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Microsoft to Pay AOL $750M in Settlement
aoteoroa writes "Microsoft will pay $750 million to AOL Time Warner to settle an antitrust lawsuit filed by AOL on behalf of its subsidiary Netscape last year, the companies said Thursday.
At first blush the deal looks good, but I can't help but wonder how a deal that ties AOL to IE again will negatively impact my favorite web browser." Here's a news.com story that also covers it. Is the browser war over? If so, it sure was anticlimactic.
Microsoft did not play quite fairly. When one installed the latest internet explorer, they were also changing windows DLLs that are preloaded on boot. This gives Internet Explorer a significant speed and stability boost. Netscape, on the other hand does not have that liberty.
I believe there was a quote from the antitrust trial in which a memo was brought forth by the VP saying that Windows should be altered "so that running any other browser should be a jolting experience for the user"
Microsoft may have made a better product in the end. But it came with cheating and sabotage.
Try 4.2 billion. That's not a great return on investment...
especially if Apple were to release Safari for Windows
Now that would be awesome. Safari is by far the best looking and fastest browser I use. However the release of Safari for windows is probably just a huge pipe dream.
Safari is one of the few browsers that uses native OS widgets for rendering pages. So safari is based around the Aqua interface and rendered in OpenGL. In essense it is 100% glued to OS X. Even if they did port it to windows, you wouldn't see the same type of speed or beauty in the browser simply because Windows widgets are clunky, ugly and slow.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
It's got a lot of those small features that make Apple stuff so damned cool.
Stop/Reload use the same button, depending on whether or not the page is loaded. Why didn't anyone else think of this?
The bookmark manager is so sweet it's been known to make grown men cry. So cool that the Camino guys are working on copying it.
Three meg or so download. Remember when Opera could claim this?
SnapBack makes getting back to search results very easy.
Spell-checking in textareas. No tpyos in this post!
So, no, it's not going to revolutionize browsing or anything. Since browsing technology has likely reached it's apex, all that's left are the small things.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
M$ will never include image and popup blocking (think about it). They may add tabbed browsing in the future, but there is no real rush. Like you said, they alreay have their 95% so why do anything innovative or steal another idea?
Maybe I'm starting to sound like a zelot... But if zelot means hating the things that M$ does, sign me up.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
" Or you could install A pop-up stopper for free and she can continue to use IE."
Sure, she can install yet another program that has to work on top of her already buggy web browser, and then she can continue to use IE. And what does use of IE entail? ActiveX vulnerabilities, browser crashes, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, stealth software installations (gator/Xupiter, etc), and other assorted issues.
"Does Firebird work well with Flash/Java and the other plug-ins we do desperately need?"
Yes, it does. It has for a long, long time.
Does IE have tabbed browsing, themes, radial context menus, mouse gestures, integrated pop-up and script/javascript supression, image blocking, integrated google search (from the address bar), integrated cookie management, forms manager, web development suite, bug tracking, regular releases, good security, and very strong stability?
Can you view its source code?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."