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. "
The [Mozilla] Project needs to get its act together, though. No more rehearsing for the Navel Gazing Split Personality Idiot Savant role. No more antique cars stuffed with vague X-technologies nobody understands anyway. And no, not even one web standard. The Project should put Mozilla on a strict diet and star it as the Viable Alternative to the Senile Evil Dinosaur Usurper in the epic multimedial co-production "Browser Wars II: The Saga Continues".
If the Project does so, it has a future. If it doesn't, it will sink further into obscurity and silly names.
Apparently this guys has been out of the loop. I agree the silly name changes, and change in directions hurt, (hell it confused me too), but now they are on a strict roadmap. The Firebird browser is on a strict diet, it's slicker, leaner and meaner than anything Microsoft has to offer. Even some of the biggest Windows advocates have jumped on the bandwagon.
Hopefully enough eyes will be opened, and will see that the future is Firebird.
Mike
IE is still the dominant browser, because Windows is the dominant desktop platform. People generally don't want to change what comes with their system, especially if it works well enough for them, to say nothing of the confusinig open source strategem of nightly builds, stable releases, unstable releases, etc etc.
Take over the desktop. then worry about a browser.
I agree with it on all counts. Microsoft is evil, Explorer is old, and we should move away from it. Unfortunately, most people don't care, and most of the other web browsers aren't all that final. Still, the next "Browser Wars" will be very interesting indeed.
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
Come on. He even admits it. I can think of a couple ways of writing this article, transmitting the same information, and not come off as a bigot at the same time. It's rather interesting to read, but he is speaking for the browsers more than he needs to, let them speak for themselves!
He's also obsessed with CSS (but we won't talk about standards in this article, no not any), like that's the only point you consider when picking/develpoing for a browser. Sure it's important, I use it a ton don't get me wrong, but it is not the only thing with IE that I have trouble developing for.
Unless MS is forced to remove IE from Windows as default IE will remain in the dominant position regardless of which browser has the best features. Having AOL and MSN both using IE must help too. Chances are that casual PC owners who just do a bit of browsing, a bit of emailing and type the occasional letter will have not even considered that anything other than IE exsists. Like the way people look for the "Microsoft Word" link on Linux boxes to type a letter. MS has so ingrained the general user base with their apps and their names that it will be an uphill struggle to get people to even realise there are alternative browsers out there. :(
Nothing seems to happen? Hello, what of all these features:
All of the features you mention were added more than a year ago, if I recall correctly. The comment was pointing out that Mozilla hasn't done anything groundbreaking in the last year or so.
What's your damage, Heather?
There is no browser.
I think after all I've seen, that's the biggest point, and the biggest reason why using Windows really stuck in my craw (well, other than crashing, being less efficient than Unix, crashing, not letting me do what I wanted unlike Unix systems, etc).
It was that it usually didn't matter what you did - if Microsoft put it in your face, the people would use it.
People don't start their browser - they start the Internet. They'll tell you so - they click on the icon marked "Internet" and off they go. They don't use a document editor, they use Word, and if they use Wordperfect they'll usually say "Wordperfect", though in the back of their head they'll say "that thing I use for editing typed stuff".
Mac users (and I'm one of them - recent convert, thank you for asking) use Safari because it's there.
My fear for Google is that people will say "I'll just google that", and type in a search string into their little browser bar, and be taken right to MSN search.
Microsoft: Hey, what's the problem with that? We're not a monopoly, after all!
Me: Yes, you are. Just stop pretending otherwise, please. While there are millions who honestly don't give a flying fuck, I do. This is no different than in the old USSR when there were two telivision channels - Channel 1 was propoganda, Channel 2 was a guy telling you "Hey, go back to Channel 2. There's nothing else here."
That's the only reason why I wish OS X would come to the i386 platform.
