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, I know that Mozilla and IE and Netscape are the big dogs relatively speaking.
What about Konqueror, Safari for the Macheads, Galeon, Opera or Firebird?
I have always liked Galeon myself. Still Epiphany is supposed to be good and there are a zillion reasons for using an alt browser. What are yours?
ACK
Funnily enough I was just checking the stats for a client web site and for the first time both Mozilla (about 5%) and Linux (about 2%) got into my report to the client. The web site is for engineers and my prediction is that engineers are going to be the first significant user of linux on the desktop over the next couple of years.
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.
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.
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. :(
I agree IE MAC was certainly moree css compliant then the windows version, but only slightly so. IE MAC is slow and slugish on most macs comapred to just about every other browser it also crashes frequently. The macs i use are top end, with lots of ram, lots of hd space and they are constamtly replaced and teh same problems persist with IE MAC. Saffari is not bad, but it's not that hot...i'm not a big mozilla fan, buty the mozilla family is tops in OS X land, it is the fastest most compliant browser i have used on a MAC.
Granted, a lot of web developers have had to deal with IE, but it seems to me with the only mention of Moz as being in trouble is, well, kinda stupid. I keep reading Moz keeps getting better and better and sure enough, with each release it does get better and better. And so do the browsers based on Gecko. If anything, Moz has crossed over that hump that IE is hitting now. And let's not forget all the neat stuff coming out in XUL. Sure, it needs to be faster, but the possibilities are interesting. Especially if you don't wanna be M$'s bitch.
Maybe it's because I mostly focus on enterprise apps and not too much on client side stuff, but frankly, this guy downplays standards too much, which to me is bizarre because the whole non-standards thing is how we got into this whole mess of one browser no innovation crap. Yah sure, standards take long and companies innovate faster. But, look who you signed on the dotted line when all you web creators went strictly IE. Yes, the f-ing devil.
I probably live in the dreamy stratosphere demanding on most of my projects that we find ways around IE only stuff and make the application robust, secure, and stable, which to me and end users is far more important than js, layers and whatnot. Sure, I also know there are plenty of people who need jazzy sites and have to deal with these issues but you only have to be burned so many times to realize that you need to pull your hand away from the flame.
I guess though, I just feel like design on Moz based browsers and tweak for the rest. Because in time, these scales are going to tip out of IE's favor. I know, I'm in the minority, but I also want my stuff to work. I sacrafice a little zing for a better development experience. Cuz in the end, the users don't care.
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?
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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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
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.
As long as the Microsoft IIS server continues to favor IE, (can't find the older /. articles about IIS circumventing the standard HTTP protocol to serve pages faster to IE, and also display crappy pages on Mozilla) rather than serving pages fairly across all browsers, and continues to be as widely as Apache, IE will still remain in the game. Simply because general home users wont understand why some pages crap out with Mozilla/etc (not designed for any browser other than IE or due to discrimination by IIS).
It's a pity Apache doesn't start favoring Mozilla/Opera over IE, but I guess that wouldn't be fair play.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In the beginning...
In the beginning was the review, and it was OK. It used Titles for Everything, and as such was a Trailblazer in some ways. It quickly became Old and strangely played the role of The Great Distractor.
The Players
This is Part 2
Part the Third
There is a great deal of discussion about browsers. Some of it makes Good Sense, but sadly much of it Does Not. There is a War. That much is certain, but
Who Will Reign Victorious
Will the Aged Dragon obtain the Dentures of Power and regain the Throne of Browser Supremacy or will his son the Flaming Sparrow recently renamed the Songbird of Fire throw down the Gauntlet of "Bring it on"? Only one thing is certain.
The Reviewer is unsure
Finis
I've been a daily Mozilla user for 2 years now. I love it and in my opinion, it's superior to IE6 in a lot of ways.
As good as Moz is, it won't unseat IE anytime soon. IE could degenerate to a festering piece of donkey dung and it will still remain the most widely used browser.
Have a look at that:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
For the majority of those IE6 users, IE is synonymous with "The Internet" Unless there is some radical new browser related technology that MS is unable to embrace and extend befofe the little guy's get their implementation out, IE will be around for a long long time.
