't.
Mozilla may thrill some tech-savvy users, "but it's not going to make a dent with the mainstream," said WebSideStory's Geoff Johnston, unless, that is, AOL Time Warner puts major marketing muscle behind it.
Like, oh, I don't know, having the news division of AOL Time Warner run stories on the browser?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
This is the media simply trying to stir up a story. The fact that it is being pushed by AOL properties like CNN, Fortune etc makes it even more apparent.
It really doesn't matter to me which browser people use as long as it supports 95% of the latest specs (in this case HTML 4 and CSS-1). If it supports DOM, XML, and CSS-2 even better.
The big problem I've found when I am pressed into using IE for whatever reason is the ridiculous amount of ad-related annoyances I have to deal with. Pop-over ads, pop-under ads, animated things flying all over my screen, etc. And this isn't even at the pr0n sites!
I think Mozilla's chance to grab some market share is by pushing for the fact that it gives you control over these annoyances. Turn off all of those unrequested popups with a couple of mouse clicks, or you can go back to using IE and have to close a bazillion windows every time you are done surfing.
So, I think the browser war isn't quite over, it's just going to be fought on a different front.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Think about it. You're AOL and half of America's internet subscribers go through you. Because 95% of surfers are using IE, sites are built to display on IE. Many sites are designed to display properly in IE, standards be damned, meaning they don't work on a properly performing browser. Many don't allow anything but IE to use their services.
Now, to convert your entire userbase to Netscape will mean a significant portion of sites will no longer look correct or will cease to work entirely. Your customers don't understand browser compliance, they merely know that they could visit sites with AOL 7, but not AOL 8. Is the deluge of customer support phone calls and email really worth the hassle?
It AOL changes it Default browser to Netscape, than web designers will again have to consider netscape/mozilla when doing pages..
No... it will mean designers will have to think about W3C compliance. The days of dual-coding for NS4 and IE4 are long gone. Anybody who can't right a page that works on both browsers without even detecting which one you're on has done of one two things:
a) Designed it poorly.
b) Written it without ever looking at the standards.
As long as enough users adopt Mozilla, sites will be forced to write standards-compliant pages. That is all that really matters. AOL alone could bring in enough Mozilla users to cause such a change.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Flame me, kill my dog, curse my unborn children but...
/. logs show heavy IE saturation.
/. but sometimes I wonder.
I use Linux, I use Windows, and I develop site every now and again. Noting to fancy shcmancy but just for pocket change. So I keep all browsers on my system so I can see that whatever I am developing remains uniform. And usually it does. I do not develop for any one but so all can see it in pretty much the same way.
Netscape sucks the big one, while I can make anything run like a charm on IE and Opera. And stability issues(Java applets working and not crashing browser, win again with the IE and Opera).
So what do we do? For one lets stop turning this into a MS bitch and moan session. Tired of it, it is worn out. We are talking about browsers and ya'll are whining about all Microsoft products. Show me the slashdot logs and see how much traffic is IE. And do not come back the the fricken answer"I gotta use IE cause it is a work box" BULLSHIT. If we are all the hotshot admins we claim to be we can run a nix on a box at work, or at least another browser of choice on Windows to show we are fighting the good fight.
I imagine that the
Hell, I use IE, no skin off my nose. I have one box just for browsing and I use opera on it and it works fine. Ilove opera. But IE ain't bad in many ways. Show me the logs TACO
And MS might be the monster that ate the world but some of there products are not too bad. Office works and people like it. Star Office eats it, open office eats it less but still bites. I would rather use wordstar.
You know what the next killer app would be? Us coming off the high horse that linux is the be all end all salve for anything that ails a computer. It is good stuff, but UNIX is UNIX, and a new Nix is just an old nix.
Christ, I love
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
It has nothing to do with the market. IE comes bundled with Windows, which comes bundled with your computer when you buy it. There is little incentive to switch browsers when your computer already comes with one.
I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for AOL to use Netscape, considering AOL 8.0 Beta 1 was just released and it still uses IE.
cpeterso
Mozilla is not a weapon to fight a browser war, it's a weapon to fight a standards war. Fight MS in following the W3C standards.
All the discussions about IE looking, feeling, being better then any other browser don't matter to me. IE is MS's tool to internet domination through bad standards support and proprietary tags. This is what we should be fighting against. Educate web-developers not to take the easy road but follow the standards, drop IE-only tags, use validator.w3.org. If I can do it for my personal pages, they should be able to do it too.
---
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
Microsoft won because they bundled their browser with their OS. Thus few people were willing to switch to Netscape because their computer came with an adequate browser already.
I don't care who uses IE. It's just that i don't want to be forced to use IE.
To avoid the web using proprietary formats, all we need to do is, to keep public awareness of the browser war. We don't need to win the war for Mozilla. We just have to remind content providers, that they may not decide the war.
For this aim, I see a good future. The amount of word documents offered to me as single choice is decreasing and the local online newspaper is fully mozilla compatible.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
then people would get netscape. Look at IE version 2.0. However, IE is a decent browser, not the best but it does most of what people expect it to do. And since people code to it, the web works on it.
;)
It's our job to change that. To make sure that people move to bigger and better browsers.
This sets off a few of my "old timer" bells (that's right, I'm old, aka "over thirty")...
One, did you ever read about "The War to End All Wars"? That was WWI! They were much more realistic about naming WWII.
Also, please realize what you thought about history perpetually progressing forward was a lie. Things are never determined. It's all still up for grabs. Winning is what happens in board games, in the real world it's a perpetual struggle. Yes, even among browsers.
-pyrrho
Many sites are designed to display properly in IE, standards be damned, meaning they don't work on a properly performing browser.
AOL users all use an AOL proxy, don't they? Just auto-spoof for them. Most sites that "don't work" with non-MSIE browsers, actually do.