(I'm going to pause here because I know the screams of people foaming at the mouth. "Apple will never do it! They're addicted to hardware!" "If they did, Microsoft would do to Apple what they did to BeOS and threaten computer manufacturers to never let it on their systems".
I know - it will never happen, and that's why I use the term "wish".)
Or my hopes that as more businesses turn to Linux based solutions for the business and start putting it on the desktops to save themselves hordes of money rather than paying another huge Microsoft Enterprise Licensing fee, that more businesses will start being able to say "Well, the cost of making Microsoft angry is now less than putting Dell Linux on a system - so let's do that." (Of course, that will mean that somebody will have to do for Linux what Apple did for it's BSD based subsystem - oh, and make it easier to play games on Linux than it was trying to get Quake II installed.
I'm going to pause here again for more foaming at the mouth people telling me it was easy to get Quake II running on a Red Hat system if only I remember to compile support for something somewhere. I know, I'm an idiot, I bask in your knowledge and lay be belly and bar it at you to acknowledge your greatness. Feel better? I never got Quake II to really run on Linux, so I gave up and installed it on a Windows machine. Thanks for playing.)
I'm waiting and watching the future, so we'll have to see what it does.
My point? Browsers don't matter. Office suites don't matter. OS doesn't matter. What matters is that the user can sit down and do their shit (whatever particular shit that happens to be), and not think about how they do their shit. Once that happens, businesses can just change out the parts that the users need to get the cheapest/most efficient/most effective shit making stuff.
When that day is truly, completly realized - then it will be Microsoft who is in the shit, because they'll have to truly, honestly compete. Not just put up whatever shit they want and expect me to swallow it.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could very well be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
So, that would be Mozilla, IE and Mozilla which are big dogs.
And then kHTML, kHTML, Mozilla, Opera, and Mozilla.
And then the ever pressing decision of Mozilla against... oh. Mozilla. (They even have near identical interfaces, both being GTK2 based.)
The whole point of this long blabfest is that now is the time for a browser other than IE to emerge. MS has stated no further IE6 development will continue. No new features, no new standards compliance fixes, no nothing. Don't try to convince end-users about Mozilla's standards compliance. they don't care. Give them real reasons to switch, and they will.
Come on, that's like saying that if I went to fat camp I'd be the skinniest person there. IE ain't the poster child for a lithe browser, and Mozilla (not even 1.4) isn't either.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I love Mozilla, have contributed to Mozilla, recommend Mozilla, and use it for my everyday browing. It's a great browser!
But this guy does have one valid point when it comes to Mozilla - it needs BUSINESS WINS. Until companies start adopting Mozilla as their core browser technology it will likely be always relagated to the back room.
Does Mozilla have evangelists? If not, it needs some.
Outlook is not just an e-mail client. Outlook also provides groupware such as calendars, task management, and e-mail gateways to the same. Many people in a corporate environment depend on these features to help them stay organized. In Outlook, it is convenient when scheduling a meeting to look up the shared calendars of all potential attendees and try to schedule around potential conflicts. In Outlook, it is nice to send a task as a small, vCal (?) compatible e-mail attachment.
There are many open source applications (Evolution, for example) that can interoperate with Outlook in a mixed-OS environment. However, it's naive at best to think that Mozilla Mail can replace Outlook all by itself.
For more information, click here.
Is that all supposed to be true? I mean the facts seem ok but the structure of the piece resembles the ramblings of someone that is on waaaaay too much speed. Note for the future: Metaphors can only be stretched so far, at some point the facts need to stand on their own.
It would be interesting if it was better written, I guess that is what I am trying to say.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
The article seems to take Microsoft at face value when it says it can't change its browser. This is hogwash. It won't change its browser, because it is dominant.
I don't believe for a minute that the code base is so bloated that they can't change it. In the late 1990's, when they weren't dominant, new features and versions were released all the time.