When I was in college from 95-99, it was easy for me to be anti-Microsoft. I didn't particularly know much about it, but I knew that my Win95 machine crashed and therefore those MS people must be morons.
I knew that there were a lot of others that hated them, so I just sort of figured it was the cool thing to do, hate those bastards.
Then I started learning more econ and started thinking less as a college student and more rationally in terms of how MS got there, and I stopped hating MS.
That said, I did hate IE. It sucked nuts. Mosaic was total ass, and at the time Netscape was the bees knees.
I continued to use Netscape throughout college and was annoyed whenever I had to use IE.
Then I graduated and began to actually program - my particular projects were nearly all DHTML web applications that were large scale ports of existing legacy apps, moving to the web to allow easier use and upkeep... so they said.
DHTML on Netscape sucked the hugest and hairy nuts, so we told our clients that they would have to use IE (these were private applications, used in house at many large universities, we weren't designing storefronts that needed to be cross-browser).
I hadn't seen IE in a long time and was really enjoying working with it compared to the clunky and awkward Netscape.
As a result, up until about a week ago, I was all for IE. It was fast, worked well with DHTML, and most importantly in the past year or two - it has the Google Toolbar.
I have been trying out Mozilla for the past few years, but haven't been all that impressed by it - in fact I was really put off by it at first.
But I just installed 1.4 last week and was really impressed with it - and once I saw that I could get the same Google Toolbar functionality that I used all the time, I realized that I really had a reason to switch now.
I personally am still sticking with IE at work, b/c I do a lot of IT admin stuff on an MS network, and using IE makes it easier to do some of the MS updates.
At home I will likely make the switch over to Mozilla to keep track of many e-mail accounts, as well as for my personal web surfing.
I'm at the point now where I am starting up my own web venture, so I am actually going to have to test for cross browser look and feel, as well as functionality.
My first test at it showed that Mozilla 1.4 is better at dealing with png graphics than IE 6.something. Mozilla also renders a page faster.
I haven't used Opera in over two years, I suppose I will need to test that as well on the site. I don't have a Mac, so I can't test any of their browsers.
I think those should totally cover my target market (I actually think in terms of the business, it will be nearly 99% IE users).
What does this have to do with anything? Not a whole lot I guess.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I've been using Opera (in "free with banner-ad" mode) for maybe a couple hundred years now -- don't know how long for real, because I cringe at the thought of using Explorer. I used to have to switch to IE for some work-required sites, but the new version (7.11, aka the "Slurpee" version) has whittled my IE requirements down to just one boneheaded site.
But the best test came when my mother sat down to do a job search using IE. She was immediately assailed by popups, so I helpfully pointed out that you don't get popups with Opera unless you want them. I showed her where to click... and she's hooked. Score one more for the Norwegians!
On the other hand, my wife and 12-year-old daughter don't like Opera. In both cases, I think it's because Opera doesn't have enough security holes, and it interferes with their game downloads. I shudder to think what I might find if I were to install ZoneAlarm...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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.
With the arrival of IE 4.0 I became a serious supporter of the MS browser because they seemed to just get things right. The rendering speed was great, and they supported a richer base of standards for web technology particularly CSS. But here it is 2 major versions later and I am an avid supported of Phoenix, which some may understand to be the version re-named to firebird that will replace the older mozilla packages.
I use Phoenix because they care enough to innovate in an area that MS has all but ignored. It is almost unbearable for me to surf without tabbed browsing now, pop up blocking, and enhanced configuration for what attributes of the browser scripts are allowed to modify, as well as their built in download history add up to create a browser that I feel allows me to determine my own destiny while surfing.
Furthermore as a web developer, the community oriented plugins that allow me to dynamically alter the DOM to enhance things like page layout, validation tests, etc. add fuel to the fire.
I hope that MS will stop working so hard at getting media player integrated into the browser and go back and add the features like tabbed browsing, enhanced privacy, etc. But for now, the best browser out there IMO is Phoenix.