I think the point of the article isn't so much whether Mozilla will beat IE for general use... it focuses on the REAL advantage of Mozilla; that is, the use of the Gecko engine in lots of other devices and scenarios. It will be interesting to see Gecko slowly supplant IE as the engine of choice for all non-MS companies who need to render HTML.
If I were in charge of AOL, and I wanted to once again make one of my products (Netscape) a staple on the internet, I would employ one simple strategy. I would pick a version of the Mozilla engine (aka, Netscape). Mozilla 1.0 final seems like a good choice, as it's a stable release, and it has reached approval from many critics. Now, I would make a development timeline for AOL version 8 (or whatever version might be next). Then, I would make an all media announcement: "AOL version 8 is scheduled to release on December 1st. At this time, we will fully implement the Mozilla engine into our browser, using Mozilla 1.0 as our framework."
The important step is the follow through, however. I can say that, but I have to do two things to make sure I maintain my market share. First, I have to make sure that I do in fact implement the Mozilla engine completely. Second, I have to make some sort of incentive for AOL users to upgrade. Nevermind a minor release. This would have to be a major release with lots of new features. Maybe take advantage of Chatzilla and get that fully integrated into AOL. Whatever it takes...but just changing the rendering engine or the browser will not be enough for most AOL users to upgrade.
The old addage is "If it isn't broken, don't fix it." Many people know that. But many people also know the caveat: "If its got new features, it might be worth a try."
AOL really has the chance to initiate some good developments here. If they switch to Mozilla, so many people will be using Mozilla that webmasters will actually care about their pages in other browsers than MSIE again. That would, in turn, make the web more accesible to people using alternative browsers, so that webmasters have to care about standards more, ...
See also the recent discussion about browser wars
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
** LAMER ALERT **
Omfg, you must live in 1996. There is like 100000000000 pieces of free software that let you disable popups under windows/IE. A lot of them block more than Mozilla does.
** END LAMER ALERT **
Pretending to be IE with Mozilla (or Konq or Galeon...) is not too uncommon.
Not too uncommon for the nerd minority, but still extremely uncommon in general. Thats not going to influence the numbers.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Whoever made that web page, that's who.
I looked at that page (with a browser that has CSS), and it was pretty cool! So then I looked at it with a completely CSS-ignorant browser, and the page still worked fine. It just looked bad. When I see a web page that looks bad, I don't think, "Oh no, my browser sucks." I think, "Wow, whoever made this page, was clueless."
MSIE users will surely draw the same conclusion. And it's the right conclusion too. If someone makes a web page that requires CSS (or requires that some specific style be used) to look good, then they're messing up.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Add to those:
Mozilla will almost certainly break IE-domination in this year (by reaching more than 10% marketshare, which is too much to ignore for webdesigners) and will become the standard browser within 10 years.
It's silly for mozilla to lie to a site. It's the sites problem not yours, send an email.
To be honest the only site I've seen so far is the passport website, but then again about every page on it is non-standard HTML and br0ks the w3c validator.
I live in a giant bucket.
Oh, so you admit that people who make pages that require IE to look good are messing up too?
I hope you also realize how some really neat stuff is not being done because of lack of standards support in IE. IE is to Mozilla now what NS 4.x was to IE before now.
IE = Old and Busted
Mozilla = New Hotness
And more!
Having my desktop re-organized in terrible ways by IE 6, allowing Windows to make unauthorized connections to the web even when I don't have my browser fired up. . , well that just pisses me off.
I don't like to be a shill in some corporate control ploy.
Mozilla 1.0 is like a breath of fresh air! It does what I ask, it gives me power over simple things IE does not, such as turning off pop-ups, "unrequested windows" in the preferences, among many basic, sensible features. --Features which would only ever be written by non-corporate, private individuals who want a good browser.
IE is for the uninitiated, the unaware, the manipulated consumer sheep of the world.
And damn it, I AM NOT A NUMBER. . !
*ahem*
-Fantastic Lad
Put a link to mozilla in your e-mail, at BBS's, anywhere you think your writing will be read.
Get the word out as best you can.
photosMy Photostream
Actually, Job Access For Windows (JAWS) is made for blind people to access common computer applications, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Outlook Express, Eudora, and so on. The problem doesn't come with the browser itself, but rather the coding habits of the page designer. Screen Reading programs cannot interpret Shockwave or Flash with much success (requires specific code in the document), many proprietary HTML tags that are specific to IE cause problems if the page is viewed with other browsers.
As for suing for compatibility, there is already a class-action lawsuit against AOL in the works (no link, heard it from someone who specializes in teaching blind people how to use computers). We specifically tell visually impaired users to not use America Online. JAWS has problems reading multiple windows, and the few times it changes emphasis, the user often has no audible indicator of what's going on. America ONline is well aware of the problem, and while the adaptive software developers try to keep up with the changes, accessibility online is something that is difficult to enforce, especially for companies who host outside the country.
Finally, there is an attitude amongst several developers that I have talked to that there are not enough bind people to justify making accomodations. "If they want to read it, they'll get someone to read it to them." Sadly, that's a quote from a website designer from a few months ago. Slapping lawsuits on people who don't comply won't solve the problem. If you want the Internet to be fully accessible, make some changes to how Internet content is created. Even if you just find a way to tell them, it is a start.
This
Personally, I can't afford to lose 5% of my business; it croggles me that online outfits will cheerfully accept even 10-20% "can't even get in the store"
Hopefully that mentality is going away with the fall of easy VC money. My own company is standards complient due lazyness - we don't want to waste time dealing with any gripes. We've found that doing it right the first time is actaully the lazy way - a we like being lazy. Give us more time to post to Slashdot!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.