The only reason MS spent money on IE in the first place was to keep people from viewing the operating system as a commodaty (gee, I can get everything I need through the web on any platform, why buy MS Windows). Once they established IE as the dominant web browser, they relaxed. People need to buy Windows cause it is the best (only for some sites) way to browse the web.
IE hasn't kept up with the times (CSS bugs, bad png support, no tabbed browsing, popup blocking, etc). But now that it is dominant, people write to its bugs. IE is the only browser that can view some websites. Even though I use Mozilla as my primary browser, I still fire up IE once or twice a week.
And Microsoft has no motivation to fix it. Why would they? When you have 95% of the desktop and 95% of the browser market, why spend a dime? Every version of IE they release costs them millions of dollars in development, testing and support. Why spend a lot of money to change a product that people are happy with?
Instead, Microsoft is concentrating its efforts on new ways to make money, like DRM and "safe computing" (which gives them a new profit center in code signing, validation, and security tools).
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.
Simply put, familiarity prevails. For the very same reasons, Linux will experience difficulty in the desktop market, OpenOffice won't replace MS Office, and majority of current Windows users will upgrade to Longhorn so that they can browse with IE. Unfortunately people believe that installing Joe shareware to kill popups and anti-virus to prevent hacks is the best available means to solve the fundamental problems with Windows, while they ignore superiority of other alternatives. Sigh...
I'm sorry, but what are these "major events"? I read the article and only saw an overview of the past and some predictions about the future. But there is no mention (that I could find) of any "major events" that are happening "for the first time in three years."
Is the major event that these guys have concluded that IE isn't viable long-term? That would mean that the major event is that these guys came to a conclusion, which sounds fairly minor to me. Maybe it's KHTML being used for Safari. I guess that could be major to a Mac person, even if the rest of the planet never notices.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
It's a web browser for heaven's sake! Why do people continually insist that a web browser be constantly updated with new "features" to prove it's any good? Mozilla is excellent as a web browser and other than a few braindead broken MS IE-only sites it has worked spectacularly for me since the pre-1.0 days.
I don't want my browser to sing, dance, and play mp3s. I don't want it to be a chat client or a mail app. I don't need it to play videos or act as my primary desktop interface. I just want something to render HTML, display text and a few simple graphics that aid in conceptualizing the text being presented to the reader.
But hey, that's just me. I'm old fashioned. Pop-ups and animated GIFs annoy me. Don't even get me started on the god damn sites that require Macromedia Flash or ActiveX.
The thing that this article seemed to ignore was the business reality of things. Internet Explorer will survive because Microsoft has huge coffers and will make it so in the interests of controlling API's. Mozilla will continue to survive because it's open source and the *nixes will always need browsers. Safari will continue to survive because Apple will make it so.
Opera is doomed on the desktop. Very few people are willing to pay money for a browser. The other projects survive because they can be given to users for zero cost. Opera may continue to be a niche player in the future, but ultimately it can't grow because it's not something people will pay for.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Download size is even sillier. I've got nearly a gig of MP3s, a web cache of over a gig, and you think I care about 60 Mb vs. 6 MB? Or even 100 MB to 1 MB? 60 MB is .05% of a new 120 GB drive.
And spare me the "Wait.... what if I'm running on my old 386SX-16 Mhz? "
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Was that a troll? Behind every browser is a person... sometimes a few people. Capitalists prefer to call them "consumers". When you control the browser, you can mess with these consumers' access to information. So, you can give them your own definition of "terrorist" or "monopoly" or what have you. You can send them to *your" online store, coerce them into using *your* identity verification scheme. Et cetera.
You see, *information* has become increasingly important to society in the past hundred years or so. When all the technological means (from hydraulics to electronics to genetics) to do anything are already in place, the only thing preventing anyone from doing anything is information. Control over information is power. And when you have power, but appear powerless (people saying "I don't get it. Who cares?").... well, that's the best kind of power.
The problem of moron users with unrealistic expectations, however, is outside the realm of the Source(TM).
