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. "

Comments

Too bad

[presroi]

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.

Climate of fear

[Epeeist]

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.

Re:the future is now.

[Jellybob]

AOL might simply drop Mozilla in favor of Netscape

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).

So in other words...

[autechre]

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).

Stability or Innovation or What?

[CrazyWingman]

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."

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. :P

Re:OK, I'll bite

[EnnDeakin]

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

I've finally switched to Mozilla Firebird

[Control-Z]

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.

Re:Who cares about bloat?

[ConceptJunkie]

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. :-(

Re:What major changes?

[cr@ckwhore]

Firebird is based on the Mozilla rendering engine, right?

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 ... http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33339, although I personally am not aware of its actual status.

Re:the future is now.

[SquadBoy]

Tunnling crap through port 80 is what he is talking about. Drives me *nuts*.