I mean, does anyone really need a new version of a .pdf viewer, or notepad, or any other user-level application that has reached a stable, relatively bug free condition that effectively does it's job?
In fact, this ties nicely with Microsoft's Liscensing V. 6 program, where they have a nice, stable revenue stream while not actually requiring any actual programming (I'll refrain from using the term 'innovation') on thier part.
This does also raise an interesting paradigm shift for the Gnu/Linux community. In essence, the programmers, in creating a sable, user friendly computing environment should be working themselves out of a job, since once they're done, there should be little to do, but periodic refinements (we may already be there in certain places.) Those programmers can then go out and focus on really improving (and innovating) the way we interact with our computers.
OK...
I can do this. I am, after all,
a superhero!
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.
This whole browser thing has been going on for so many years, and yet I don't think the question has ever been answered; if a company/group wins the browser wars, what does it get them? Microsoft, Apple, etc. pour how much money into development of software they give away - where's the reward/compensation for the investment?
The only thing I can think of is an assumption that people would choose an OS based on its proprietary browser (Explorer7 or Safari) but I think everyone would agree that the decision would probably work the other way around (OS first, browser selection consequential).
If that's not it, what's the answer (the answer to a shareholder's question, perhaps) for pumping money into browser development? Is there a day of reckoning fast approaching when we'll all start paying for browsers and this long-running war is just for future market credibility and establishing a price point?
RTFM; please, I beg you.
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
I think that the pretense of the article is wrong. When I reached the point of the article where it said "end users do not care about browsers" I felt like I should stop reading. You are the end user even if you are a developer. If no-one cares about it then why write about it? If no-one understands or cares about CSS then why mention it again and again?
Not only is the article poorly worded but it states all it's theories and conjectures as if they were facts! Where is the proof?
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
User: Browser? What's a browser?
Web guy: A browser is the application---er, software program---that you use to view web pages on the Internet.
User: Oh. How about them Mets?
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
... I'm working my holiday away at a computer store. You know what? 90% of those who bring in their computers complain that their PCs are lagging.
I ask, "Do you use IE?" They all reply, "Yes!"
I install Ad-aware and 198 items removed later: "Wow! Thats fast!"
Using IE is like walking into a battlefield with a big bullseye painted on you.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
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
This guy interprets Microsoft's "improving IE any more will require changes to the operating system" as meaning that the IE codebase is so bloated and stuffed that they can't fix bugs anymore without a major rewrite.
Here's a different theory for you: Microsoft isn't fixing the IE6 css bugs because they don't care, and the "operating system" comment means that IE7 is going to try to move away from HTML and into web-based embedded windows ".Net" (or whatever) applications. Microsoft has from their perspective won the browser wars, and they are finally ready for their long-awaited "Make The Web = Microsoft" step that that whole "open standard" thing has prevented them from for so long.
Just a thought. But probably not all that paranoid.
What really interests me is, what happens now that IE has dumped the whole cross-platform-y ness thing? IE's big strength right now is that everyone targets it. IE HTML is standard HTML. What really interests me is the idea that at some point in the future, the idea of targeting Konqueror will begin to begin to look increasingly attractive. After all, there are a nontrivial amount of web designers who use the mac. I'm sure Microsoft is hoping that these web designers will be willing to switch to Windows just so that they can see what their web pages look like for 90% of the customers.
However, unless things reach the point where (say) Banks can afford to totally ignore all Macintosh and Linux customers (instead of just giving them substandard service), we may start to see the ubiquity of "optimized for IE only" disappear. Big sites like targeting only one browser. If someone comes up with a windows version of Konqueror in the near future (and preferably finds a way to make it muscle into the file browser in IE's place), that browser may well become Konqueror. Konqueror already has a pretty decent amount of mindshare in both Linux and Mac (I don't know any mac users at this point that don't use Safari over IE) and the potentiality that Konqueror could become the one browser that's actually *the same* across *all* platforms might start to look very attractive to web developers at some point-- the sort of thing that Mozilla/Gecko might have at some point fufilled if it had ever become, you know, not painful to use. (Galeon/Phoenix and similar projects may still someday allow Gecko to take on that role.)
