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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.
Until my logs show something close to 50/50 for IE/Mozilla I don't believe it. Still showing 90% for IE, and I promote Mozilla on my site.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
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!
It AOL changes it Default browser to Netscape, than web designers will again have to consider netscape/mozilla when doing pages..
Why AOL hasn't switched after buying netscape must say something about microsofts control...
Competition is good though, so hopefully this will help all browsers get better..
NEW YORK (AP) That's the associated press' byline. CNN didn't write the story, they simply published it. Lots of other news outlets will publish it, too.
Keep in mind that it's an AP article, not written by CNN.
"And like that
Unfortunately for Bill Gates, his company has rested on its laurels. IE6 offers little that wasn't present in IE5, and the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.
And how can we complain about that? May the best product win - again. It's nice to see open source come out on top.
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.
I'm starting a new war. It's called the War on War. If you're sick of all these Wars, please join my war.
Seriously, who really wants to read about browser wars any more? The market will dictate which browser "wins." The rest of the browsers will have to be happy with less than a majority of users.
Big friggin whoopty-do!
I use mozilla because I like it. If MSIE comes out with something better, I might use it instead.
"And like that
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
The Washington Post has a favorable review of Mozilla 1.0 as well, with I though was interesting because a) it's read by politicians among others, and b) it is a review of Mozilla and not Nutscrape.
Anyway, here is the link. One of his favorite features was the ability to block ads. He even tells people how to turn that feature on.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon
Bookmarked.
Care to bet on this?
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.
Those of you using IE will need to switch to Mozilla. Those of you using Mozilla won't even notice the part that doesn't work under IE, it feels so natural.
Cool effect that works only under Mozilla and just feels right. Now who's at the disadvantage?
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
Eh? What's that? Is this the same company that called the GPL "pac-man like" and Linux "unamerican?" How is it that all of a sudden that can't speak on rival products?
<snort>
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
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.
Actually, that's all it takes for IE, too--just use the highest possible security settings, including "Disable Active Scripting," for your "Internet" zone. Probably 90% of the websites I surf render just fine without it. And if I think I'm ever going to come back to one of the 10% that don't, I can add it to my "trusted" sites list, which uses "Internet"-level security settings.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Here's my theory. If the word was spread that mozilla can block pop-up ads by simply checking a checkbox in the preferences, then I bet people would come to mozilla by the millions.
Unfortunately, most people are completely unaware of that simple, yet extremely powerful feature.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Why they chose to block any customers remains a mystery
I like to browse with konqueror and I try to do something about it when I can't. I send a polite email to the webmaster telling my problems. They usually are surprised that their site, created with whatever "point-and-click" website creation tools their artists are able to use, doesn't work for standard browsers. They are even ignorant of the fact that the web standard is published by the W3C, not microsoft. The happy ending to the story usually is that one more website becomes compliant with the *true* standard and one less website requires IE.
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.
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
I'm not trying to troll here, but it's the truth. And don't give me the typical "but IE breaks web standards, etc." I'm not talking from a developer's perspective, but from a user's perspective which we have seen time and time again is the real deciding factor in most technology "wars," fair or not.
I try my best to keep my machine MS-free, but when it comes to browsers, there was little choice in the matter. Netscape 4.x was a joke and Netscape 6.0 was freaking slooooowwwwwww. A lot of people (even those who despise MS) fled to MSIE for relief, and let's be honest. MS did a decent job with it, at least from a user's perspective.
I'm using Mozilla 1.0 now, trying to give it time to grow on me and replace IE. Mozilla has a few quirks, but its benefits outweigh the negatives and I see significantly little difference between it and IE in terms of user experience. I've been actively encouraging others to try it out, but it will take time. Netscape botched the browser war very badly and IE has rooted itself in the public mind as THE ONE AND ONLY BROWSER. Although I like Mozilla, I have real doubts that it will get far, but best of luck to them. I'm on their side.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
- popups can come up in new tabs, and each tab can have its own close button. You can kill popups without even looking at them! It also makes it easier to kill tabs without leaving the tab you're looking at (unlike the middle-click in mozilla)
- The searches text inputs are very unobtrusive. It doesn't pop up that big ugly sidebar that insists on popping up even when you're doing normal searches in the main window.
- It saves the state of your browsing session, so you can open everything just like it was when you left off after quitting / rebooting / crashing / etc. Big time saver!
- The Preferences are in the Settings menu item, and not "Edit" or something silly like that
- Nice autobookmarks feature of your most-browsed sites, when you don't feel like mucking around in your history
- A bunch of other inane but useful features that really click in a way no other browser has clicked for me
:P
Of course, it's a challenge building it to keep up with the pace of Mozilla development, but once it works, it's really nice... (of course with debian, it's just a simple apt-get source -b galeon )IE 6 doesn't have full alpha layer for PNG yet... no word on if it ever will. 24 bit png with alpha layer (transparent/translucent) works just great in Mozilla, blending into background, without all the tricks and hacks that you have to do with IE. I can use a style sheet to change colors on the fly and don't have to to re-save all the damn graphics and screw with them to get the shadows, edges to come out right. For me that's IE's biggest drawback.
What do most people who design for IE do to avoid this silliness? Is there any 24 bit graphic format that supports an alpha layer in IE? No, really, I'd like to know.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
The sight of people defending AOL Time Warner against Microsoft is in my mind worthy of a bookmark for future reference... AOL Time Warner are a monopoly in a way Microsoft would love to be - they have absorbed media companies left right and center yet as long as they release or support free software they are considered acceptable? Hmm why is it im suspicious of their motives ?
/. i can post links to this story - Just WHO do you guys think would have the cash to buy parts of a split up MS anyway ? Painting the worlds largest media monopoly as a small guy against microsoft's might makes me laugh and feel ill at the same time.
These people control what you see and what you read - they make no bones about their desire to dominate the media world and for them to turn around and start lawsuits against a former ally and best buddy (MS) shows the level of loyalty and trust worthiness they should be afforded.
I use Mozilla on Linux - i like it - its not as stable nor as useable as IE5.5 but it is a damn good browser. Netscape is a bloated, buggy unuseable piece of crap on windows and from my experiments on linux as well. To defend AOL and beg for them to do something like this is a joke, they WILL not do anything unless they can gain a competitive advantage from it - this is the way they have built a business (and previous slashdot stories can attest to it)
Im bookmarking this so when they become 'evil' in the eyes of
It might sound bad to some people but superior products win marketshare - IE was better than Netscape - IE won whilst netscape frittered away a lead and became a second rate product (yet mozilla is a first rate ? go figure)
And yes the majority of the real world (non open source) consider IE a very good product.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
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.