Microsoft's decision to move to a browser inseparable from the OS will become a major thorn in their own side, and possibly end up helping out the various alternative browsers out there.
The key thing to notice is that for Windows 95 through Windows XP, IE 6 is effectively the last Microsoft browser those OS's will be able to run. This means that, in order to see any new features from IE 7+ users will need to replace their entire OS. This is where Microsoft's huge marketshare starts to work against them. Even now, there are large numbers of people who refuse to upgrade from Win9x because their current machine cannot handle the newest versions or because their happy with don't see the point in upgrading. Microsoft will have to fight there own installed user base.
Case in point: I have one machine with an Intel processor in it. It's an old Gateway laptop. It was running NetBSD for learning purposes. I needed to be able to run a few windows-only apps, so I broke down and decided to install Windows. This laptop can't really handle anything over Win98SE, so that's what I installed. In the process, I ran Windows Update and updated IE to version 6. But, according to Microsoft, after version 6, there will never be a higher version of IE available for this machine. So what am I to do? I'm not going to spend money on a new machine, at least not another x86 machine. Fortunately, Firebird is available, and is more than up to the task. My little laptop will be surfing the web for at the near future.
If websites start designing for features found in IE7, large groups of people will be left behind. Large groups of people will complain because sites don't display properly in their 'old' version of IE6; sort of like the situation Netscape 4 was in. In Netscape 4's case, when a better alternative came on the scene ( IE4 ), people dumped Netscape. People will now be faced with a new decision; do I shell out the cash to upgrade my OS and possibly my machine, or is there a way to view the latest and greatest websites on my current machine?
Since IE will cease to be an option in this case, people will be forced to look for alternatives. Hopefully, one of the alternative browsers will be there with open arms.
The browser wars are over. Pitting products against each other is now pointless, because the rules of engagement have changed.
The new conflict is the Standards War, where the features (or lack thereof) of the products stand toe to toe. The W3C now decrees the rules of war, not various marketing departments.
A side skirmish in this will be about user interface: tabs, popup blocking, etc.
The announcement about IE6 development being at an end is not news: a resourceful googler could put together the pieces months ago, as I did. The only thing not verified yet is a bit about IE7 only being useable on an MSN account, which seems like MS shooting themselves in the foot.
MacIE suffered its fate because MS is a poor loser, but a smart one. They know Apple is going to do the same thing on Mac that MS did on Windows.
Many people (the author of the article included) forget that Mozilla is not a commercial product, which is why there is still a Netscape branded browser.
Many forward thinking people are beginning to realize that over the next decade, the desktop based browser will become an ever shrinking peice of the browser market. PDA's, phones, kitchen appliances will all have browsers. The embedded browser is coming fast. Is IE6 capable of being embedded in anything? The correct question is: Is Windows capable of being embedded in anything? Probably not. Will IE7 be embeddable? Ask about Longhorn instead. Mozilla (Gecko) is capable of being embedded, so MS has already fallen behind once again.
I personally wouldn't even put Opera on the battlefield, they're like Switzerland: capable and organized, but too small to make a difference and not interested anyway.
No longer does IE have to be the best - it just has to be good enough.
Thing is, users don't decide if it's good enough. We (the developers [and our employers]) are the ones that determine if it is good enough. If we use features that IE doesn't support in our websites, IE is not good enough.
If [phoenix|firebird|???] realizes it's potential quickly enough, it's unlikely that it will fail to gain market share, particularly since it's open source nature would make it ideally suited as a vehicle for OEMs to make a mark on the users desktop.
For example, I could see HP rebadging [phoenix|firebird|???] and making it the default browser for their systems, particularly if their experiments with Mandrake go well... they could support the same browser on Linux and Mac and reduce training costs in their call centers, a pretty good incentive if you ask me.