At the least, which sounds more attractive; tell your windows base, some of which have a KHTML-based browser, "you have to have KHTML to view my site", or tell EVERYONE except those with the brand new IE8.NET2WINDOWS2007WEB "you can't use my site at all".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
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.
A few years ago, in London, during the Internet silly season, somebody had the bright idea of gathering sysadmins and web developers together and plying them with free beer. This happened on the first Tuesday of each month for about a year or so. So I went to Techie Tuesday, as it was known, once. Of course the majority of the punters were recruiters who had rapidly changed into sweatshirts on their way up west from the city. There was the odd nerd, though. After some deeply unfulfilling chit-chat with one such low-life, I was asked the question 'So, what is your favourite browser'. I left and never went back.
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?
most people don't care
Exactly. That is why it's important for those of us that do care to make them care even less. Make browsers a commodity. Make browsers that are customizable but also standardizable. We need to develop a standard UI that every browser can morph itself into (OT, but I would suggest doing the same for desktops/window managers as well). That way, people that don't nit-pick about css support and html engine implementation won't know that you've switched their browser to the latest and greatest implementation. Meanwhile, those that do care can customize their browser how ever the hell they want. If someone comes up and needs to use your browser, just hit the button for generic mode and they're set.
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).
Firebird crashes when there are maybe 40 instances
IE typically causes problems with that many instances too. The simplest solution to the problem is to find porn sites that don't have so many popups.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Firebird crashes when there are maybe 40 instances, each with 3 to 5 tabs, and some tabs are closed.
Yeah, I had similar problems with my old '91 Sentra. When towing six elephants, there was serious buffetting at transonic speeds. They should really get some aero engineers to look at that.
That's part of it, but IE is also the better browser... IE passed NN/Mozilla/etc in quality around IE 3 which was...1997?
/. for not testing my pages) so I'm more familiar with them.
I'm a front-end web developer, so I usually have a range of browsers on my kit, and use them all on a regular basis.
Personally, my browser of choice is Opera, but I'm finding more and more that my second choice is becoming Netscape - and this from someone who remembers well the nightmare that was NS4.x (it still makes me shudder). Mozilla's pretty good too, I like it, I just have to use NS6 and 7 as part of my job (and cos I'll get bitch-slapped by
I'd agree that IE3 was probably better than NS3, and that IE4 kicked the crap out of NS4, but lately, I'm finding IE to be slow and buggy, and it's literally the last browser I start when nothing else will do (hotmail, anyone?).
Just my 2p, but imho the only reason IE's still the most commonly used browser is that it's what comes on most people's kits. It used to be the best browser out there - it's not any more. Gimme cookie controls, popup blocking, tabbed browsing every time...
Warning: May contain nuts
Kind of impressed with it. I'm a big fan of Mozilla (I kinda *like* the swiss-army-knife approach). However, when setting up my son's account on my home computer, I found that Playhouse Disney works better on Konquerer. I've also used Opera and I like it, but Java apps seem to crash it a lot in my experience. Were it not for that, I think I'd prefer it to Mozilla.
BTW - my son is 2 1/2 years old. He calls my Debian installation "Penguin and Dragon" after the boot Logo and KDE splash screen. I actually installed Debian because I'd heard good things about the childrens program "gcompris". It has definately lived up to what I've heard about it.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
- Can the browser show me all the websites I go to like they're supposed to be seen ?
- How nice is it to use ?
- Will it run on my computer ?
I think you can see how the features you mentioned map onto these three points (except for XUL, that's just pointless), but one should always keep in mind that the users think in general terms, not specifics.This means that they won't be saying "I switched to Mozilla because it halves ping times !", they will be saying "Hey, my friend Bob showed me this trick I can use to stop popups from shwoing up... it's probably illegal but what the heck". Later on, they might say, "hey, Bob's trick works pretty well, but now I can't see movies in my browser for some reason... I guess I'll put up with the popups". (Note: that's just an example, Mozilla probably handles Flash anf WMV just fine).
In other words, only the user-visible features are important, and the margins are razor-thin. One missing feature, such as correct CSS support, DHTML implementation, or that "deny unrequested popups" button, can mean the difference between victory and oblivion.
