Slashdot Mirror
Browser Wars II: The Saga Continues
adamsmith_uk writes "For the first time in three years something has happened in browser land. In fact, major events have started happening at a breathtaking pace. Time for a long overview that tells the whole story. "
I really miss the "Software war" map which used to be at atai.org
The last update has been 2002 and it never got updated since.
Agreed - at work we recently had a query about spam and popups. Two or three of us suggested using Mozilla or Netscape instead of IE. We pointed out the ability to suppress popups and minimise email spam within the Netscape mailer in addition to the lower chances of viruses.
To put it mildly we were howled down. People wanted to continue with IE and Outlook. They were happy to add absurd bits of additional software to stop duff information getting as far as IE and Outlook, but they weren't prepared to change them.
There's one important point this guy is missing here. Big corporations often provide web applications that are based on the latest IE. To do my job I have to use one particular web app. provided by my firms supplier. It requires IE 6. If I wanted to use IE 5.5, I am SOL. When this supplier starts to require IE 7 we will have to upgrade our Windows.
So by tying IE 7 to the OS Microsoft can just about guarantee corporate acceptance of the upcoming windows. Even now, we can't switch completely to Linux because we would not be able to do business. Sucks if you ask me.
i don't like my old sig.
I hate to break this to you, but Netscape *is* Mozilla, with some branding added to it, and the odd feature to link in with AOL... but most of the development for Netscape is done by the Mozilla team (who incidently, has a sizable proportion of Netscape employees paid to work for them).
You want to use Mozilla, which has all of these things right now.
#4 is not quite what you propose, because that would be a serious and unnecessary drain on a Web site's bandwidth. A site can specify whether a link is allowed to be pre-cached (not by default), and Mozilla will pre-cache it for you if you've enabled this feature (also not by default).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
As an aside, how do I change the keys for moving through tabs in Mozilla? They are truely awful - the three browsers above use F2 and F3 and Opera uses 1 and 2 (and is easily customisable) which are much, much better.
--jobby
This is an interesting article, in light of the one a couple of weeks ago about browser innovation being dead. That article almost seemsed to talk about the idea that in order for any browser to come out on top, a new interface for browsing would be necessary. This article, however, is more focussed on stability and standards conformity as the way to win the "Browser Wars."
:P
I don't know as I can say what people really want more - stable browsers, or new [useful] features. I know I'm all for the stable/reliable/unified/etc. browser design, but then again, I'm not a M$-using consumer whore.
It's Mac not "MAC."
:)
It's Safari not "Saffari."
It's the not "teh."
Kidding
IE was the best browser on the Mac probably since 4.5, and certainly since 5.0. There's no question about that. Was it the best browser period? I think it was, crashes notwithstanding. It lost what was left of it's lustre, though, when it came to OS X.
Mozilla is slow and ugly. Safari is clearly it's equal or it's better and six months time will see it clearly surpass all competitiors on the Mac.
The real question is, will there be anything as good on Windows? There are serveral contenders, but which will be the best? IE won't, it's too old. Mozilla? Could be, I guess. Opera? I'm doubting it myself, but anything could happen.
My guess is that it won't matter a bit which browser is "better." People will continue to use IE 6 for as long as it takes for 7 to appear in a future release of Windows. Web content will be developed for IE 6 with all it's crappy incompatibilities and quirks and when "better" browsers like Safari or Mozilla (or whoever takes the title on Windows) choke on sites developed explicitly for IE 6 people will say "damn, this browser sucks!" with little or no understanding of what's really going on.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
OK then. Here are some features that *were* added to Mozilla in the last year.
- NTLM support
- open multiple home pages in tabs
- per-site popup blocking
- rich-edit control (Midas)
- image auto-sizing
- dynamic profile switching
- find as you type
- bookmark groups
- XML prettyprinting
- WSDL support
- composer has image and table resizing
- junk mail controls
- link prefetching
- more info on Page Info panel
- extra tab browsing options
- download manager improvements
- more intelligent autocomplete
- view selection source
Heh, I thought it was bad enough when I found my mom still using Netscape Communicator for email. She likes the new version of Mozilla Mail/News I installed for her. She, at least, has known about the problems with OE for some time - now, if I could only convince my dad and my aunt (who also live with me).
;) Too bad /. wouldn't let me put in a link to his ID)
(And check out the new sig I just stole
(Score: -1, Stupid)
I have about 20-30 windows with about 3-8 tabs each open normally and it rarely crashes, and if it does, only one window crashes.
Nope, that's the Win32 binary (zip) archive. Just decompress and go. Uncompressed, it runs about 18MB.
ZIP compressed, the archive runs about 7.4MB. BZ2 compressed, the archive runs about 6.5MB.
Please note that these figures are for the 20030101 nightly binary, not a milestone.
I like IE, it's fast and works great. I've used it ever since Asheron's call forced me to install IE5....
But I've had it with popups, and the "last stand-alone" version of IE is the final straw. So I've switched to Firebird at home and as of today, at work. Pretty painless transition really, I can even drag and drop my Toolbar quick-links from IE to Firebird. So far so good.
