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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.
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.
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. :(
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.
Agreed - at work we recently had a query about spam and popups. Two or three of us suggested using Mozilla or Netscape instead of IE. We pointed out the ability to suppress popups and minimise email spam within the Netscape mailer in addition to the lower chances of viruses.
To put it mildly we were howled down. People wanted to continue with IE and Outlook. They were happy to add absurd bits of additional software to stop duff information getting as far as IE and Outlook, but they weren't prepared to change them.
There 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
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
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
Firebird is a 6MB download, compared to a 60MB download for IE, I'd say that's a supermodel at a fat camp.
Mike
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.
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
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 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).
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.