This is why I believe that Mozilla is ultimately doomed. The people who make it think in terms of XML, XUL, ZYZ, not in terms of "how can we make the users like us". Opera has a shot, because they are actually trying to make money with their browser (as opposed to a political statement). However, paying money for browsers is a new idea that probably won't catch on. This leaves the Mac crowd (which will always be there), and IE as far as the eye can see (because it comes with the OS, and it's the path of least resistance). Sad, but that's the way things currently stand.
>|<*:=
Unfortunately for Opera, though, the Sympathetic Outsider role seems to have been scratched from the script.
The article seems to take the stance that Opera's future is bleak, because it doesn't have a feasible chance to overcome any of the King browsers. I agree that Opera doesn't have a shot at doing that, but does it *have* to overcome these guys to survive? Can their role as a company that survives by sales and ad revenue from their browser (their only product) perpetuate itself? I hope it is not just a matter of short time before Opera caves, but can it be avoided?
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 &
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
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 article author is correct - there is an opportunity now for lots of people to take on a new browser. Pop-up blocking alone is worthwhile.
How do do it? Firebird release, AOL style! You build a custom CD image with firebird set up in the most friendly way, perhaps with a quick tutorial explaining what tabs are and how popups are blocked. Then anyone can download the image, burn some CD's and make use of AOL kiosks in stores to distribute the browser images. Put a snazzy cover on the front explaining "Free browser! Blocks popups dead!! Tab support!! Better online bank support!!" and at least a few people would take them, and tell others about the browser as well.
Key is to make sure the windows login integration code is in place so the things will work at work, also the distro should have mozilla mimic IE ID strings close enough that detection sites will not block the browser.
Make sure the CD works OK on the Mac too, even though the Mac has Safari there are times when it's nice to have Mozilla around.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
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.
I've heard that suggestion made a few times before on slashdot, but I've never thought AOL would be brave (or stupid) enough to try a browser swap on their customers. I think AOL's reasons for not making an all out switch boils down to one simple question:
Will we alienate/confuse/loose customers by making a change from IE to another browser?
It's a bet-the-company decision not to be taken lightly. Yes, I love Mozilla/Gecko. Yes, I'd love to see Mozilla get distributed to the masses. Yes, not being tied to IE would seem to ultimately benefit AOL. But, if I were in their shoes, I'd have to admit I'd be wary of making a sweeping change like that too - even given the major investment they already have in Mozilla. There are just too many unknowns in terms of customer satisfaction. And I'd be worried that since a browser is such a huge part of the overall internet experience, a browser swap would be a drastic change that could send customers elsewhere.
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.
The reason IE is getting the overhaul that it's receiving is so that it can be fully integrated into Microsofts DRM efforts. Microsoft is moving towards making it so that every single bit of data that moves across your PC has a digital signature. IIS is a part of this effort as well. The next major iteration of IIS will include server verified signatures with all of the files. Signatures that only IE will be able to process. This will go one step beyond the Key signatures that you know today in the web world... Then Microsoft will toute their platform as the only true one-to-one path of content control for publishers. ("Look, we can track every single file anywhere, and you can even put an 'end of life' on your file to make sure people don't retain a copy or mirror of the data! Isn't that great!")
...two years isn't all that much time people, and unless something radical happens in the OSS world **right now**, it will come and go and MS will be even deeper entrenched.
Don't believe me? Read your EULA with Media Player 9. This program is the priming piece of their technology on the user end, and fundamentally changes all of your Microsoft software rights the moment you install it... and they've already trained a whole new generation of users to call MS everytime they want to activate their OS.
You'll also start to see this implemented in the next year or so when they start to offer limited productivy aps to next generation X-Box Live subscribers (eg, Longhorn web services).
Attack of the Mozilla Clones!?!
Ok, ok, I'll go hide in a corner now...
-B
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.
The article says nothing about the cell phone browser war soon that's brewing. As we throw out WAP for full website functionality on a mobile this war will increase.
IMHO Opera is the mobile browser king right now. They make an excellent product for both Symbian OS and Nokia.
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
Right, but that's part of the problem. Because they use the same guts, let's say my mail portion is chugging - I bring up the browser and it doesn't refresh. Integrating things that tightly makes for some significant bulk. Admittedly, they seem to realize this, but it means that Mozilla, as of 1.4, is bulky as heck.
Point is, if you don't use Mozilla's mail and such, then it's effectively a browser to you. And you still get the bulk and such.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.
More seriously, the article completely misses the reasons why the browser wars were so important in the mid 90s and so irrelevant now. At the time, the impact of the web was still unclear (and open to influence), and Netscape proclaimed from the rooftops that by controlling the browser they effectively controlled a new operating system capable of challenging the Windows monopoly on the desktop. What's more, they were right. Microsoft took this hubris seriously enough to throw major-league resource behind the IE development effort. This, coupled with Netscape's inability to handle its hypergrowth, led to the status quo, where IE is the only browser that matters for 95% of all PC users.
If someone were to exploit the nefarious CSS bugs that lurk in the bowels of IE and somehow achieve dominance in the PC browser market, it still wouldn't matter. The browser no longer represents a threat to Windows' hegemony. HTML rendering is now a commodity, a feature in an array of widgets that people are accustomed to using on their PC desktop. In other words, MS was right: the browser is part of the operating system.
As a software developer I can affirm that it is a joy and pleasure to have widgets like CHtmlView and CHtmlEditView (sorry, I am a - gasp! - MFC developer) available for easy integration into apps. Personally I don't give a hoot whether IE or something else is powering that widget, and nor do my users. Value is now being added by building sophisticated structures around the HTML renderer: support for XML web services and RSS feeds, drag and drop with other apps, external navigators (like tree views) that customize the browsing experience to a particular use case. This is today's competitive landscape, and the good news is that there's still plenty of scope to complement and compete with Microsoft.
Peer Pressure
Opera, while a nice, lean, fast browser, has a couple of major flaws in it that would ever keep it from being the king of the heap:
1) It isn't free. People haven't been paying for browsers since the web first started. IE was always free, and Netscape had that 'evaluation' clause that didn't have any boundry. People aren't going to want PAY for a browser, and then download 6 meg, and have nothing tangible to show for it. Unless Opera finds a business model where it's free, it will always be 'niche'.
2) I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for this, but, opera doesn't have a mail client.
IE has Outlook Express. Mozilla has Mail&News. If Joe Homepc doesn't want to buy a browser, you can BET they don't want to go out after that and buy a mail client. Email, after all these years, is STILL the killer app for the Internet. Mom's and Dad's aren't getting internet access because they like CSS. Email is the first reason, and then, MAYBE, the web after that.
Opera is a great browser for those who have very specific requirements for a web browser, but it is not the 'browser for the common man'.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
I have not measured (time to do that, I think) but I suspect now that around three percent of web sites I visit are now flash only and probably about three times that have a signficant flash component.
Designers like flash - it gives them lots of power and lots of ways to restrict the user into seeing a web site the way the designer (or the marketroid who owns the designer) wants. Then too, its a standard. And finally it is certainly browser neutral (modulo the usual problems where it doesn't run on this machine or that - which is, of course, the users fault for choosing such non-standard platforms).
So, I think the article has it wrong. None of the current browsers will survive long. Someone will build a flash/shockwave platform that manages to display html and take over the world.
I have seen the future and it is unstoppable flash popups!
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.
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
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...
Nothing seems to happen? Hello, what of all these features:
Tabbed browsing
Why in the hell is everyone so big on tabbed browsing? I tried it, and frankly it pissed me off. Why? Because it did the same thing that multiple window browsing does, but it did it while adding an extra line for the tabs at the top of my page, further reducing my screen real estate that can use for the actual web page I'm trying to read.
I multi window surf all the time. I frequently have 10+ browser windows open. But I detested tabbed browsing when I tried it, and removed Mozilla yet again (since it's still slow and bloated and the only reason I installed it again was to see what the tabbed fuss was all about).
I mean, how, exactly, is giving me a clickable list of browser pages at the top of the screen any better than giving me a clickable list of browser pages at the bottom of the screen (in the toolbar, where my windows are listed)? Be detailed, mind you. It's still one process either way, I'm not loading multiple copies of the browser into memory (check the task manager). It's just as fast to switch windows as it is to switch tabs. And the window bar takes up space on the screen already, giving it that slight edge over tabbed browsing, in my view.
I just fail to see the benefits, but there's a very good downside. I use my browser maximized, with most menus and toolbars off. Why? So I can see what I'm reading. Anything that reduces my screen space is an instant loser.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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!"
"If we really get down to it, who killed Explorer Mac? Safari did."
NO! WRONG!!
Microsoft killed IE for Mac. They were planning all along to add all kinds of exclusive proprietary functionality in the next Internet Explorer that will be integrated into the Windows Longhorn OS. This is part of their strategy for forcing you to buy their next OS. They want everyone running IE7 so as to marginalise Safari, Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, et al. They by doing this, the also marginalise Linux and Mac OS X which is something they very much want to do.
So instead of admitting that this was their plan, Microsoft just made up the line that they couldn't compete with Safari because dropping it fit with their business plan to begin with. It's just the same old monopolistic behaviour all over again, except this time they are using the browser to marginalise the OS market instead of the OS to marginalise the browser market.
This article by PPK is a piece of trash. If I didn't know a little about the evolution of browsers, I might have believed it was informative and based on facts. But it is mostly a viewpoint of the writer, who presents his own beliefs as facts, kind of like Jon Katz.
End-users, there is no single group known as end-users. Today there are several groups of end-users, has been for years. Some care about what browser they use, and some are just excited by the fact they can turn a computer on and open a browser, any browser. There are the mac-users, geeks, developers, newbies, daytime/nightime surfers, business users and many more. Having seen the browsers stats of two similar sites, aimed at different demographics, I know that different people use different browsers, for different reasons.
Explorer was succesful, because it was always there, on windows. Even developers use it for that very reason sometimes. Other browsers have failed or succeeded mostly because of this. Developers, no matter what their preference is, must develop for the majority. The preference of developers is relevant only when they become end-users.
Their are no more browser wars, there are just distribution wars and returns on investment. The browser with the best distribution will dominate the market. And companies paying for website development will only support browsers that have a significant percentage of hits to their site.
I am the "tech guy" for many of my friends, and their families as well. I have had now 3 mothers come to me and say "could you please make these damned pop-ups go away". I install Mozilla, set their homepage to hotmail again, and set it to the default browser. Sure they didn't do it themselves, but put on the "modern" look and feel to it (vs. the netscape default one) and they don't find it that intimidating.
The key is not to introduce them to any of the features. They are scared enough using this new thing let alone trying to say "oh and look at all this whizbang" (tabs, the advanced popup blocking, search features, etc). Thats now 3 computers which have passed the mom test. Not to mention the friends and the girlfriend test, all of them have passed, and have passed since 1.1. If this browser isn't ready for mainstream I don't know what is, or ever will be. Bugs are a part of life, it's why we all have jobs, if this stuff all worked out of the box geeks would be out of a job.
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.
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
-- It's a floor wax.
-- It's a dessert topping.
-- It's a floor wax!
-- It's a dessert topping!
(third voice)
-- It's a floor wax, a dessert topping, a web browser, and an application platform!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
how long until
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
Microsoft's not FAT either. It's mostly NTFS nowadays.
It's all under the presumption that in the next 2/3 years windoze will still rule the desktop.
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.
Kids have been growing up with computers for a long time already. We have a generation through school that has been exposed to computers throughout their school life. This has encouraged some of them to think and feel confident enough to challenge the status quo.
This has encouraged the vast majority to simply use what is placed in front of them. Just as we have had a number of generations immersed in a life with cars, the vast majority of these people are not able to tinker with their cars, to modify them, or even to properly understand them.
There are a small number of people who think critically, explore and challenge. There are a vast majority who go with the flow.
By the time you're at 40 instances, and three tabs a piece, you should really be done .
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
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