Besides all this, IE is likely to continue to be a vehicle for virii, and Microsoft are unlikely to take any steps against intrusive advertisers, which means those will remain two areas where another browser can offer real added value to the consumer and motivate them to switch on their own. Lets be realistic, installing another browser is not exactly rocket science, is it?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Seems like he missed the point. The point is WHY don't users care? The answer is because users care about filling out their forms, doing their work, making their sale, finding their information, buying things, etc.
I have been using Firebird - excellent browser, however, I know for a fact that multi-billion dollar corporations will be buying applications that are web-enabled (via Microsoft web servers) and will ONLY be compatible with Microsoft web browsers, i.e. IE. And so, by using an IE pre-installed configuration with their Monopoly OS, and by leveraging the familiarity angle (I learned it at and use it at work, so I will use it at home), MS will continue to dominate as the mainstream browser.
The browser is finally evolving from an information gathering/presenting tool, into an application client (a "web" front-end) for several if not all applications to be developed in the now and coming years...
If vendors continue to make deals with Microsoft, and they will $$$, and users continue to only care about making the sale, filling out forms, buying things, etc, (and they will), then users will continue to use IE - at the office and at home.
To swing any browser war leverage away from Microsoft, application vendors must start building applications that are not IE-only. This is why companies like IBM are supporting java (among other reasons). "You can run our applications using any standards compatible browser." Which includes IE, but DOES NOT REQUIRE it.
To not undertand or care about why users don't care about what browser they use is to not understand the browser war at all...
Ultimately there are only two things that matter: information and using information (potential information and kinetic information). The information store has become more and more a database of some kind. The informatin vehicle has become more and more a web browser. Control the vehicle and you have a chance at controlling the store. Microsoft controls the vehicle, and are mounting their assault on the store. You want to control the vehicle? Don't forget about the store. Understand why users do what they do (frightening), and you may see the bigger picture (more frightening) that shows MS attempting to control everything - from your mouse and keyboard to your OS, to your web browser, to your database, to your datacenter...
Loyal_Serf
NTLM support
We're talking "groundbreaking", not "new feature for Mozilla". This is not new in any way; Internet Explorer has had this for years.
rich-edit control (Midas)
Internet Explorer has this for years (contenteditable).
image auto-sizing
Internet Explorer has had this for years.
XML prettyprinting
Internet Explorer has had this for years.
link prefetching
The general idea has been around since the early 90s, but Mozilla has now implemented it based around the link element (pages which use it are rarer than icecream vans at the north pole).
more info on Page Info panel
extra tab browsing options
Come on, we're talking big improvements that will make people switch browsers, not tweaks to an obscure dialogue box or a couple of extra menu items.
download manager improvements
Again, download managers are ancient.
more intelligent autocomplete
An incremental improvement, nothing revolutionary.
(oh, and for the record, I think Internet Explorer is a piece of shit, and I spend way too long every *day* working around its bugs).
Unfortunately, the author has somewhat misunderstood Opera's role in the browser wars.
The next generation browser wars will not be fought on the desktop - it will be fought on mobile devices, and on embedded devices, a market where Opera doesn't have any competition from either Mozilla, IE or Konqueror/Safari.
Opera have partnerships with Sony Ericsson, which brings their phone to devices like SonyEricsson P800. Furthermore. Opera is also available, and by far the superior alternative for other mobile devices such as Nokia 3650/7650, effectively bringing a sixth-generation browser with full CSS/DOM-support to handhelds.
Unlike the Mozilla project, Konqueror or Apple, Opera has created partnerships and made deals with a lot of companies, as outlined here.
As a desktop browser, Mozilla will remain what it is today: An outsider. The browser is too large, or bloated, if you will, with features noone hardly ever uses (And, yes, that goes for Mozilla Firebird as well) - for many desktop users it's just too complicated, and too slow.
Konqueror will remain a competitive alternative for which platforms it exists - it won't be any better or worse than other alternatives.
As for Safari, it may well become the dominant alternative for Mac users, but being what they are, a minority, Safari will remain a minority browser.
Opera is available for all major desktop platforms, and will compete on equal ground with the other browsers.
As for the behemoth of web-browsing, Internet Explorer; it's days are numbered. Following the statistics for a site like AWStats is interesting reading: The percentage of MSIE users has been decreasing from month to month. Granted, AWStats is a specialty site, mostly interesting to web developers, so it's statistics may be somewhat skewed. Keep in mind though: Web developers are what has made the browser market what it is today, it's web developers that chose to develop for MSIE.
Finally, the author failed to mention the perhaps most important of the browsing competitors of the future: The Aggregator, enabling users to subscribe to XML feeds, instead of visiting a site by traditional means. The aggregator market is a highly diverse market, with products like NNTP//RSS, Amphetadesk, Radio, RssBandit, FeedReader, FeedDemon and a whole bunch of both commercial and homegrown readers. Many of these either utilise some common browser rendering engine, convert content to plaintext, or have a minimal HTML rendering engine.
http://virtuelvis.com/
Hello? Screw 40 instances, use 100 Tabs instead.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Checking memory boundries is a OS work, not an application work.
Also, if you are using Linux, remember that, when it is low on memory, it simply kills applications that are consuming lots of memory. And Mozilla tends to be only a process with several threads...
I don't think that will happen for a long long time, if ever.
After all, there are a nontrivial amount of web designers who use the mac.
Don't kid yourself. Market areas vary, but not that much. Most web work is still carried out on a PC, in order to work with Internet Explorer, which is what the users use. The Mac market share is still only 2% or lower, even if the majority of them are web designers (which I'd be surprised about), it's still mostly insignificant. I have a friend who uses a Mac (but he has done for a very long time now). Whenever he does web design work, he has to get me to test it out in IE (i run it under wine). Of course, it never works because he uses InDesign or something stupid to design his web pages, so the markup is full of crud that only looks right on his box, at his screen resolution. He doesn't know much about CSS, so it normally takes most of the evening (or several) to sort it out. Very few people are willing to screw about like that, especially not in business.
You appear to have overlooked the fact that there is no KHTML based browser on Konqueror. It relies heavily upon Qt, which is available under a free license only on X11 and now the Mac.
The Windows version of Qt is still what makes TrollTech most of their money. They have no incentive to release it.
The KWQ stub library that Apple used to make Safari without paying Qt developer costs is written in Objective C++ (i kid you not), and is tied to Cocoa. Cocoa of course is a proprietary set of APIs, which are not portable.
As such, if anything other than IE6 is going be targetted anytime soon by the masses (not likely) it'll be Gecko, as that is what people have access to, and it's available on every platform, and (at least on Linux and Windows) it's the most popular 2nd place browser.
That article, and a million others like it (written by folks who don't know much about the Mac's browser market), claim that Safari came along and was sooo awesome that IE's development on the Mac platform had no choice but to fizzle out.
:) Apple began to look at hiring Dave Hyatt and possibly adopting Camino since they were the only glimmer of hope we had to browse the web with any dignity. The only problem with Camino was, as Dave himself has mentioned, that it didn't have a native rendering engine. A gecko browser has less speed potential (among other things) then a native browser. So, what did Apple do? They hired Dave, took a bunch of the great concepts that Camino had, ported KHTML over to X (since it could run natively unlike gecko), got some additional Apple developers, started building in Cocoa, and had Safari beta 1 out in only a few months.
...well, at least not now.
Honestly, that couldn't be anything further from the truth.
Microsoft hasn't legitimately updated Mac IE for -years-. Of course, they've released small fixes for critical bugs and security updates; however, that's it. Mac IE on OS X was littered with hundreds of horribly annoying, very obvious, bugs that have been present since it shipped with Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000. That's almost 3 years!
Just about every OS X user loathed IE X. It was slow, it crashed, it had UI problems, and it had rendering problems that it's OS 9 cousin didn't have.
Apple -had- to make Safari. Microsoft was going to let Mac IE rot until Mac users were forced to adopt a better default system browser. Yet, OmniWeb was not standards compliant, Mozilla was too slow with quartz and didn't have a Mac like UI, Opera was still full of bugs, etc.
But then Camino/Chimera came along.
If Microsoft really gave a damn about IE X they could've built an awesome cocoa browser within 6 to 8 months. Shess... they HAVE enough money. Or, at the very least, they could've fixed the hundreds of tiny bugs that IE X already has. If they did that, there would be no Safari.
MS is getting back to it's old dirty tactics with the Mac market. They're killing IE, they bought VPC, and they are suing the makers of Real PC. Soon, they only way to check your JavaScript with MS JScript or HTML in Tasman will be to have access to an x86 box. Moreover, soon IE exclusive web sites will be Windows exclusive.
This is really obnoxious.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Interesting... you seem to mention the same browser several times:
No, but some browsers use the same renderer. Safari and Konq may both use khtml, but they are significantly different browsers. The browser is a package that has many parts, one of which is the renderer.
Example: As you point out, both Epiphany and Galeon use the Gecko renderer. Also, both have an interface that uses GTK. However, they are different browsers. They handle bookmarks differently. They have different context (right-click) menus. They handle middle-clicks differently. For the way I work, Galeon is a great browser, while Epiphany is a frustrating experience.
The rendering engine is only a small part of the web browser. It's important, but it's not everything.
Of course you're right, so it's a bit of a dead horse. I must disclose that I use Mozilla exclusively for mail and browsing, so that should say a bit about how "unhappy" I am with them. I think they're moving largely in the right direction.
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 wouldn't say completely - he seemed to be using sort of a split argument. They're too bloated now, and by the time they "get it," they're going to rename everything and kill their branding. I do think it's a terrible idea to rename everything.
I suppose his "bottom line" point is that the Mozilla team isn't doing a lot to make themeselves accessible to the general public. That's OK if they don't care about the general public, but I think they do. Therefore, a consistent name and a streamlined configuration interface (even as an option) might be a good idea. I think the next version of mozilla will be great for my needs, but I don't know how generally accessible it will be.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Hell, there's even an IE skin for Moz, so they don't have to miss anything!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Lots of comments above suggest faking the browser id to mimic IE when using Firebird (etc.). This is a terrible idea because when companies look at there server logs they get a disproportionate idea of the market-share of IE. This will increase the proliferation of IE-specific sites.
Open source browsers need to be detecting this trend and taking steps to workaround it perhaps by warning the user that they have found a website with certain 'incompatibilites' and offering a list of different ways to browse it - but certainly not by changing the software id to mimic MSIE. It's counter-productive and it admits defeat.
Just my ha'pennys worth,
Stem
It really annoys me that there are standards for almost everything around us, yet as of July 2003, Web Browsing remains a mess of incompatibility and pointless fragmentation.
Pick up a telephone and one can call others all over the world. Fire up (Mozilla,Safari,Opera) and sooner or later, one is bound to run into serious (read: major incompatibility/security/crashing) problems with at least one site.
I'd like to know what's stopping the IEEE from getting their act together and ironing out THE Web Browsing standard. Don't point at the W3C and say "the IEEE's involvement would be redundant. We already have a web standards body... bla bla bla." Microsoft doesn't care about the W3C, which is glaringly obvious now, and that is the group's fatal shortcoming. Only a small group of web-savvy individuals see their recommendations as The Bible of web standards, and I can't see this ever changing.
I wish people from the IEEE, Macromedia, Adobe, Apple, AOL/Mozillla and Microsoft got together and came up with a spec that eliminated the fragmentation. Unfortunately, it seems that day will never happen. And that's a pity.
Reading the article reminded me of something written by an obsessed teenager describing his ex-girlfriend.
"She's a slut because she wouldn't sleep with me!"