*cough* Firebird is confusing? read here [www.mozilla.org] From there: "Clarification: "Mozilla Firebird" is just a project name, in the same way as the Mozilla Application Suite is codenamed "SeaMonkey"." Calling your old Mozilla install "SeaMonkey", are you? well, then call this one Firebird. ;-)
Incidentally, the above link also as a link for the latest "firebird" download
The original article said this is exactly what the Mozilla Project needs to do. How unfortunate for the author that he was out of the loop and didn't know that we've already been there and done that.
I tend to agree here, though I also take the side that while it's a bug, it's not a bug that should be high on the "fix list" priority list. At least assuming that it works reasonably well on almost all systems.
Opera is also available for free as ad-supported software.
No, you're absolutely right. Most of IE is loaded with the rest of the OS. It's as big and bloated as anything, but since it's in bed with the OS, it looks and acts snappy. The end result is fine, unless you want to use another browser... you still have all that bloat loaded.
:-(
Good thing memory is as cheap as water. Too bad the company I work for will only spring for 256MB and doesn't allow us to modify the machines ourselves.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Firebird is based on the Mozilla rendering engine, right?
... http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33339, although I personally am not aware of its actual status.
Yes.
The one without a full, documented API that enables you to actually do things to the content, right?
The W3C DOM API compliant one, which is very well documented and implemented closer to the standard than IE.
The one that doesn't allow you to get actual rendered layout values?
Again, its W3C DOM compliant.
The one that doesn't support the ruby tag?
The "RUBY" tag was recommended to the W3C in 2001 and became part of XHTML 1.1. They're working on it
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Just spend some time reading Microsoft's own product announcements, interviews, etc... they don't make any effort to hide any of this. You'd pretty much have to be blind not to see what's going on... oh wait, that pretty much describes most of /. poster community.
First, there's Longhorn...
TechWeb
WinSuperSite
But don't forget to research Jupiter, Yukon and Kodiak, and be sure to look at the extended feature sets of these products and how they can interoperate.
A quick search for some time lines got me this, but there are lots of places that keep track of this stuff:
Internet.com
Some general info on Jupiter
JupiterResearch
...and don't forget MS' own efforts to push rights enabled content into the marketplace:
for one example there is...
...but don't forget, games, their deal with small movie studios, etc...
Microsoft
MS is working with British Telecom to develop online applications and media support including appication rental that can be used for an added nominal monthly fee... all of this is web browser accessable, and while the dot's are pretty thin to find, I've heard in the developer circles that once it is stablized around MSN 9, MS is looking to offer this service out to XBox live subscribers.
news.com"
...and then there is the MIIS layer that just was released to support data tracking.
MetaConnections
"MIIS has its own data store (the metaverse) into which it consolidates information drawn from the connected systems. Rules can be applied to determine how objects in a connected system are projected into, or join with objects already in, the metaverse and to create objects in the connected system (i.e. provisioning). Other rules specify how each attribute within the object should flow into or out of the metaverse. The sophistication of these rules allows customers to create fully automated identity data integration solutions."
...or this quote:
TheWhir
"Customers have told us they need an end-to-end solution for managing identity information and access rights," said Bill Veghte, corporate vice president for the Windows Server Group at Microsoft. "With today's delivery of MIIS, we bring provisioning and metadirectory capabilities together in a single solution that enables customers to create and manage user identities with a single consistent view across the enterprise and throughout the complete life cycle of identity management."
I would point you to the Market announcements on the MS site, but they are oddly missing... but then Google saves the day here...
MS care of Google #1
MS care of Google #2
...and on and on and on... Do I really need to give you more links... I suppose it's pointless because with most of the people who can't see this, I could drop a bible of text proof in your face and you'd still denign it.
Microsoft makes no efforts to hide what they're planning, and doing. It's all out there in your face if you bother to take the time to read it.
Big business wants start-to-end accountability for ALL DATA, and they are going to get it, and Microsoft is going
Tunnling crap through port 80 is what he is talking about. Drives me *nuts*.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
> A gecko browser has less speed potential (among
> other things) then a native browser
Excuse me? What part of gecko is "not native"? The fact that it does not use native widgets for form controls? That's because there was in fact no way to do this. Notice that Safari is either a) getting changes to the core OS widget set made or b) suffering from bugs (see hyatt's recent blog entries) due to its use of native widgets.
Gecko did not have the luxury of being able to make the OS makers modify the OS widget set, unfortunately. But the native widgets issue is not one that most users would even notice, imo... (Note that this is for the web page rendering, not for the browser UI -- the latter is a separate kettle of fish, and Camino is a Gecko-based browser with a native UI.)
Mozilla (at home - here at work, I am stuck with IE)
I was in a similar situation to you until a friendly slashdotter told me that that Firebird can be run on Windows from the executable. If you have sufficient permissions to copy something from a CD onto your desktop, you can run Moz at work -- just run MozillaFirebird.exe It automatically copies over all your IE bookmarks as well : )
Give it a try, you'll be pleasntly surprised.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling