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Microsoft Wins Browser War, Abandons 'Innovation'
rocketjam writes "Web developers are expressing frustration with Microsoft's apparent abandonment of its 'operating-system-integrated' Internet Explorer web browser. An article on C-Net points up the efforts of the Web Standards Project as well as Adobe Systems to prompt Microsoft to fix long-standing Cascading Style Sheet bugs in IE as well as continuing to add other improvements which have virtually ceased since Microsoft won the browser war. While alternatives such as the Mozilla Project and the Opera browser still exist, their marketshare is miniscule." In a related story, an anonymous reader points out that the bugs aren't just in rendering, they're security holes as well: "iDefense and eEye have basically said that Internet Explorer is full of holes and just surfing the Web using it is "unsafe". There's 31 un-patched holes in IE, but MS won't talk about it... It took them nearly a month to roll out a new patch after this one was found to be more or less useless."
Anonymous cowards avoid "Innovation" in their First Posts!
Huh. I wish.
Wait - Microsoft are going to be the first browser developers to release the new innovative "Do you want to run this plugin? [OK]" pop-up technology! They're way ahead of the game!
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
this is a classic sign of monopoly. no incentive to change, no incentive to repair, no incentive to improve, no incentive to innovate.
Microsoft not leading the way in innovation? What else is new. Too bad they don't make Safari for PCs, then the other 95% of the population can have a more enjoyable surfing experience.
Integrate browser into OS. Continue working on OS, ignore browser.
Would work fine if the browser wasn't a point of failure for the OS. How do they expect to secure the entire package when pieces of it are so full of holes?
Just an honest question.
MS needs to either secure IE, or remove it from their core OS installation (make it an addon) if they're really serious about security IMO.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Sure, Microsoft got it's browser on a ton of computers, but I would argue that not that many people that have IE are using it regularly. I know a ton of people that will use IE for a little while, and then when it locks up on a page (inevitably), they switch to another browser. Anyone got the stats on the # of hits / percentages from different browsers, versus the # of actual PC's with IE?
stuff |
Start planting sites that root peoples MS boxes and there will be a huge outcry on CNN or something.
Like the blaster worm, code red, etc, etc, etc.
The problem is manifold.
1. even when MS patches bugs people don't care
2. If people don't care why would they waste money patching things
So, if you're this pissed off, make them care. Show how you root the machine of some joe-smoes computer with a simple gif or something...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
According to the purists, some effete board such as the W3C sets the standards instead of the market leader Microsoft Corporation (who really sets the standards).
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
...but "winning" seems to be accurate if the stats at thecounter.com and W3Schools are at all trustworthy.
On the other hand, I'm not sure if, in these numbers, "Netscape" includes "Mozilla".
P.S. This HTTP POST request sent by Mozilla.
The Army reading list
Let's get Apple to port Safari to Windows just like it is doing with iTunes.
It's a bloody great browser... although having thought about it, theres no reason for Apple to let the hoardes have its pretty software for nothing...
I can tell you this though... if you think your browsing and computing experience is slowing down in terms of innovation and invention, switch to the OSX platform... my god, there's enough new stuff every week to make you do a sex wee.
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
IE is the lesser of several evils.
It is quicker and more stable than netscape.
It is most familiar because it looks/acts like windows.
It is better known than mozilla, opera, and clones.
The only way to stop the cycle is to enforce the ruling to have Microsoft remove the browser from the OS.
That's it. Until then, they win.
Davak
Let's see what happens after a year or so. First, the whole security thing is a BIG issue now. It's no longer a discussion amongst geeks. As more and more companies and the government buckle down on their security initiatives, they will either force Microsoft to have a secure browser (anyone want to predict the probability this will happen?) or they will abandon IE for more secure browsers.
Safari is making (understatement?) inroads on the Mac side and Macs are picking up momentum. Safari can tandem on that aspect alone.
Let's not forget...the tide really can change. Remember when Netscape was the undeniable champion? Look where they are now. Who's to say this can't happen to IE?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I switched to Mozilla a few months ago. Not out of zeal, but because Mozilla's better software. And it's hard to beat that native pop-up blocking. Using Mozilla, I forget that the web is infested with pop-up ads. When I have to use IE for some reason, I'm quickly reminded.
Really, why should they add more feauters now when they've won. It's sad but still true, average Jennie won't download a 5-15MB browser when she gets it with her 'internet ready' computer, esepcially not when most large websites 'optimize for ie'. The users thinks the problems is with opera/mozilla/ns when they can't use sites they've always been able to access with their beloved explorer
This is hardly surprising. Microsoft's intention was never to build the greatest browser, but to simply build a browser that would net them the largest market share. With the other big player out of the way now, there's little incentive for further "innovation".
IMO, this is one of the fundamental differences between Open Source and commercial standard development. OS projects are often made "for fun" or "for advancement of technology X", whereas commercial projects are usually (!) made "for profit". Both have their places, they just use different mind-sets: academic or business.
Holy crap! This is old news. They are not abandoning the browser, they just can't be ar$ed to fix the holes in it.
Never touch an Irish man's Guinness!@#
"While alternatives such as the Mozilla Project and the Opera browser still exist, their marketshare is miniscule." :P
A small current marketshare can in no way infer that "The Browser Wars are Over" and that Internet Explorer will ALWAYS be the de-facto standard. Sure, Mozilla may have not have a huge marketshare at the moment, but then again, neither does Linux in terms of common Desktop usage to the average user.
I feel that when Linux really takes off as a real Windows alternative to the average user, Mozilla will really begin to shine, and it's market share will increase as Linux's market share increases.
The Browser Wars are certainly not over yet...they are just being postponed for a little while.
In related news, ruthless dictators neglect the human rights of their people.
Phlegm at 11.
Tim
"Too bad they don't make Safari for PCs, then the other 95% of the population can have a more enjoyable surfing experience."
If Safari went to the PC world and the user base multiplied by 2000% as you describe, there's a good chance all these users hammering at it and all the hackers released upon it would find holes and bugs that you could not even imagine with Safari right now having so few using it.
It's such a pain that IE has such a gigantic marketshare, because if it didn't, we would see a huge migration amongst the web development community towards Mozilla (and derivitives), Opera, Konqueror, etc. which would inevitably, over time, mean a similar migration amongst users.
:-)
Unfortunately, I don't suppose developers can afford to ignore IE's lack of support for basic standards like CSS. Damn monopoly.
If only they could, we could finally start to see the web returning to using standardised, open technologies and innovating in a way that will benefit us all. Mozilla has shown us what funky stuff you can do with SVG, CSS and other more current technologies; let's hope web developers start picking these up.
It'd be ironic to see pages that say: "Best viewed in Netscape 7, Mozilla, Opera or better" or "IE users may not be able to use these pages"
I don't run IE anymore, but you can't expect people to switch to a new browser like opera when it crashes everytime you try to access espn.com! So, for right now, its Firebird for me.
I mean, what's the point of living...if you don't have a dick?
(Most) People only use IE because they are scared to install some software (I don't want to break my computer!) or they don't know there are options (What are you using - why do I get all these pop-ups?)
Use MS tactics! Force a new browser on them!
First we take over the world
Then we allow it to fall into chaos
um... 3. PROFIT!!!!! (sorry couldn't help it)
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
and their customers lose. Surprise, surprise.
Here's to hoping they lose some of their latest lawsuits, and start being held responsible for the incredibly shoddy quality of their software, so the people can benefit. After all, it isn't like MS has been helping anyone else--including their shareholders--with that gigantic lump of cash they've been hoarding, illegally obtained through their extortive monopoly practices.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
IE development is still going on -- Looking at the Loghorn builds. There are several new improvements .
But Microsoft won't release the changes as a new version because of the whole anti-trust bullshit.
Well, sure, I came to this conclusion and switched to Mozilla v1.0 when it came out. Having a solid multiplatform browser like Mozilla also ment that I could ditch Win2K at work and run Linux instead. I haven't looked back. Really, I just got tired of getting pr0n windows popping up at random when I went to download emulator ROMs and such at home and feeling extra vulnerable on my workstation at work.
Why anyone would run a browser that effectively gives more control to the world at large than the actual user is beyond me.
The flaws are not being patched since the Government want the option of installing backdoors on all active computers by coercing the commercial sites into being viral infection centers.. Basically, the Government is instructing Microsoft to go slow on the security updates. That way, they can effectively shut down the internet or install back-doors at will.
Stop the brainwash
At least from the statistics of my site, IE has dropped from 95% to around 75% in the last year and a half. Netscape varients are up to about 20%.
Maybe this means we will start to see some more innovations to recapture market share.
Now that MS doesn't have to compete anymore with others on the number of (useless) features, they now have time to fix the problems and make something good and stable. But then again where is the profit in that?
Where else?
is legal (e.g. EULA components where you agree to be harvested for your organs if you die or are incapacitated or in the vicinity of a hospital or if Bill needs/wants them) and financial (e.g. charging you a separate licensing fee for each organ harvested), then you stop wondering about those pesky "standards".
Tell your friends about Firebird. If anyone ever voices a complaint about IE or any other browser for that matter, i point them in Firebirds direction.
It really is a wonderful browser that is lightweight, fast and it has a host of cool features like popup blocking, password manager (for the less paranoid), tabbed browsing.
Their market share is miniscule because no one knows about it!
- Word Processors: When WordStar was king and WordPerfect came along and dominated, Word was the upstart. Microsoft kept throwing more and more features into the product. Fast forward a few years: Word is king, innovation slows to a trickle. The Word you use today is like the Word you used half-a-decade ago.
- Programming Tools: When Borland was kicking Microsoft's butt in IDEs and compiler technology, Microsoft had to add features like mad to get their market share back. Fast forward a few years: The Visual IDEs are king, innovation slows to a trickle.
- Web browsers: When Netscape was king, blah, blah blah. The IE you use today, blah, blah, blah.
Monopolies traditionally stagnate as often as they can get away with. Ain't nothing new here. Move along.If everyone got to use a mac for a week, then had to go back to windows, I don't think we'd have much of a problem - OS X is sweet to geek, and easy to Mom.
I'm using mozilla firebird. When I submit a comment here on slashdot, it doesn't render the comment approved page correctly. Sometimes it just shows the background, and never loads the text. When it does show the text, it's overlapping the toolbar on the side.
Is this a slashdot problem or a mozilla problem?
Anyways, improve mozilla, and get the word out, and people *will* use it. Developers - stop kludging your sites for IE, stop putting "this site is best viewed by IE" on your front page, put "this site is best viewed by mozilla firebird or Opera" instead. Tell people why, give them sensible logical reasons, not a rant about MS world domination and capital F Free.
Firebird seems the best hope, since it's nice and robust, and pops up almost as fast as IE does, and doesnt make you dizzy with feature bloat.
OT: In fact, slashdot is the only site I browse that has any real problems being rendered by firebird. What the hell is the deal with that? This would be the last website I would expect to work properly only with IE.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
... to go back to the "Page best viewd in" messages on the bottom of pages. But this time with a little link to Firebird. If people start coding for the standards-complient browsers instead of IE, people might realize what they're missing out on. Or just get frustrated (and/or curious) to the point of installing it.
Who doesn't like free music?
I remember very well the MS site reading in bold headlines "U.S. Department of Justice Vs. The Freedom To Innovate" when they were in the thick
of their Anti-Trust lawsuit with the USDOJ.
I guess this is Microsoft's new form of "Innovation."
Proof positive of the negative impact of Microsoft's monopoly in the browser market coupled with the fact that they received little more than a slap on the wrist from the USDOJ in the end.
Use IE only when you *have* to.
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Microsoft is a company, not a carity organisation. Improving IE would cost them money without getting any revenues - they are giving IE away for free.
Innovation and improvement made only sense when they had something to achieve: pushing Netscape out of the market. But this is no longer the case.
I would not even blame them. If the customers were keen on good browsers, they would rush to pay money for better versions like Opera. But they aren't. They are simply whining that MS is not innovating, but they won't do anything themselves.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
If every regular slashdotter were to introduce 5 people to the wonders of choice and get them using mozilla or opera on thier windows platforms and then ask those 5 people to introduce 5 more, the word would get out that there is an alternative.
The fact is, 90% of people who surf the net consider that iexplore is the only option - they consider it as being 'the world wide web', rather than software used to access it.
You don't need to educate them too much - just say "hey, try this alternative software that allows you to surf the web safely"
Perhaps this is a case for a bit of decent spamming - fire of a million spam mails advertising the choices that people have when it comes to surfing the web and indicate how unsafe it is to use iexplore.
Surely that would swing the market share a bit more in the right direction and away from a company that certainly doesn't give a damn about anything but profit.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
(PS - you can still get your page to work with IE if that situatioin applies to you, you just have to get the submit button title from the x and y click coordinates titles [which IE is so thoughtful not to ignore])
Monopolies stifle innovation.
:)
The sky is blue.
Tell me something I didn't know
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Or at least make people aware of Microsoft's hypocrisy (lies?). The EU still has their antitrust case pending...
;)
Maybe we should all whine and complain instead?
The self styled 'chief hacking officer' of U.S.-based eEye Digital Security, which has been responsible for the discovery of a plethora of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products, says that Internet Explorer has been insecure for a long time.
...then plethora? I think that's it.
How does this sequence go now?
One, a couple, few, some, many, a whole lot, sh*tload, f*cking unbelievable amount,
Well, why do ppl use IE when it's full of security holes? I'd say that until they get hit by'em they wont care! So what are all the 3v1l haxx0rs doin out there? We need anonymous shells for the caped Haxx0rs!! Come to think about it, we allready have it ;)
As much as I despise M$, everyone coded for IE, so I gave in. Now Mozilla is making ground in my mind if I want to get stuff done and that can only mean good things if I'm not the only one (and I don't think I am).
The average user simply wants to open their computer and have it work, kind of like Apple's approach to computing even though Safari isn't mentioned Apple users are more inclined to use Safari simply because it is there. This is why IE won the browser war; if you do indeed consider it over ?
This is a central question that I've been asking in every "What makes you think MS is evil?" discussion I've had lately:
Why is Microsoft, the player in the browser market with the most resources by an insane margin, have the piece of software that's the most egregious offender in terms of standards compliance?
You can come up with a lot of answers, but I've come to believe that it's because they understand something:
(1) The lock in principles that we're all familiar with
(2) You more easily make money by letting others waste their time making things work than by wasting your own resources
(3) It's possible the IE 6 codebase really is hard to polish and move forward at this point.
Focus on #2 for a moment. They steal time from every single developer who has to use their products to deliver a product -- and that's everyone who's delivering a web application, at least. How do they steal it? Just recently I lost hours of my time (and possibly business) because of some bug that makes images that display all right and proper in every browser -- except IE. You just had to know that in certain situations involving nested, CSS positioned divs, unless you set the most immediately containing div to position: relative, the images would not render. Anyone here who's ever tried CSS positioning and the accompanying loosely semantic markup knows what I'm talking about. This happens in a hundred small ways.
It's not just IE, either. I have to use MS Word XP at work to occasionally do *page layout*. Nevermind that it's the wrong tool for the job, we know that, it's just that sometimes our customers demand stuff in that format. The gyrations necessary to do things in those programs are ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. I've used two other word processors who make it an order of magnitude easier -- hell, sometimes I'd rather do page layout in the same bug-ridden CSS/XHTML combo I mentioned above. Again, who is the player with the most resources? Who does not have the easiest or most powerful toolset?
Seriously, someday I think people will wake up and realize that Bill has been wasting several GDPs worth of people's time, and that's how he's amased his wealth -- Microsoft would much rather let customers and developers waste their time than spend their own dimes creating truly effective software.
Tweet, tweet.
What?
The developers are complaining that they have to create non-standards compliant websites because 95% of the userbase use a non-standards compliant browser.
You make it sound like it's the web developer's fault that MicroSoft have produced a crappy browser.
To belabour the point: developers produce sites that work best with the most widely used browser - if the browser doesn't work in the logical and 'correct' manner, then a lot of time is spent hacking and trial-and-erroring trying to get the effect that the client wants. Clients aren't going to give a sh*t whether their site is fully W3C compliant and looks exactly as it should in Opera, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror or whatever if it doesn't look as promised in IE
=#= Man, you are such a loser! Why can't you be an individual, like the rest of us?
Try Avant Browser if you must use IE. It adds a shell around the browser for tab integration, popup blocking, and all those other goodies you like best about Opera and Mozilla.
Sadly, it can't do anything for IE's HTML or CSS support....
*sigh*
Canthros
I now have a few members of sales using Mozilla's Firebird for a lot of things, as well as our content development staff.
One guy's IE install was corrupt, and since we're a web based company, this was a serious issue for him. I installed Firebird as a stop gap measure until IE was working again. Set up tabbed browsing, showed him how to block pop ups and went on my merry way. I had IE fixed later that day.
Thing is, he's still using Firebird as much as he can. He came down later that day, AFTER IE was fixed, and thanked me for setting him up with an alternative. He was amazed at how much faster it is.
The content management team loves it because by using Mozilla, Opera and IE they can be logged into three different accounts on the same site without the session data conflicting. This means they can edit content in the Instructor accounts and proof it in a student account.
And if course, Firebird is my main browser at work.
By the way, I found out form one of the developers, that the Boston Glove's online site is maintained using a custom Content Management System that requires Mozilla to operate. The superior options for development and customization make it very attractive to technology firms.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I have to say, even though Mozilla is better than IE, it's not significantly enough so... It's bloated beyond belief, slow as hell, unresponsive, doesn't have many special/exclusive features that people would want (other than javascript controls) etc.
Personally, I think people should be looking at projects like Dillo (which is an extremely small, extremely fast browser), and put a little effort into adding what it still needs. Port the thing to windows, and after a single demonstration of how incredibly fast it is to load pages, as well as startup times, you'll have everyone dumping IE in a second.
That's why the browser war is over... IE has an illegial leg-up, as we know so well, and the competition doesn't really compete.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
couldnt agree with this more. it's so frustrating. IE is like 90%+ of the market and it can't render css properly. what the hell. why do people allow microsoft to control the internet as well as the operating system world. essentially microsoft defines what web pages people may create.
(-1, Redundant)
Isn't it funny how huge corporations, governments, and software firms (Like Adobe) will dump tons of money into Microsoft's products, kiss Microsoft's ass, partner with Microsoft, and never get attention to all of the horrible flaws that need fixing? Maybe eventually it will dawn on them that the reason competing products have a small market-share is because the same people who complain about their Microsoft woes refuse to support try the competition for once?
I was a long time IE user, and even advocate in some cases.
I also work with several people who felt the same way.
In January or so I switched over to Opera because I got sick and tired of the pop-ups and IE had no good defense against them.
I had been using Mozilla at work for some time--having to develop for both IE and Mozilla platforms--but I hadn't been too impressed with it until about the end of the summer.
These security holes and the apparent lax nature by which MS is handling them in IE have actually scared most of my coworkers away from Internet Explorer for their day-to-day ops.
I mean, of course, when you go to the MSDN web site, you can't find a damn browser out there other then theirs that displays their pages with any kind of reliability (and I'm sure that's intentional). But for almost anything else, most sites written for IE display relatively well in Mozilla, better IMHO in Opera, and seem to display almost the same as IE in the latest build of Konquerer. And quite frankly, things seem quite a bit zippier in any one of those than in IE.
Most people won't switch because their too lazy to download the latest builds of the alternative platforms...fear though, is quite a powerful motivator.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
...cos I'm working (no, really) and testing as I go along, and I have to say, with no knee-jerk whatsoever, that IE is the poorest offering of the bunch.
;)
My personal favourite is Opera cos I love the mouse gestures, but Mozilla's got good things going for it too, like being able to block those bloody annoying animated banner ads. Even Netscape's not bad these days
But Microsoft seem to think they reach perfection with the addition of the Go button on the address bar. It doesn't have tabbed browsing. It doesn't block popups. It doesn't have any useful features whatsoever, and IMO, it doesn't do anything it didn't do in IE4.
I hit a site in it earlier, and realised just how long it's been since I saw a popup/under ad, and how many sites still have them; I haven't seen one for ages. Until, that is, I accidentally went online with IE.
Security issues aside, IE gives the worst browsing experience of any modern browser I've seen. The only reason they have that market share is because IE comes bundled with every new PC. If Windows came with no browser, and users had to choose and download one, that share would disappear overnight.
Warning: May contain nuts
Can anyone file a lawsuit against Microsoft for a form of neglect? They are neglecting to patch their browser, putting people at risk for serious attacks. Just look at that poor valve guy! If Microsoft is not vigilant, people will gradually become so vulnerable to viruses, that either they will just not use the web, or get a new browser. Microsoft is abusing their position, and if they don't clean up their act soon, they need to be punished.
...about 4 years ago, when so many of these same web developers were saying "Netscape sucks!!! Everybody should use IE!!!"
Well, you got what you asked for. What are you whining about?
...will never take off anyway.
I use Mozilla's Firebird on XP and it's great. My wife, a very non-computer user, loves it too. She really likes tabbed browsing and is really starting to get the hang of it.
:-).
One way I think the Mozilla suite should be promoted is through the use of XUL. XUL is "the" killer-app for Mozilla. If the functionality gained from usuig XUL and XHTML over plain XHTML was so incredible, people would be forced to install and use Mozilla.
It's up to us now, people who know how valuable Mozilla really is, to promote it and tell all of our friends just how cool Firebird and Mozilla really are.
Oh, and thunderbird rocks too,
XUL Intro: www.xulplanet.com
A pedant writes:
The biggest problem is the CSS support in IE. Tables were only supposed to display tables of scientifc data. Before CSS came along web designers used tables to control the layout of their pages - not what they were originally designed for - with the consequences that they had to use myriad nested tables, colspans, rowspans, spacer gifs and all sorts of inelegant hacks to make their sites cross-browser compatable.
When CSS1 and later CSS2 came along designers had the chance to re-write the way sites were made without having to use such a limited, slow and cross-browser-unfriendly way of laying out their sites.
But what do you know, ALL the browser manufacturers stuffed up the implementation of CSS. While every other browser manufacturer has tried and mostly succeeded in living up to the agreed W3C specification by improving their browser's CSS support, MicroSuck haven't bothered.
=#= Man, you are such a loser! Why can't you be an individual, like the rest of us?
Oh IE, why can you not support an open standard correctly?
1. Integrate Browser in OS -> Eliminate rivals.
2. Desintegrate Browser from OS -> Sell browser seperatly now
3. Profit!
4. Repeat with 1.
I, and no doubt many many others, use any browser BUT Internet Explorer. However, there are lots of pages, including banking sites, that refuse to load properly or let you continue, simply because your browser doesn't return MSIE 5 or 6 headers.
I myself use Opera, or Firebird, but I also have Proxomitron running in between to filter all the crap out before it ever gets to me. Part of this filtering includes sending a fake referrer header to make sites think I am using MSIE, since usually they work just fine with all browsers regardless of what they want me to use.
Incidentally, those "coders" who force a particular browser type to continue instead of using STANDARD HTML etc should be exposed a la spammers to show the wider community what crappy coders they are. They have no place coding for the World Wide Web.
My first point of computer education to most people is that MSIE and Outlook are the two best virus propagation mechanisms on the planet, and I always change them over to Mozilla or another free alternative. I'm sure many others do just the same thing. Most browsers by default are set to emulate the MSIE header however, so in the end I don't put much faith in stats showing MSIE to be the king of browsers when I know nearly every other browser masquerades as its nemesis.
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
I still use IE 5.0. My upgrade to 6.0 lasted about a week. It's unstable as hell! Regardless of the fact that it's a piece of swiss cheese, it doesn't run well!
I've talked to too many so-called web gurus who refuse to make their code cross-browser compatible because "those other browsers are too picky". It's called standards compliance you idiots. If these simpering fools are tired of IE then they don't have to write for it, they don't have to support it. They should start making it clear (to users and MS) that using Mozilla or Opera or whatever is better than IE. Then when IE's market share starts to drop maybe MS will get a clue.
Microsoft wins.
Users lose.
That how it has been always and will be as long as users don't demand better services and software.
well crap of course ie's winning... i didn't even know Mozilla and Opera were available (and free) for WinX platforms until recently. The problem isn't microsoft it's not enough folks getting the word out to everyone that you don't have to accept ie.
currently rocking mozilla, just because. building a red hat box in the next few weeks to begin my transfer to the dark side.
I use Safari mostly, or Mozilla if I have to (when not on my Macs). IE isn't even on my desktop or Start menu. It's buried down there where it belongs. I'd remove it if it wasn't necessary for Windows Update (I seriously need to get a different patch manager).
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Those aren't security holes, those are features apart of Microsoft's "Administrator anywhere anytime" initiative! Stop blaming them, they are only allowing remote access!!!!
Works great.
I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
If you are comparing it functionally to Mozilla/Netscape, on the other hand, I'd be forced to giggle uncontrollably.
This is one of the reasons why they've had so much legal troubles. Giving away IE in hopes of quashing Netscape worked well even if it is anti-competitive.
More importantly is MS's general failure with a security model (or lack of one). The operating system has a poorly and retrofitted set of security features. Add on top of that "features" that all but wipe out security like:
active content executed from the browser without some type of sandbox
e-mail clients that do the same
the complete misunderstanding of administrator vs. user
an open-by-default mentality to installations
Add on top the total lack of revenue that directly comes from IE and this is what comes of it.
The sad thing is that if they had only spent more "quality time" on design and implementation, like any software development project, they would be spending less and making more now. What makes them different than most software makers is that they can buy and sell most other companies a few times over and still have this problem.
Correct me if I am wrong but didn't the US government tell Microsoft to separate their OS and browser not too long ago? Now they are trying to integrate it even more on the next OS? I wish the laws were this lax on that no-seatbelt ticket I got.
I use Mozilla for the day to day browsing but I still have to use IE to access my online banking application.
Microsoft is paranoid. The only thing that gets their attention is an impact on their growth or mark et share.
Strategy:
(1) Web sites start conforming to web standards even if the site has problems in IE. Balance conformance with a "best-viewed with" statement on your web site providing links to browsers that do conform to web standards and will render your site the best. Try to find a balance between how it looks in IE and web standards.
(2) Develop a gecko-based activex plugin for IE so that when your site is viewed, the plugin downloads and renders your site correctly.
(3) Build your web site so they are fully web standards compliant and develop a community project on top of cocoon to translate the maintainable web standards version into the botched IE version. Web developers stated that by not following web standards IE is costing them money. Web standards lower development costs. So you develop in web standards and reap cost/time benefits, while at the same time you isolate the costly IE development into a community-supported translator project which allows you to pool and therefore lower the cost. That would be a great product, probably already exists.
(4) There are a number of unpatched bugs in IE that crash the browser. You can use bugs on two fronts. You can setup your web application server to randomly inject bugs that will crash the browser. On your page, you the "best viewed with" campaign mentioned in #1.
I am not a web developer. Web developers understand their customer base and know which of the ideas above are crazy and which might be practical or useful. Ever web developer is capable of taking action. To force Microsoft to listen to it's customers, it's customers must use their paranoia to get action, otherwise, they will be ignored as they have been.
...the Pope converts to catholicism and a bear performs an easement in the woods.
I'm not sure they're going about this the right way (Bear with me, I don't have a good solution, either).
Microsoft has 95% of the browser market. While better security may be an incentive to fix the security holes, that is mostly separate from layout issues. So we're really dealing with two separate chunks of issues.
Now, as far as the layout problems go - Microsoft is the defacto standard for web design, if not the actual published standard (there wasn't much of a standard when they started the project). Web designers may be complaining, but they hardly make up the majority of the customers. So, from a cost/benefit standpoint (we'll ignore the "doing the right thing" thing - everyone around here automatically assumes they won't, regardless), where's the carrot?
What concrete reward does Microsoft get from fixing the layout bugs, aside from a small percentage of users (web designers) who are then happier? Remember, this small (but vocal) minority has a voice in the developer community, but combined, developers and designers still only make up a small percentage. Neither group has much of a voice in the Ma and Pa Walmart world, and most of those people probably aren't even aware that anything is wrong.
I'm not saying Microsoft is right on this - but I am asking a serious question here.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
They've never innovated. Most of their "innovations" are things that other people have been doing for decades that they've simply renamed with a friendlier name. Microsoft isn't really a technology company at all, they're more of a PR firm with the power to buy lots of stuff from other companies who MAY have innovated at one point or another. But witness this:
... otherwise known as a mount point for decades in the Unix world.
;P
1. Unix: mount points with no drive letters. Windows 2000 introduces this in their "change drive letters" feature allowing people to mount a volume on an empty folder.
2. Unix/DEC VMS: The X protocol for "network tranparent" remote application execution. Combine this with Xnest for the export of a full desktop. VNC also comes along and offers it multiplatform. Windows: "Remote Desktop" introduced in Windows XP as a brand new innovation. Even though it's a rehash of their rdp protocol from Windows Terminal Server Edition. Created to try and kill off Citrix. Hmm... nothing new here, but Unix has been doing it since 1984.
3. Unix: Multiple X servers running on the same host with a different desktop for each user allowing a fast switch between users with Ctrl-Alt-F(key). Windows XP: The introduction of "fast user switching". Does EXACTLY the same thing, but puts a simple, "friendly" GUI over it that bears a strong resemblance to GDM in GNOME. Again, nothing new. Just more of the rename game.
4. Unix: ssh becomes available as a protocl to allow far more than just telnet. No need for passwords any more if you use public key authentication. You can tunnel TCP traffic from systems on the other side of your remote host to your local host allowing you VPN-like abilities. You can remotely execute programs and tunnel the X protocol securely. Windows 2000: Kerberos/Telnet server introduced as a standard part of the OS. It ONLY provides remote access to the C:\> prompt. Well la-dee-da!
The list goes on and on and on... A lot of what MS has in IE was purchased from other companies, slagged on by their code monkeys and then "updated" in teh same way that they updated QDOS WAYYYY back when.
And saying that they "won" the browser war is kinf od silly. They will not have won the browser war until there are no other browsers out there. Unless, of course, your definition of winning is that of the United States presidential administration with regard to Iraq.
Un-news
why is it that folks working in the linux sphere can solve these types of problems in about half the time; as volunteers?
yesterday, i un-installed m$-office for open office, and switched to mozilla. so far, i don't see any negative effects. with an average of 12 hours a day on computers for software development i can spot problems in a reasonable amount of time. i base my results on reproducible facts, not 'personal feelings', it's how i pay the rent.
if open office, and mozilla can do the job that a software developer, students, and a 'meeting-to-death' administrator needs to have done; then this week, a new dawning has happened to the desktop community.
memo to microsoft; "every KNOCK is a SHUVE in the right direction"
I have to agree. Firebird is better than Moz. The only complaint I have is that, under linux, I haven't figured out how to get thunderbird to open links in Firebird directly. Right now I have to copy/paste, but that seems to work.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I develop everything for Mozilla, and I never have issues with IE, even when I'm developing ASP.NET. Not a hard problem to solve.
If Microsoft removed Explorer from Windows. How would I download my browser?
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
(insert Microsoft bashing comment here)
I guess it never gets old.
Some IE updates would be nice. What I think we really need, though:
Yeah, wishful thinking, I know. But in the absence of strong standards the web is going to keep getting worse and worse, to the point where you *have* to use some huge, glorified browser-sniffing case statement (*cough*ASP.NET*cough*) to do anything advanced and be confident it'll work across browsers.
I would love to switch to mozilla. As a browser it seems superior, but it doesn't have this:
http://notesbydave.com/toolbar/doc.htm
this is better than tabbed browsing or anything else. Its open source so one should be able to do a Mozilla port.
I know that Moz and Opera support skins, but why should I need to go hunting around for a skin I may or may not like when IE lets me customize the interface so easily?
The fact is, simplicity works sometimes. IE lets me see more of the actual web page I want to look at with less interface clutter. MS won the browser wars because their browser provides the best user experience. Moz is getting there, and Opera will always have its niche, but as of now, MS is tops because IE really is the best browser.
What the mozilla and firebird users need to do is get the name out there. Most people I've talked to think that Netscape is dead. We need to get the word out that Mozilla is the best browser, and IE is dead, full of security issues. I realize that there are other browsers out there (Safari, Opera), but we need to focus on one name and forget about mentioning standards. It used to be just Netscape vs. IE. Mozilla is standards compliant though, so any other browsers will benefit automatically by Mozilla's increase in usage. There needs to be a single name to give out to people. This is why the whole name change to Firebird pissed me off. Eventually it will become Mozilla Browser or suite already, so whoever gives out the Firebird name instead of Mozilla when spreading the word is doing us all a disfavor. The way to get the word out is tell your friends, webmasters, put it in your email sig, etc. This is not about zealotry or "my browser is better than yours" debates. It's about making the web more standards compliant and getting rid of IE while it is down (not in development, full of holes, having to be modified because of Eola's suit).
Unfortuneatley, Camino development seems to be very slow, otherwise it would be the best browser available for OS X.
Not that I'm knocking Safari, it's an excellent browser, in fact, it's better than vanilla Mozilla.
Windows needs a feature complete browser based on moz, but one that has a *better interface than mozilla.
Firebird is looking really good, but isn't quite there yet.
* better being defined as something people would like more, although I think it's better than most windows UIs...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Oh well. At least there is Firebird... tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, type-ahead find... Makes being stuck on Windows a little more tolerable.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
It's OK to do integration the way MS envisions it, but you have to make sure you have the horse out in front.
Granted, IE is little more than a glorified file system browser. That being the case, their approach should have been to integrate a first class file system browser with a pluggable API. Then, ship the Internet browser components as a plug-in component.
Using this scenario, your favorite MS-Office app just became a pluggable component for the file systembrowser. MediaPlayer==plugin, PaintBrush==plugin, photoEditor==plugin... Publish the API and then you get PhotoShop==plugin, Netscape==plugin, Kazaa==plugin.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Pivx was the company that had a website with a list of 31 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. Two days ago they pulled it with what sounds like a nice way of saying they were pressured to do so.
Word processors and web browsers have pretty much come to the end of their innovation, and now they've become commodities -- they pretty much do all that they're going to do. Sure, there's room for some incremental improvement, but honestly, is there really any rock-your-world innovation going on in word processors any more? Not really, right? How about for browsers? A little more than word processors (woo-hoo, popup blockers!), but there's still not a whole lot of room for sea-change improvements. As for programming tools, I don't think it's fair to say that MS hasn't continued to innovate. The recent VS.NET IDE is *way cool*... much better than VC++. Also, the .NET framework is also quite a leap forward over anything VC++ has.
I don't disagree that there is some stagnation in the product lines you mention, but I think it's unfair to say that MS is ignoring them ONLY because they're a monopoly, and they can get away with ignoring them. There's a certain point in a product's life cycle where more and more features give you diminishing returns (I would argue that MS Word has too many features...).
How about seeing some stats on the browser % breakdown on Slashdot visitors?!?
Adobe needs to quit complaining and to start profiting from Microsoft's stagnation. Macromedia makes plug-ins for web browsers like Shockwave and Flash. These add-ons come closer to true innovation than CSS or Javascript.
Macromedia also uses their popularity to get into the middle-ware market with Coldfusion competing with ASP so Microsoft is effected. If they had better (standard) CSS and Javascript support on Explorer that would take market share from Flash and thus Coldfusion.
The only thing holding innovations like Flash back is their reliance on proprietary software. If there were open source equivalents to the Flash plug-in and authoring environment then the technology could really take off and maybe become more standardized and integrated into most browsers.
Companies like Microsoft and even Macromedia can not afford to liberate their technology to the degree it takes to change the browser. Our only hope is projects that are open to the public.
Create a Windows distribution share that doesn't install IE.
I used to be die hard Internet Explorer fan (due to frequent crashes in Netscape) but I have to say that I am now a converted Mozilla user - much more stable and seems faster. Its worth it alone for the tabbed browsing.
On thing that does really irritate me is when a website does not support Mozilla by using MS only features - most of the time I just don't go to those.
This space intentionally left blank.
Please mod parent up to increase likelihood someone will answer this. I too have been very curious about this for some time.
On my website(s) MS-IE leads with 70% hits, but falls behind Mozilla/Netscape which leads with 60-90% page views. MS-IE usually loads images again and again, Mozilla does not.
So don't trust any statistics you didn't forge by your own hands.As I'd measure usage more by "page views" (= HTML downloads) more "hits" (any download), Mozilla leads clearly, leaving MS-IE on far-off second place.
Microsoft has historically been a company that capitalizes and monopolizes. Innovation? That would require R&D. MS is here to make money, not spend it. MS buys good programs and puts the creator out of business. It really bothers me when I hear about MS "innovating" a new product. In the back of my mind I'm always wondering "who'd they buy out now?"
CD
before people realise that ie is crap, it will need to hit the pocket book. Wait till your hard drive gets wiped or financial info gets leaked because you are using ie. The sad reality is ie is the majority, and most people don't have the brains(joe consumer) or mindshare (ie. corporates) to switch.
Whoops, Forgot the spacing
Start, Run
ftp.exe
== IN FTP
OPEN ftp.mozilla.org
USER anonymous
PASS anonymous
BINARY
CD pub
LS
[There is usually a mozilla or a mozilla directory, depending on your mirror].
CD [MOZILLA DIR]
LS
[If there is a pub directory, CD pub. If not, don't].
CD releases
LS
CD [VERSION]
LS
GET [RELEASE]
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
Just guessing, but did Microsoft make Pivx take down their web page discussing 31 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer? If so, it is good that Microsoft decided not to buy a billion dollars of bad publicity by asking Google to erase the cache.
The page is gone: Unpatched IE security holes, but lives on in Google's cache.
Google's cache: 11 September 2003: There are currently 31 unpatched vulnerabilities..
So even if MS has won 'the browser war' on desktop pc's for now there is still a brave new world out there in need of good browsers such as pda's and other mobile gadgets yet to come.. Opera or some other browser may dominate that field and as people become used to using it on their mobile toys there may be a gradual shift to using it on the desktop in place of IE. Or maybe the desktop pc as we know it today will simply not be around or as popular in the future and so IE will be defunct.. In my opinion the best feature of IE is the google toolbar anyway - if only it were available for firebird or some other good browser I would be able to switch from IE..
I have been watching the browser stats at my wife's Hot Sauce store and mozilla ranks lower than all the search engine spiders! Sad indeed.
Is there some global browser stat site similar to what netcraft is to servers?
To encourage participation I recently added a browser aware cart (flexcart) that gives a 5% automatic discount if you are using a 1.0+ mozilla client.
The problem with Microsoft is that because they're a monpolist (well, and because Slashdot doesn't like 'em, frequently for good reason), *any* deviation from published standards gets 'em raked through the coals. I doubt Mozilla, Opera, Konq, etc are fully standards-compliant either. Linux certainly isn't -- Linux says "this POSIX standard is broken", and it just gets ignored. The thing is, they don't catch flak for it.
So while I agree that "embrace and extend" *is* a real tactic that Microsoft has used historically, every time they deviate from a standard, they aren't deliberately out to get folks.
In good news for Mozilla, once a Microsoft product starts to stagnate, it tends to stay stagnant. So if the Moz people can keep trudging along, AOL or Dell or someone can ship Windows bundled with Mozilla (or Linux just plain catches on on the desktop), they may have a much better shot.
Microsoft dissolves development teams once a development project is over, and can have a tough time finding people to start up a long-dormant project. The Samba people have said it before in frustration, when they tried tracking down a Microsoft SMB developer to answer a question at a networking conference. There just wasn't anyone left who *knew* how Microsoft's SMB implementation worked. The Samba lead said in frusteration something along the lines that they knew Microsoft's SMB implementation better than anyone left at Microsoft.
May we never see th
Is there a check box in the Apple store to NOT get that option?
Every other post is about how we should switch to firebird. Besides having a stupid and overused name, what is the benefit?
Right now I use Opera because IE simply sucks and Netscape crashes more than a win98 box.
Opera also lets me open multiple windows, remembers what I had open in the case of a crash, lets me open links in the background with a mouse gesture (and colors the link the instand it loads), has 4 pop-up settings, and lots more.
Why sould I switch?
Everyone I have shown Mozilla, has made it (or Firebird) their default browser. They were blown away by the speed, and features. Typing to find links in a page, tabbed browsing, popup blocking... very cool stuff.
Then when they hear that it's more secure, and won't automatically execute everything it downloads (like those stupid virus IM's spreading over AIM)... they love it.
So I suggest every geek pass a few copies around. If everyone does it... and a few others spread the word... Mozilla will get around.
Mozilla has had 0 marketing to this point. Start the effort.
I've turned out dozens of people. If everyone does the same, the userbase will grow very fast.
Oh my gosh! Microsoft has abandoned innovation! What are we going to do now that Microsoft has stopped innovation? Will we be able to recover from this - WILL WE!?
Everytime I have to open IE for testing, I am amazed at how little has changed since really IE 4. I can't stand not using a tabbed browser.
The reality is that Microsoft never did innovate. Just because Bill Gates says they are innovating doesn't make it so. As with any industry often the most innovative ideas come from the little companies that have a reason to think outside the bun.
"Microsoft stops innovating." Everytime I type that I laugh and laugh. What's next? "Bodybuilder becomes president..."
LoRider
that coding for standards can save boku bucks in the here and now, in terms of bandwidth costs and in the costs of designing and maintaining sites.
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid =03/09/30/1633204
(remove space from above url)
Now that Microsoft has won the Browser War, they see no need to improve their product because they have so little competition.
In other news:
Scientists have determined that water is indeed wet.
NASA has concluded that the sky is blue.
Thank you Captain Obvious.
I'd like to see a breakdown of actual /. browser usage (not just a preference poll). I'd imagine that IE is fairly high.
1. do not give bug reports to MS as they are not woth it, let them pay for our service, they make us pay too for all the crap they make.
2. break your pages for IE and tell the people why this is the case and blame MS for it while offering Mozilla Firebird, these are exactly the same tactics that MS played at first.
Most people i got turned over to Firebird are extremely satisfied, more so as it does not need a installer and thus give people in restricted company environments a second chance to browse beyond their crippled IE.
3. wait with directing people to Opera, it's a nice fast browser with a MAJOR problem, A totaly crippled DOM, the things you need to do to make Dynamic HTML posible is to cry of.
Why would MS want to obtain a large market share with something they hand out for free? With operating systems, the interests are clear: more OS sales means more money. But why does it matter whether someone runs their browser (which is for free) or someone else's (which may or may not be free). It sounds like addiction to power, or am I missing something?
The logical next step would be that you will have to buy IE for, say, $50, but that does not make sense since the whole potential market is running an operating system with that same browser built-in. Or is the time there that the browser shipped with the OS will be stripped down and you'll have to pay extra for full features? I don't get it.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
slow as hell, unresponsive, doesn't have many special/exclusive features that people would want
Most here are talking about firebird, not Mozilla.
Slow: Nope
Unresponsive: Nope
Features: Popup blocker, themeable,tabbed browsing (my fav), etc
In fact, I'm using it right now, and honestly if I swapped it on a few windows desktops, changed the icon to IE so that people would click it, and left it for a month very few people would probably notice the difference or think to ask about it.
I'll tell you what I think is true innovation: making the product more efficient, more capable, but reducing the complexity of the interface and reducing the number of 'features' needed to achieve the same goals.
I've removed back and forward buttons from my Opera toolbar. They are effectively obsolete;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
i run opera 7.2 on win2k and while it doesn't crash opera, it does have problems rendering the page correctly the majority of the time. it's to the point where i only fire up IE for critical updates & ESPN. the rest of my browsing takes place here in opera. but i find that i prefer to get my sports fix on foxsports, myself.
man, i love opera.
ed
A lot of people (even die-hard WindowsXP users that are either afraid of or hate GNU/Linux or *BSD) i have shown Firebird to have jumped right on it. Others use Netscape or Opera.
Microsoft keeps touting this "We've won the Browser War!", but really... IE is a clunky, buggy, crash-prone and behind the times mess. Its mere existence is a pure security risk. It lacks numerous useful (not just frivolous) features that many other browsers have (i.e. tabs, popup blocking, working java, etc).
In short, IE is at the bottom of the pile. It may have had some advantages in the past, but aside from the New Crayola Interface, using IE feels like 1998 all over again.
do() || do_not();
If IE had won the browser war even a year earlier, the web would be a very ugly place. The standards we have now, ugly as they are, would have been muddied with Microsoft-proprietary junk had IE taken off. Remember Java vs. ActiveX? Lucky for us, both lost.
Though I guess given enough time, the MS-specific stuff might creep back in as the competitors disappear into the noise.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
If you want a permanent copy of the unpatched vulnerabilities, get it now, because Google's cache does not last forever. See the parent post for a link. Since Microsoft has stopped improving IE, we may be living with those vulnerabilities for a long time.
It looks more like they are stifling bug fixs, not inovations. There is a world of difference between the two.
You write that a lot of them have probably improved while IE has most definitely not improved, but they were all HORRIBLE. Exactly what went wrong? I have had no problems with Mozilla 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3.1 under Windows 2000 SP2 or SP3 or Windows XP SP1. My computer has a 1 GHz Athlon and 512MB RAM. My only complaint is with Web sites that don't want to support browsers other than IE.
For this to happen, yo would need to lighten up Apple's restriction to open OS X to the Intel market.... something not very viable to happen (read: Jobs is too chicken to go head to head vs Microsoft).
thought i was reading The Onion for a second there.
Politicus
I've never heard of "Dillo" until just now.
Do users really want a web browser that's pretty much perpetual shareware?
IE is at least "completed." Any subsequent releases are "new versions" - not just "beta 2" to them.
I thought it was Linux and Open Source that was full of holes, and were the #1 source of internet break ins?
How so? It's the exact same technology. In fact, Mozilla is going to split up into Firebird and Thunderbird soon. So, Firebird is simply Mozilla without the e-mail client.
Zodiac Survey
I love Mozilla. It's great. But I have lessons in high school, with bunch of idiots who love hip-hop, gangsta, graffitti, this kind of junk. Installing Mozilla is one thing. To make it usable though, you need to install Flash, Java, possibly some other plugins and the process isn't trivial click-through. So for now they just won't do it - too stupid for that. And even if they did, sites MSIE bug-for-bug compilan won't display properly - so they won't use Mozilla - and I assure you a huge majority of computer users is like that.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'd like to see some stats of browsers that visit /. Guarantee the hated MS IE is near the top!
This is hardly surprising. Microsoft's intention was never to build the greatest browser, but to simply build a browser that would net them the largest market share. With the other big player out of the way now, there's little incentive for further "innovation".
And this is exactly the problem that free markets have in a general sense: the action(s) that maximizes a company's returns may not always maximize consumer utility.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Its intresting what you say about CSS and IE.
I use Mozilla and was browsing their site the other day and came across this pretty page on why you should switch to Mozilla. It was all very well done and heavily relied on CSS.
So I thought, this page is obviously mainly intended for the 90+% browser users who use IE. So how would it render in IE, bearing in mind how much CSS it uses. OMG, its crap! This doesn't help ppl switch because if they use IE it looks like a poorly designed page and thus they make think similar things about the browser.
Go try out the page in IE, and see what I mean.
Think about it, has Innovation really ever been 100% Innovative.
Here are a few examples of M$ Innovation
c# = sun Java
Windows = apples OS (they beat M$ by over 10 years)
IE = Based on NCSA Mosaic (look at the about IE thing)
And also remember M$ just got beat in court over patents.
Really think about it, M$ is a re hash company. But they are good at it. Well at least making people think they are good at it. I have seen very little quality program from M$. I give credit where its due and I admit windows 2000 is a decent system. But again it's just a re hash.
Once they market the crap out of something and get everyone to use it, they look at it and say hey why wastes cash on this. It's making cash, and that's all we care about.
My 2 cents plus 2 more
Yes, maybe I'm bitter. I've created a website that works fine in every other browser that I've tested it on, but sucks in IE. So I'm maybe not your average surfer, but I think this topic is much more important than surfing for porn or stock quotes (or stock quotes of porn companies).
I couldn't help but think of the not-so-distant future when reading this topic. I'd say the web is an important part of my life now, but in the future, the web could be extremely important to everyone's life. It could bind cultures and peoples together or tear them apart. It is becoming our main source of information and communication. It is changing the way we think, do business, and approach our world.
If Microsoft continues to set the standards for the web, there is absolutely no doubt that they will abuse their position. They are right now, by not innovating, and ceasing in their bug-squashing efforts (chortle). Soon, there will be no standards-compliant HTML, there will be only Microsoft-compliant HTML. Apparently, CSS will never work right. The W3C will be a joke. People without IE will be locked out of important sites, and alternate platforms will be totally screwed, since development has stopped for the Mac, and there isn't IE for Linux, to my knowledge.
We need to view this as a war, 'cause it is. If we cede this battle, we've lost. We're at the breaking point right now, since Micro$oft has almost complete market dominance. We can't turn to the courts. The business world sees monoculture as a good thing, and IE as a defacto standard. They haven't been burned by it; yet.
I think guerrilla warfare is the only way. Any successful geurrilla movement must win the hearts and minds of the villagers/people. That means we must be honorable with them, and calmly educate them about the dangers of our mutual oppressors. But what are the dangers? Do they care about monoculture and standards? Probably not; that's a web developer bitch. Most web developers will sympathize with our plight. How then, do we win over the common people?
Features.
Microsoft has given us an opening, and we must take it. Since they've slowed down work on their browser, now is the time to redouble our efforts. We need browsers with cool features beyond popup-blocking. Innovative browsers, that work. Microsoft has given Apple a free pass. Safari rocks; I'm using it right now. Firebird is another great browser, and it works on every major platform. We need to support these browsers and get people to change over. When people check their site and see less than 80% of their users are using IE, then they will have to design for and support other browsers. Only idiots and crazy people can afford to lose 20% of their business.
Increased speed, and lots of features will be great, but nobody will know about it unless we spread the word. Get your Windoze-using friends to switch to Firebird or any other browser. Even better, get them to switch to Linux or the Mac. But we need to get the word out and convince people to change, one person at a time. I think we'll find there's a lot of discontent out there.
Anyway, sorry about this long-ass rant. But I feel strongly that something must be done about Microsoft's crappy-yet-dominant browser. Don't even get me started on their OSes.
Electric Monkey Pants
I use Safari but some banking sites and some of the more secure sites seem to fail with Safari. Is Safari considered a secure browser? Is Netscape more secure. I freaking hate Netscape but if its more secure.....
My karma is getting better everyday.
That is all.
There's only so many ways to type a letter, format, print. The rest is just bloated fluff.
"How so?" you ask? I can't say I know exactly. As I wrote: "It's left me with the impression..." so I don't know how much psychology is involved in that statement and how much empirical data.
As for Mozilla splitting up into pieces, I believe it isn't just "going to", it's actually in the process as we speak.
And Firebird is Mozilla not just without the e-mail client, but without anything but the web browser. Given the way over-burdened virtual memory can cause performance lags, the potential benefit from a smaller feature set (and hence a smaller memory footprint) can be quite significant, I should think. Anyone else see it my way?
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Why don't the companies who are in this web standards group put links to Opera and Mozilla on their homepage? Something like "Enhance your web experience with Mozilla/Opera". Don't expect MS to improve IE until they have 80% of the marketshare. C'mon, they still don't support png correctly.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Opera recently put out version 7.2.
I had always used Mozilla or Firebird, switching back and forth. I went to Firebird hoping for efficiency and a speed increase and got none, and switched back to Mozilla to make up for missing features in Firebird, and back and forth.
Then, on a whim, I FINALLY tried Opera. I was blown away. It started up instantly. I checked the memory footprint and noted that it was 1/5 that of Mozilla, and I had 14 pages open! The interface was much more customizable, and switching themes, amazing me the most, took less than a second. No restart. Just immediate new theme.
I don't know why anyone would use Mozilla over Opera. Mozilla is incredibly slow and a resource hog. Opera is blazingly fast and doesn't eat up all my memory. I'm really curious how they did it. Check it out.
"Sufferin' succotash."
This space intentionally contains only this statement.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Oh...cause Apple told you, right? Hahaha. Sucker.
Blar.
Long live diversity! Say "no" to monoculture!
One of the outcomes of the antitrust suit was the "Automatic Update" facility, which is basically Windows Update using a Win32 app instead of IE.
Scientists have discovered that the liquid phase of dihydrogen monoxide has a peculiar property called 'wetness'.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I tried to put CSS into my pages at my previous employer, thereby making them Section 508-compliant (the previous incarnation was a mess of kludgy non-compliant code) and satisfying the requirements of the government that I was working for at the time. The side benefit of making every single page in a rather large site load in a tenth the time due to more efficient code was nice also.
I was ordered to remove the CSS and replace it with the mess of inline font tags and other such nonsense. I was able to stealthily leave in some acronym tags, but who knows what my idiot successors may be doing to the site by now.
Illegitimi non carborundum
Aye, port to Windows but let's not forget the obvious--GNUstep. Apple could (probably) quite easily port Safari to *nix via GNUstep.
GNUstep is just BEGGING for someone to use it--such great libraries and foundations. The fact that it works (they can build GNUmail.app on both Linux and OS X without changes) is impressive.
Sure, they added lots of gimmicks and features, and they made IE prettier and a bit more usable than when it started. But I don't recall much "innovation", as in "genuinely new ideas".
Webdevelopers complaining about IE-development comming to a halt are not powerless. Microsoft and IE are not building the web, webdevelopers are. The main problem is that users have no incentive to switch to another browser, all the websites out there work just fine with the browser they have.
If webdevelopers started taking advantage of technologies available in other browsers but that still downgraded 'good enough' to IE, and then put a small recommendation to switch to a better browser I'm sure that people would start migrating at a much higher pace then they do now.
Instead, the main message that webdevelopers now spread is "this page that I designed for IE doesn't work in browser X, you should fix that in the browser" and "Eh, mozilla doesn't have any marketshare anyway, i don't really care if my page doesn't work there" or "If this feature doesn't work in IE I won't use it".
Stop playing microsofts game and just maybe they will start listening to you. The way things are now microsoft can just sit back and enjoy the show while the entire internet world helps them out.
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
Want to make the world a better place? Make it so that it truly does not matter which browser is being used.
Run your pages through http://validator.w3.org . If you use a content creation tool, and its pages don't validate clean, complain to your vendor that their software is broken.
Without exception, every page I have ever seen that didn't render the same on multiple browsers did not do so because it had nonstandard HTML that caused the browsers to resolve the inconsistencies in different ways.
From my perspective, the User-Agent: request header for HTTP was the worst thing that was ever done to the web. It should just. not. matter.
Here in our office two of our machines running ms ie6.0 suddenly lost all search capabilities. Whatever search engine we try, lycos, google, msn, none work, we get a "page can't be found" ...in fact my computer tells me google.com does'nt exist! anyone else having this trouble? Any ideas on where to go for information on fixing this?
Try my new smokable Sig,
I realize that the market share tends to point out 90%+ using IE, but that does not jive with the percentage of people I know. I have seen almost everyone in my family and workplace (on their home machines) switch over to Mozilla or Firebird for the native popup blocking, etc -- with little or no input from me....(Most of these people actually come up to me and say "you have to try this"). I can't imagine that this situation is unique to only the people around me. If this is happening everywhere -- then I assume the numbers have to be swaying somewhat.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Opera always contains "Opera" in the UA string no matter which one you've selected. Stats programs are smart enough to find this.
.. what's their motivation to improve? They have no ompetition and people just let them do what they want. Hey if anyone gets in their way they crush them like a grape. So now they have about 90% of market share and they don't have to improve. They just have to make it look like they are inovating, but they never really inovated anyway, and don't tell me COM was an inovation, it is a nightmare as is active X. So what's really improved between Win 95 and XP? No really improved and less crashes doesn't count?? Please tell me as an end user???
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
He can embed mozilla into the linux kernel
The lunatic is in my head
My own choice has been to support web standards to the hilt, and try to make sure that users of IE (the most popular browser) at least see something decent. They get slightly degraded functionality, but that's their fault for using broken software.
The most significant numbers I saw on the zeitgeist page was that there are the same number of linux users and win95 users hitting google...wohooo! next up: 98SE. Bill must be quakin'
"Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," [IE program manager] Countryman said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
There you go. That copy of Windows XP Pro that you just bought? It's legacy. Windows 2003 Server? Obsolete before you unwrap it!
But never mind, because in two years time, we might produce an OS that isn't such a piece of kludgy circa 1992 designed shit.
In the meantime, please remember to renew your Microsoft Volume Licensing contracts. It's not like you have a choice, is it?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
IE is so unbiquitous that most web-designers don't design to the standards, they design to IE, including all it's bugs. That creates barriers to users switching. How many lusers, upon trying out Mozilla and finding their favourite website doesn't render properly are going to assume the fault lies with Mozilla, rather than broken HTML on the website? The vast majority are going to say "Well, it works fine in IE, Mozilla must suck!" If Microsoft were to comply with the standards, it would be easy for users to switch to other browsers. I don't know what the answer is. One solution would be an "Emulate broken IE behaviour" checkbox in Mozilla. But then, that would just allow the bad behaviour of web authors to continue.
Which is it? Should Microsoft throw everything but the kitchen sink in (monopoly!) or should they not do everything and leave some for others (monopoly, not improving the product!)? Make up your minds, or at least confess:
"I am a contrarian. I don't like Microsoft because they're mainstream. I listen to off-the-wall music like The Wailing Cricket Sperms and make sure I tell everyone about it."
Here's a hint: There _are_ other browsers. Several of them. There are other browsers that even extend IE (I'm using MyIE2 right now) to add some features. It's the same with OS's, but still you whine "monopoly!". What a load of crap.
Most people are completely ignorant of the security issues. What really bugs them are popups. Once you show them Mozilla's popup supression, they're hooked for good.
I've turned dozens of people onto Mozilla this way.
Another thing they really like, when they get used to it, is the password/form manager.
...is Google's Zeitgeist IMO (see "Web Browsers Used to Access Google"). Charts-only, no figures though.
I was thinking about the IE is default/popular/everywhere argument, and the thought occurs... In a work environment, why do admins leave it accessable on the machines at all? I run Mozilla on our network, and although the odd page fails ("Currently you are using a browser that does not support the features of the Land Rover New Zealand website."... bite me - I'll buy an X5 instead) we've got a solution that doesn't suck and won't trash the network due to a "malicously constructed webpage". I assume the folks running these MS-only shops are MSCEs, but even so, when a product has 30+ KNOWN VULNERABILITIES, it's got to be incompetence to keep running it!
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
This is a good post. I agree with most of the opinions in here. It couldn't be much more of a pain than having them download Acrobat and Flash.
Ever try to download one of Microsofts security patches or service packs with a non IE browser? I haven't been able to pull down updates from thier site with any browser other than IE.
I do still blame developers for this one. What's this crap about "compromizing stylesheets and markup?" Where's the compromise? Exactly what brilliant thing are you forced to deprive your users of, because of browser compliance issues? This is a load of crap. Maybe you ought to look at your over-reliance on window dressing and geegaws, and pay more attention to good basic information design.
Why not just recommend Apple computers and be done with it? Microsoft's been so kind as to kill IE on the Macintosh, and Safari rocks your socks just as hard as Mozilla does....
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
An HTML iteration mandating CSS use -- I have to admit I'm not up to date on where w3c is with many of their standards, but it is time to clean up HTML
How would that be different from XHTML 1.1 Strict? Well, besides the fact that none of the browsers are particularly strict about the strictness...;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
However, Firebird 0.7 (which, I believe, is enhancements to Firebird 0.6.1) will just be the browser of Mozilla 1.5 (which is totally different from 1.4).
-nt-
And this Trolling is modded up because?
"It's bloated beyond belief, slow as hell, unresponsive, doesn't have many special/exclusive features that people would want (other than javascript controls) etc"
This is pure FUD and anyone stupid enough to mod this up should have their points taken away.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
1) develop an easy way to remove internet explorer from windows systems. 2) put posters, give out stickers, and otherwise EXTREME promote Mozilla, and mention the words "Free, Better, Reliable, Secure, FAST! and EASY!" in all said promotion. 3) Provide Anti-IE/ Pro Mozilla: Uninstall/ Install fests, like the windows/linux install fests of yor. 4) Kick microsoft in the ass when Mozilla has the market share. Benefits: for one, people will be getting a more reliable browser. Microsoft will rethink their browser war strategy and fix the damn bugs and possibly conform to standards.
I write code.
If they mean, "If someone installs every certificate and plugin that anybody, anywhere, writes there's a possible breach," then is that really a MS problem?
I used to use Netscape. I loved it. It was WAY better than IE. Now it's junk and the only way to look at a webpage is with IE. Sure, I could pay for some other browser, but it's not worth my money. Ooh, I can look at warez sites - I'm so 3173133. Again, browse smarter and don't click on every freakin' link and OK box that shows up. I haven't heard people here bitch about being able to run machine level code via Java. (Cup holder, anyone?) Frankly, if you're dumb enough to get screwed over by a security flaw, then you probably don't deserve a computer in the first place.
It's lame, but if the majority of pages are rendered and tested with IE, it's probably the way to go. If you started driving a right-hand drive car, you don't have much of a right to complain about how the roads are designed for left-hand cars. (Or the other way around if you're in Europe.) If you say, "IE doesn't support the [obscure foo] tag," then maybe you should use another tag that renders properly on all browsers.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Actually I'm lead to believe that it being an urban myth is an urban myth.
And soon this too will be an urban myth.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I'd agree with this -- Look at Mozilla Firebird -- they're basically rewriting what they already have for no real good reason other than to de-Netscapify the thing.
They're not really interested in adding new features or pushing the boundries, probably because they don't have enough users to make any bleeding edge features worthwhile.
Usually people get bids from two or three different "web designers" and I always ask to which standards do they code to. 90% of the time I hear, "MSIE". I retort, so you don't use Xhtml, html 4, CSS 1 or 2.0 as your standard as defined by the W3C? Usually makes them a tad bit uncomfortable when they know they are dealing with an expert. Then after peeling the onion back a little bit further and they say, "90% of the world uses MSIE, therefore that is what standard we code too". These are "Web Professionals" and people wonder why people are paying me money to sit in on meetings and tell them if Web Design/Networking company X is bullshitting them.
Then I say to the business owner, however that means that 10% of potential customers may not be able to access the site. Business owners get the point, sometimes. Other times they stick with the, "Well all my current customers use Windows and MSIE, its what we use, so if they can't use Netscape or Safari, too bad. They need to get a PC".
However I have a bigger fear, and that is the moving away of technology from open standards creating closed global networks. While some will defend open standards to their death, the truth is with openness, also comes the ablity for those to abuse it for their own gain. Just look at Email and Spam. Even if a new "Open" protocal is designed, how long until the spammer find a way to circumvent the technology and continue their annoying habbits? Not to say it wouldn't happen with a closed solution, but here is where the closed solution (bit of a slippery-slope) could come into play:
Spam is a problem. I hear this all the time from my clients wanted to improve their technology. It becomming such a problem and some of the major players come to develop a new method for delivering Email, let's just all it NixSpam, that is harder to fake, but here comes the kicker: It requires you to have a DRM chipset and server solution to authenticate messages sent. Co inside this with paliadim(sp?) and other M$ technologies on the horizon.
Some of my clients would pay the money if the technology worked. Would they care that Mac and Linux users could no longer send them email, maybe some with Mac users, but most would say, "Well if Person X want's to communicate with the rest of the world, they can buy a Dell like everyone else" (Yes I do here that more than you would think).
Again, at the same time, many of my customers are tired of playing the "Let's spend thousands every 18 months to upgrade all our software and hardware" game and some have seriously looked at Linux, and I have had one office of about 18 make the switch and several smaller mom & pops have switch to using Mac's. Linux has matured to the point where it may just be ready for Desktop use at larger offices that have at least a small dedicated IT staff, however most still are afraid of not having the level of support of Windows or Apple.
However, if M$ would be sucessful in creating closed API's like they have in the past for email or even webbrowsing, any hope of making Linux a reasonable and viable alternative to Windows is gone.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
> because they're a monpolist (sic)
...
This is why. If there was competition, then the market is assumed do the work of weeding out the non-compliant products. But without competition - in a monopoly situation, there is no competition to force the incumbent to do anything, so they are held to a higher standard.
> Microsoft dissolves development teams once a development project is over
We're talking about IE here - which MicroSoft claim is an integral part of their OS product. Are you seriously suggesting that they desolved the IE team? That's it's no longer supported by them? If that is true, then it's time to re-evaluate the anti-trust evidence, and put those lying MS-execs in jail.
1) Yay! Microsoft is not planning on updating their browser, allowing their competition to leap ahead. This is a good thing! We should be celebrating!
2) The article on security holes? Please read it carefully. The summary in the header is absolutely incorrect - this article doesn't pretend that there are 30-40 know security holes in I.E. right now, nor does it make any sort of compelling case that MS isn't plugging those holes correctly. It is sad, actually - the writer obviously slept through the whole "gather your facts, present them objectively" part of their journalism classes....
I've been testing Mozilla since the 0.6 release, I think, and I switched to it as my primary browser just before it went to 1.0. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was that IE couldn't properly render sites that were being Borg'd into MSN (i.e., ESPN). Mozilla had no such problems.
Tabbed browsing and popup-blocking were merely the icing on the cake, but now that I use Mozilla as my primary browser, I cringe when I'm forced to use IE for anything.
I read last week on C-Net that an IE hole was to blame for the Half Life code leak. Had they required developers to use Mozilla, they might not have been hacked so easily. Here at my company, developers still using windows are scoffed at, and anyone found browsing the web with IE is taken to the broom closet for torture/interrogation. I tend to develop apps using Mozilla for testing, which behaves pretty well, too bad most users are stuck with IE. The poor web developers here have to support IE and Mozilla, I like to make people test their stuff in Safari once in a while too. Mozilla has its flaws, but I find it to be 10+ times better than IE, which I find to be double plus ungood.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Those same "Web Developers" that are complaining about IE's lack of progress are the same ones that helped IE to it's monopoly by refusing to code and test against other browsers. So they really only have themselves to blame.
The monster that they helped to create by being lazy and not regressing against other browsers and platforms is something that they'll have to live with now.
Just don't let it happen again, kay? We have another chance with media standards--all you fools who only support WinMedia, once it becomes the standard, innovation will stop with it, too.
--
$tar -xvf
"Maybe you ought to look at your over-reliance on window dressing and geegaws, and pay more attention to good basic information design."
I apologise in advance for breathing, and ask your forgiveness. I didn't catch the name of your book, though.
"I do still blame developers for this one."
Non-standard compliance of browsers? Or the vast amount of non-standards compliant code still around? Psst. Try 'view source'.
"Exactly what brilliant thing are you forced to deprive your users of, because of browser compliance issues?"
Specific layout elements, dumbass. Those mentioned in the w3c standards documents for devices other than browsers; broken or buggy implementations of CSS that _should_ allow for a flat development model across the board, but instead frustrate when you get the positioning of an element correct under one browser, and then have to figure out why it didn't work in another. And before you harp on about design, bear in mind that in the commercial universe, there are the graphic designers that demand certain things, and I have to be stubborn to a point to stop them using flash, activeX, that cute little java scroller, but you can't be stubborn all the way because they fire you for things like that.
Catch a clue, and stop assuming the worst of someone you haven't even engaged in conversation. Jesus.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
In a work environment, why do admins leave it accessable on the machines at all?
Because our bosses would just tell us to re-enable it when the Land Rover New Zeland website doesn't work, because they don't like the X5.
You make it sound as if the admins have complete and total control. We do have complete and total access and configurability in most cases, but someone higher up with less IQ generally calls the shots. All most admins can do is recommend and implement, not actually make the decision to stop or start using a particular peice of software, no matter what it's faults are.
Mozilla recently put out version 7.2.
I had always used Opera or Firebird, switching back and forth. I went to Firebird hoping for efficiency and a speed increase and got none, and switched back to Opera to make up for missing features in Firebird, and back and forth.
Then, on a whim, I FINALLY tried Mozilla. I was blown away. It started up instantly. I checked the memory footprint and noted that it was 1/5 that of Opera, and I had 14 pages open! The interface was much more customizable, and switching themes, amazing me the most, took less than a second. No restart. Just immediate new theme.
I don't know why anyone would use Opera over Mozilla. Opera is incredibly slow and a resource hog. Mozilla is blazingly fast and doesn't eat up all my memory. I'm really curious how they did it. Check it out.
I do crap like that all the time and haven't seen that behavior in IE 5.5 or 6 ...
I'm writing this as a person who only recently went back and took a look at a browser OTHER than IE. Back in the early days of the Internet, I was a diehard Netscape user, but was quickly converted once IE passed Netscape in functionality and correct rendering of pages.
.com to the end of everything, and I haven't found a way to disable that "feature."
Just this past week, I've installed Mozilla Firebird on both my work and home computers. I love the tabbed browsing interface - which is one thing I think IE needs to avoid losing market share to Opera and Mozilla.
I do see a couple of problems with using Mozilla as my full-time browser, though. First, is that (like it or not) many more pages are designed to work correctly with IE - without any consideration for other browsers. The company I work for is guilty of this, but I can't necessarily blame them because the other browsers have such a small market share. Why waste expensive development hours on something that a very small percentage of users will ever notice?
The second problem is that the Mozilla Firebird browser doesn't work nearly as well with accessing our Intranet sites at work because of all of the strange URLs that we have. It wants to add
Overall, I'm really impressed with Mozilla, but it's not quite to the point where I can quit using IE and switch over. That's where they need to get before they can possibly win the browser war.
Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy?
I'm gonna use IE twice as much now just to piss you off. That ought to offset your addition to Mozilla's usage statistics. Moron.
If you like (or have to use) IE for whatever reason, consider installing MyIE2. It has a lot of the cool features that Mozilla has: tabs, popup blocking, etc., but uses IE's rendering engine. It doesn't fix the security holes, though.
if they didn't have to pay Netscape (now AOL) 0.7 Billion or so.
"We balance feedback from all our customers and make our development decisions based on meeting the requirements of all of our customers, not just a few of them," Sullivan said.
Gee... the customers of a general purpose operating systems aren't web savvy enough to know that they want to take advantage of current standards.
Morons.
Of course, I'm sure they're spending all their time and money on that 'Securing Windows' thing...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Microsoft "abandoning 'innovation'" is like hippos abandoning spaceflight.
Abandoned? And other browsers are still trying to play catch up?
I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.
How so? It's the exact same technology. In fact, Mozilla is going to split up into Firebird and Thunderbird soon. So, Firebird is simply Mozilla without the e-mail client.
No it's not. Firebird is a completely different application based the Mozilla Gecko core technologies. It shares much of the Mozilla backend but it is not "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client." If you want to use "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client," then select Navigator only in the Mozilla installer. Compare that to firebird and you'll see how they're quite different applications.
--Asa
One thing I find very interesting about this article and issue is that MS hasn't actually learned from it's own history.
Specifically, I'm referring to the comment about how Windows once became more important than DOS, and supplanted it. MS might be trying to prevent that from happening again, but they don't understand WHY it happened.
If you look at DOS and Windows 3.0, and then 3.1, Windows was honestly easier to use. The Mac had been using a GUI for its OS for years, and MS was playing catch up with the features. Of course Windows won over DOS - it was BETTER.
But now, about the only thing that is progressing is Windows. MS might have the market share, but when it comes to Word Processing, WordPerfect beats Word any day. Web browsing and email? Netscape, Mozilla, they're all better. So why aren't they winning now?
Well, how easy is it for an "average" user to get their hands on Netscape? It isn't sold in stores, and the download is actually quite long if you're not using high speed. WordPerfect doesn't seem to be that widely distributed, but there's also a common belief that if everybody's using Word files, you may as well get Word.
The big question in my mind is how long this will go before it changes. I don't think there's a lot of good will towards MS at this point in time. People don't like dealing with security holes, or word processors that require the equivalent of a special university degree just to change the margins. But Microsoft is starting to fall behind. The latest WordPerfect has built-in support for Word files now - once it has the distribution it needs, it will be easier to use, cheaper, and fully compatible, and a lot of businesses will be asking themselves why they're still dealing with MS.
I have a funny feeling that history is getting ready to repeat itself. The Windows OS is probably going to be around for a while, but all of the add-ons are in the process of becoming obsolete, and soon MS might just be losing their monopoly just because they couldn't be bothered to keep up.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
They are VERY concerned about SECURITY.
The security of there current position as a monopoly.
yea yeah come on MS release those groovy ass code such as "contenteditable" shiznit so that htmlarea will work in any borwser. you do that and i just might think about forgiving you for teh god awful hellish, and you will be damned no matter what tag.
thats why competiton is good.
+-+-+-The folowing statement is true. The previous statement is false.-+-+-+
Yes it is, sorry but Netscape did not have a chance. But the Browser Revoluton is just starting. Mozilla and opera are starting to launch small battles against the big IE. first their was the tabbed browsing offensive, it completely caught MS off guard and they did not even try to put up a fight. Then came the battle of standards compliance. While this one was not a huge fight, I am betting that history will show it was a crucial one.
viva la revolution...
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Okay, the question first. Why does IE still not render png graphics with transparent backgrounds correctly? Are my png files malformed or is this a problem with IE?
Now the comments. I mostly used Safari on OS X and Firebird in XP. I like tabbed browsing and browsers that aren't resource hogs so these are obvious choices. I do occasionally have to drop into IE on the XP machine because of rendering problems with a (very) few sites. Between Camino and Safari I can view all the sites I need on my Mac. I think that the main reason people don't switch to alternative browsers is because IE is what most people use at work and school and it is difficult for them to transition between home and work. I know that many times I forget how to do something in IE or Word or some other thing we have at work because I use the alternative at home. For me it is not hard to figure out how to do something, but for other people it is very difficult to remember all these things and constantly switch back and forth.
Smeghead every day of the week.
rpm -i -v i-hope-this-is-the-package-i-think-it-is.rpm, and then watching two screens of missing dependencies scroll past them.
I could only deal with a couple months of RPM dependency hell before I switched to Debian. Rumor has it that apt works with RPMs, also.
Besides, your point is moot since *all* Linux distributions come with *several* browsers and several hundred other programs pre-installed. That's more than anyone can say for Windows.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Well, Mozilla is just a web browser and an e-mail client. There's no "anything without", unless you are talking about the features, which are ALL useful. In fact, Firebird keeps adding stuff to its set, like the popup blocker, so I guess this is the logical reason why Mozilla is splitting it up into the two parts: Firebird is becoming just like Mozilla (without the e-mail client) again.
Zodiac Survey
MyIE2 is a wonderful addon to Internet Explorer that has pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, and skins -- as well as many other extras such as the ability to right-click even when webpages have forbidden it. For people who like the speed and rendering capabilities of IE, but want the features of Mozilla, I highly suggest giving MyIE2 a try.
that's nice dear... but how much surfing can you really get done between fucking off and drinking all that shut the hell up?
"There's 31 un-patched holes in IE, but MS won't talk about it..."
/. story headers. Will it ever end?
Where is the proof of this? Why would a moderator allow this in a story header?
Article does mention: "...allegations made by security research company Pivx Solutions that there are over 30 un-patched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer..."
Ok, so some rinky-dink company I've only vaguely heard of (for finding exploits in video games or some such) claims this, so why should I beleive them?
So I go to their site and click on 'Research' to see if they have anything to back up this claim. Page says: "{ this page has been temporarily disabled }" Nice.
Unproven anti-ms fud in
We've already been waiting for 5 years, since IE4 with desktop integration slithered its way onto computers. What features of consequence has IE brought us since then? As others have noted, popup blocking, type-ahead find, & tabbed browsing have all originated elsewhere. The Safari team at Apple has made more progress on the standards complaint front in the past 6 months than IE has made in the past two years. I, for one, am not satisfied with taking my lumps for another year (or two, or three). Time to light a fire under Microsoft and make some changes happen, or else we need to start a massive campaign to get people to switch to other browsers!
Firebird is based on a different implementation of the XUL toolkit. That's why it can do UI stuff mainstream mozilla can't (like drag and drop toolbar editing). Its browser engine should be identical, but in practice there's a disconnect. Not a large one though, and it's popup blocking should be identical to mozilla's.
It's true, other programs have been "king of the hill" before, only to be dethroned. But look at your examples and tell me who did the dethron-ing? Microsoft.
What we have today is different than what has happened before. Before, one company dominated word processing, another had a lock on spreadsheets, another was the king of databases. But look at the situation now. When it comes to "productivity applications" (i.e. the programs that 90% of users use 90% of the time), the leaders are products FROM A SINGLE COMPANY.
Word Processing: Word
Spreadsheets: Excel
Presentation: PowerPoint
Planning: Visio
Database: Access
Web Browsing: IE
Email: Outlook
It goes on and on. No one is going to dethrone MS because they control the whole field. No one can get money and mindshare by succeeding in one area and then move into others, because MS controls ALL the areas. MS makes sure that most PCs come with MS applications that do everything, obviating the need to purchase any other software. If you're Joe/Jane User with limited funds, and your $500 Dell comes with programs to do all the things you need to do, why in the world would you spend more money or more time installing other programs that do the same thing?
Microsoft has a lock on the whole computer, especially now that they're extending their reach into the BIOS. The only reason they need to add more features now is to force users to upgrade their computers and feed the upgrade cycle.
As long as people can spend less than $1000 on a complete system that comes ready to use and has software that does everything they need it to pre-installed, and works pretty well most of the time, no one is going to switch to anything else.
CSS3 "tables" stuff already does this -- you can make block elements behave like table rows/columns/cells for layout purposes.
Though, I think CSS3 is still a CR.
DNA just wants to be free...
Pages do not look right with IE!
Often they have broken images, and I don't like that.
So I use Firebird.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
It has already been established that people think GUI wizards are more important than security. Until people change this emphasis by not spending on Windows then MS will continue to give customers what they deserve.
This implies that most people think their time is more important than their data. Maybe as people rely more on their data they will realize that security is worthwhile afterall.
What Slashdotter doesn't know FTP?? Does he think we're retarded??
I am a sysadmin, but sometimes web-designer at Microsoft's #1 worldwide partner (you can guess the two-letter company acronym). I had taken a long vacation from web-design from back in the HTML 3.0x days, and a few months ago picked that back up with a few projects on the side. I saw the wisdom, simplicity, and beauty of CSS and learned it quickly.
Then I found all the holes and incompatibilities and hacks and workarounds. Ugh. I liked Mozilla before (actually I hated moz but love phoe--er firebird), so I began the old song and dance from the HTML 3.0 days of coding for multiple browsers. What a load of crap!
Oh, I almost forgot the whole point of my post. As a designer working for **, I spoke to my Microsoft Technical Account Manager (TAM) and asked him WTF? (That's paraphrasing.) I went into GREAT detail actually, including links to the WSP and many other sites explaining the problems with IE's lack of compliance to the standards. Initially I would get an update every couple of days saying that the TAM was trying to find the right group, waiting on a response from soneone on vacation, etc. I would go a couple of weeks, then ping him again for a response. This was oh...maybe three months ago now. Haven't heard from him in long time.
They don't care and it pisses me off.
Last night I considerd that Eolas' suite was endangering others rather than MS. Today I really hope he manages to kill MS' IE monopoly for a while. An injunction against MS would really hurt MS because IE is part of the OS and so much depends on it these days.
Everybody knows how to use FTP. This is redundant.
Mozilla:
- Listing files in the open/save dialog is slow as sh|t.
- Saving files is slow - Moz stalls until it can pop-up a "saving" window.
Opera:
- Takes up HUGE amounts of memory after a while of running (Moz is no lightweight either)
- Can't disable certain javascript functions (like allow windows to focus themselves (real annoying)).
These are my biggest issues - I won't use Mozilla when I need to save more than a few files. And I won't use Opera on sites that use javascript to focus windows (like f*cking Google groups).
to say Microsoft abandoned innovation. As one of the least innovative companies in the history of IT, I question what innovation they ever contributed to web browsers. Bundling with the OS? Egregious security holes? Poor support for open standards? Sure, but what about technical innovations, particularly ones that are actually beneficial to the user.
While is it obvious that IE is the most widely used browser by a landslide, how do they really know that Mozilla has such a miniscule user base ? Mozilla is shipped with every version of Linux and BSD. Linux and BSD can be copied freely. If no one really knows how many people are using Linux, then how do they know how many are using Mozilla ? If their numbers are based on how a browser identifies, then consider this: a large percentange of non IE browser users (such as Konqueror and Opera users) switch their User Agent to Internet Explorer just to access certain websites, so who's to say who is really using IE ?
Many of the sites they're polling don't have anything to offer to a Linux or MacOS user- so they don't go to them and therefore don't get logged. Couple this with the ability to look like a completely different browser (present in the three top browsers for Linux, present in most of the alternate browser choices for Windows, and present in the alternate browser choice for MacOS...) and you've got nothing in the way of even remotely accurate stats.
The people selling that info are selling snake oil.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
They separate Netscape 5+/7 from Mozilla- when in reality, 6 and 7 ARE a commercialized version thereof. The stats are close to that 10% mark if you properly combine the two.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
There's LOTS of sites out there that render just fine- most of them. And, guess what, they're largely standards compliant. It's when you start trying to do truely fancy things (which is a debatable thing- the web wasn't intended to be an application, etc.) with JavaScript, etc. is when it all breaks down. Worse yet, it doesn't work right on most versions of IE in many cases. When 10-20% of your potential customer base (i.e. MacOS and Linux users definitely comprise that 10% between the two of them) is barred or has problems with your site you're doing the wrong things with your website.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
you can't fix bugs after the devs have left.
during the Netscape years, MS was at war, with 200-300 people working on the browser. after IE6 shipped and Netscape was DOA, that group (made up roughly of UI/shell, graphics/rendering, and setup teams) was broken up and cannibalized. the "new" MS internet experience, MSN Explorer, absorbed the UI/Shell team. the graphics/rendering team formed the core of a new Longhorn unified graphics engine. and the setup team became... the legacy IE team.
I believe the Longhorn unified graphics engine still leverages the IE rendering engine but any fixes for that (like with CSS or security) will appear in Longhorn IE, not in downloadable IE, unless the bug is heinous. which none of the issues raised are (heinous bugs are ones that reduce marketshare, not offend standard bodies or security companies).
anyway, my point is there is no one "there" to make the number of fixes that everyone wants. they would have to re-assemble the IE braintrust to do the work and rev IE either to 6.1 or 7, which isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Light, responsive, highly usable, rock solid, Galeon is by far the best browser, in my non-so-humble opinion. It has a very high degree of "fit and finish" on even the small features that comes from having been around lonig enough to learn from its, and others', mistakes.
I have to scratch my head every time I read here where everyone is getting all excited about some new, unfinished, unpolished Mozilla offshoot *cough*Phoenix*cough* is all the rage, which will one day have all the good stuff that Galeon has today.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
It is intresting to note that MS went to all the trouble to develope CSS (not a W3C std) for scroll bars but couldn't be bothered to fix many CCS issues in IE..talk about fluff!
Around here, nobody uses IE (okay, I think it's got around 3% browser market share).
The alternatives are just so much better.
Of course, none of them come pre-installed on windows systems, but that's hardly a problem as I put one of them on as soon as the machine is switched on.
It's not a problem for linux machines, of course.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I meant, how does he know that Safari doesn't have the same hooks? Duh, I mean, what kind of Slashdot user would I be if I didn't keep track of all of MSFT's failings...
Blar.
Obviously the "Mozilla Ueber Alles" moderators are out in force today, and you got burned.
Too bad, because you make valid points and it sounds like you are actually out there in the real world trying to improve the situation rather than evangalizing your dormmates.
I attempted to switch from IE to Firebird, but I got turned off by some of its behavior. My job is done through a web app, and the way I work with it is to copy out regions in the app, and work with it in emacs (basically i unmunge spam and either turn it into a regular expression filter or find some other pattern common to the spam).
... sort of a mouse finagling skill people get used to. What Firebird does, and what is completely unacceptable to the point of making it unusable is to jump-scroll to the end of the selection. That means if I hilight an area and miss some invisible section boundary, the screen flickers as it zips back and forth, moving me off what my attention was on and completely screwing me up. It'd be like using vi and having it jump to random sections of your document when you moved the point to the end of the line.
... bad UI behavior that IE doesn't exhibit. IE simply doesn't scroll the window on drag selection unless the cursor is being dragged past the window boundaries. There's simply no reason for things to jump around on a drag like they do with FB. It's really hard to adequately describe this behavior until you've come across it ... suffice to say that to fix it I have to write various javascript tricks to perform hilighting that was simply intuitive in IE. I haven't had time to do so, and for that reason, I'm still using IE.
Each line is in a span, and the spans are grouped by divs. In IE, I simply control-click on one of the lines, and it will expand the selection to the whole div. Firebird knows nothing about control-click. Additionally, I can drag the mouse through more than one span, and it will extend the selection like normal. FB confines it to the span.
Granted, that's simply an idiosyncrasy I just got used to that I wasn't really "entitled" to, but the insanity really begins when I try to drag out an area outside the spans, or in general, drag out areas outside of the text, near the edge of the page. Most browsers go a little wiggy with selection when you do that, and extend the selection in large chunks beyond what you wanted until you finely adjust it to what you need
This isn't just a bug, it's design
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Tables were designed by Netscape and, if you read the original drafts, they were intended to be used for both layout as well as tabular data. In fact, one of the examples in the proposal was a newspaper site. That's why the table tags are full of layout properties.
It was only later that the W3C objected to the layout aspects, and it was only later after that that the W3C developed CSS-Positioning.
Also, there's several problems that tables solve that CSS still does not -- at least not easily. So arguing in favor of tables over CSS doesn't really work because CSS isn't entirely a direct replacement. The spacer gifs and so on are more due to devs wanting 'pixel perfect' layouts than anything inherent with tables.
And finally, table layout is the MOST cross-browser friendly way to do things. You can't name a browser that doesn't do tables correctly (except for Lynx, but you should be using Links).
The reason IE acts this way is to be 100% compatible with Netscape 3.
You also see this if you have a form with only 1 input type='text' and 1 input type='submit' --> IE won't send the submit element back with the form.
I've seen posts like yours before... someone says something about how crappy Microsoft products are then for no reason a flamer says tries to argue for MS. How about someone track this guys IP. I'll bet it leads straight to Microsoft. Telling someone who's making a valid arguement to die? You pig. How about I rip your heart right our of the fucken chest and feed it to my dog you piece of shit. BUrn in the pits of hell you cock sucker. Fucken microsoft pig. I'll kill you all one day. Mark my words.
I'm not anti-microsoft. I'm anti-bullshit. Which means I'm anti-microsoft.
Yeah, it seems a bit of a dumbass move in retrospect, the effort failed in terms of eliminating browser competition. Now they have a can of worms embedded intentionally as deeply as possible into their OS. Making it a modern and secure browser requires a level of change that isn't acceptable in terms of the risk of blowing up their OS or requiring a lot of work on the OS. So they leave it unmaintained to dry up and blow away... IE on Win32 seems to wending its way to a practical end-of-life. Opportunities for progress are clearly elsewhere...
I agree most clients initially don't care about W3C standards.
But it's part of a developers (or at least a pitcher's) job to point out that certain standards do exist.
Creating a metal-Pr0n flash site with light grey 4 point font on white background might be tres cool, but it is crap for most other users other than those in your immediate monkeyspank circle.
This doesn;t necessarily relate to the IE issue.
But let's use an SUV analogy to bring it back to IE.
Say you're the biggest SUV MoFo on the freeway. You can pretty much do as I like.
Yr king of the road. You set the standard.
However, if you keep ignoring those crunching sounds under yr phatboy tyres, you're likely to get into trouble.
Same deal if you're giving advice to clients.
It pretty negligent to not point the existence and importance of these standards to clients.
Once you've pointed this stuff out, 95% of the time clients start to care about standards.
This is particularly the case if your doing "boring" sites...like in the areas of say... medicine...or for older people...or say government services.
Clients might not give a shit...but it's up to you to point out issues of usabilty and Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act compliance standards.
Unless you really only care about your magic monkeyspank circle...er...target segment.
I just don't feel safe surfing pron with IE with all those viruses and spyware things floating around...thus that's why I use Opera or Mozilla :-)
... or does it have no installer?
That by itself tends to scare people away.
+++ATH0
I am totally shoched to read so many complaints against Microsoft which don't consider mozilla truthfully.
:)
I am a web developer myself, and I know html, css, etc... quite well. IE has its own problems, but only on the details. On average, if you are building a web site with standards, IE should render it ok, though there are some issues. With mozilla there are also some minor issues, but mozilla seem to be more standard complaint. On the other hand, if you want to develop easily and quickly without much hassle, IE is the way to go. Mozilla will force the developer to learn more about the standards, because some of the things are not intuitive.
Another issue is that, there is no significant innnovation on mozilla side since mozilla 1.0. I haven't seen any company specific project which replaced their old mozilla browsers with the new ones, because they have reimplemented their web pages which can only be viewed in the new pages. So Microsoft's lack of publishing a new version in its browser may be a very good choice. Mozilla went to 1.5, and I frankly don't know what the real innovation there is. Adding buttons, blocking popup ads are not big deals. People who think Microsoft should integrate that to its browser forget that IE is the dominant browser, which means that, if Microsoft integrates that, many sites will complain about it. So, it is all slashdot crap again.
I personally can't wait until the web browser is removed from the (loosely termed) Kernel of the Windows OS. Here's my list of reasons why
Bigger kernel means more paging of core code - SLOW down!
Bigger kernel means more crashes and less stability - RELIABILITY!
Alternatives can be used without wasting valuable CPU cycles and RAM on a product that should NOT be in memory.
Please, please don't ever encourage anyone to put an application in the kernel (and folks, that's what a web browser is... it is an APPLICATION).
I've started using Crazybrowser at work. It has a stupid name, but it's uses the IE html engine with tabs. It's got nothing on Safari, but better than no tabs.
I've been INNOVATED!!
I would disagree with that, except in a few examples.
I can think of a lot of excellent commercial software products like WinZip, Ahead Nero and tons of components I've bought which are well worth buying.
The difference with the open source communities is numbers, and that they can catch up very fast (and go past) the commercial alternatives.
Also, commercial software houses are probably struggling for money because they've run out of original features and reached maturity. This cripples paid development unless support or enhancement work (like with small software companies) is involved.. We still use Office 97 at work, because it does all we need a word processor to do.
What do you expect from a bunch of whining children? And the damn hypocrites that run this site are showing MICROSOFT BANNER ADVERTISEMENTS almost non-stop. Too bad there's no money in Open Source or they could live by the principles they pretend to have.
Taco takes it up the ass from Gates. Film at 11.
I think we should start a email train thing. You know, ask other people to try out Mozzila or Opera and see if they like it. And tell them also the reason. IE is dominants because most people don't even know anything other...
CHEERS
--RoadkillBunny
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Sweeeet. ;)
If you don't like IE try my browser... 404Browser [^] it has automatic bookmark organization, notepad, password generator, popup blocking, ad blocking, cookie blocking (that keeps it for the existing session and deletes it after that), etc... Try it (512kb download). -404Browser Support Also any comments/suggestions (other than port it to linux)/bug reports email me [its on the page] I'm really interested to hear what should be added to it... and there is a lot of features planned for future releases of it.
Crashoverride025
Surf the faster and more efficiently with 4
I would say that not updating IE is part of a more board plan. MS is placing a huge bet on their next wave, longhorn being the base of this wave. Along with longhorn, they will release a new much updated, longhorn specific versions of most of their software, office and IE included. The idea I assume being to create a reason to upgrade to the new OS. Cause lets face it, MS's biggest competition right now is themselves. There are still a rediculous number of computers running Windows 9x.
Having run various versions of longhorn. I can tell you that the version of IE in longhorn, does have popup blocking for instance.
I believe that the next MS wave will be worth seeing. On the other hand, its going to be a while. (late 2005 at the earliest)
Aren't we overlooking a wide-open opportunity here? All it takes is for Google to be persuaded to give standards-compliant sites a significant listing edge over IE-only sites and IE suddenly becomes bad news. Mozilla and Opera accelerate widening of the standards support gap and corporates start to demand standards-compliant sites indirectly to get better Google rankings.
In the East crisis = danger + opportunity
Pay more attention to good information design? That would be great. But that doesn't make it any less annoying when I finish making a webpage on my box at home, only to find out at work that all the stuff I did looks crappy in ie. Yeah, that's really going to turn me into a Microsoft-fan, because now I more-or-less have to redesign my site, or else just allow 90% of internet-users (okay, so 99% of the internet-users will NEVER visit my site, but whatever) to think that my site was designed by an infinite number of monkeys in my attic.
I'm trying to be reasonable here, if I said what I really thought, this would probably me modded flamebait. Yes, content should be more important than style; straight HTML will put more or less the same content on any browser. But if CSS is going to be supported at all, shouldn't web developers be able to expect the same behavior across multiple browsers, just like they did from HTML? Why should CSS or newer standards be different from HTML? If IE didn't support HTML properly, would you consider that broken or would web developers still just be whining about nothing?
Sheesh. Okay, rant over.
philcrissman.com.
But that's OK. It's not like they are using thier monopoly on IE to tie it to another MS purchased feature.....????
i disagree with the ongoing sentiment of MS hatred. Please see: Microsoft Hatred
Xah
xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html
and still, in every one of those cases and in every case to come there is some corporate winner-loser complex sycophant that will tell you, "well, not this time."
Isn't it said now that insanity is doing the same thing again and again, getting the same result, and expecting a different result each time?
It has to be pointed out because so many people act like it's a "theory" that is still mere speculation.
They act like we are saying we are claiming this phenomenon is caused by lack of ethics... no, it's caused by the environment a monopolist finds themeselves in. It's one where there is no near term return on making improvements, and near-term is the only term these days. The ethics comes in when you break the law to get into the monopoly environment, but once there, legally or illegally, innovation slows.
It's simple, run a 1 mile race with others, you will do your best. Run a 1 mile race alone, you may walk a few laps. Hell, you are still going to win.
-pyrrho
again.
there has never been a monopoly with total exclusivity, shit head.
My copy of Mozilla reports itself as IE (the default case) as does my copy of Opera. Haven't checked Firebird or Safari but I can make an educated guess at the former ;)
;) and changing the preferences to make Mozilla or Opera correctly report their version is not way up on most peoples list
Can we really trust these statistics if browsers default to misrepresenting themselves as IE?
I know quite a few people who moved from IE when they realised it was keeping undeletable hidden logs of the pages they visited (guilty conscience I suppose
Just my 5c
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
At that point Google would be a really bad guy. Sorting by *anything* but a good faith analysis of how the content is relevant to the search terms is bad. I don't care if it is to advertise subvertly, or to push an agenda (sorting by things that break IE/only presenting things that work perfectly with Google's browser of choice). The agenda in this case may be one I agree with, but it doesn't make it right. Google is one of the few internet success stories that really does the right thing consistantly, and I'd like to see it kept that way.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
One key feature that was missing in version 7 was account seperation (ie if you had multiple mail/news accounts it all got merged together) but in 7.2 you can view them individually (or together, or only news account or only mail accounts).
It's still a fairly young client and won't satisfy everyone but it should be good enough to satisfy most peoples requirements.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Do you really think the stats programmers are such dumbasses they still don't know to look for "Opera"?
Assuming "The last guy knew what he was doing" without actually knowing anything about the subject is just one more endemic problem in the software industry... And on the highway. The most important part of programming is what you read, not what you type.
He did say it back in 1981. It wasn't Microsoft's fault because it's a flow-on effect from the IBM PC design, though MS-DOS could have conceivably worked around it, but he's still an idiot for saying it.
Why consider it subversion? I'm arguing for Google simply going with the flow of web standards, ie. valid XHTML/CSS markup = separation of content = easier to find the message = more easily rankable. In an all-other-things-equal scenario, ie. identical content in 2 web pages - one "optimised for IE" and the other XHTML/CSS validated, why shouldn't the good guy win if he supports the ethos of the internet better?
Since when has it become a problem to install a superior piece of software?
gewg_
nerds are lame!!
I fully agree here. At work we are creating a JSP web application that must be section 508 compliant for sale to the U.S. government. We are actively supporting IE5+, NS6+, Mozilla, and Opera. Increasingly, however, we have to treat IE as a special case since it just doesn't do what it's supposed to when we use the standards.
If we ignore the standards and treat IE as the standard, we run severe risks of not being section 508 compliant.
Forms are another big thing that are quite annoying with IE. Many secure sites, or in general web applications don't handle forms well at all in IE when you hit back or forward. Everybody else handles things quite handily, but not IE.
To top it all off, IE has this awful idea of an error page to display. It looks like shit, is totally useless to the user, and doesn't tell the developer what is going wrong. What the hell is wrong with displaying the intended error page from the server? I can't even use the thing anymore...so I don't. The odd time I have to load it up I am reminded of how useless it is and I wonder how so many people out there can stand to look at the thing.
It's the same CSS bug/intentional error as reported earlier (see the Opera bork-edition). Tell Opera to report as Mozilla (or IE) and it'll work.
And complain to your local Microsoft representative.
Peder
Time to get back to the original idea of the Web - to proliferate information in a simple, straightforward way.
Which means no "flash", no minutia about positioning elements, and the rest of this stuff. More concern about usability and content than presentation.
We need a layered OSI model for Web content, maybe.
And maybe we need to redesign HTML more on programming language principles where interpretation is more constrained and thus can be interpreted one way and one way only. Some enforced discipline.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The things I hate most about IE are ActiveX, possibly the most evil concept ever invented for a personal computer, and the myriad index.dat files it buries all over your hard drive. Clear History? I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Vote with your feet or wallet, which is what I did. I had a bank try that and I walked across the street and got better interest rates and lower / fewer service fees plus web access.
You gotta wonder about how secure the MSIE-only sites are anyway. I investigated getting a loan from a third bank, which turned out to be in on the Windows/MSIE MLM scheme, and left a clean e-mail address. Within days that address was getting spam with subjects like "Home Loans" or "Prospective Buyer"
Having pre-installed MSIE onto machines is the only reason it got market share. Unlike five years ago, there are now several very good browsers. If people actually had to choose and install / order a web browser the large majority would go with mozilla or opera
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Yes, I've heard nothing but good things about Firebird. Admittedly I can't use it because it always crashes on launch on my PC, but there's no point complaining about such minor details.
The reasoning used was that, since the system as a whole had not started (or even considered) using CSS, the web administrators didn't want to (claim to not be able to) ensure it was compliant. The very use of CSS does not make a page compliant with Section 508, but it sure does make it easier to debug. I would have been thrilled to have a site-wide CSS implementation to base my pages on, since the site has a billion different looks and feels through the various subprojects.
Basically, since the main web admins didn't understand CSS well enough to implement it, nobody else was allowed to either.
This is the site I worked on. I was once in charge of DCGS pages. They are no longer mine, so don't blame me. :-)
Illegitimi non carborundum
On my (work) WinXP machine, I use Opera 7.2 almost exclusively for browsing, and Thunderbird 0.2 for email. I just set these as the defaults and haven't had any problems. Give Thunderbird a try - it will probably get you back to using Opera.
Constitutionally Correct
I hate to help Slashdot repeat itself, but the zen garden was linked from here a week or so back. It shows how much you can do just by swapping stylesheets. Pretty much anyone who works in web development could benefit from taking a look at it.
Friends don't let friends surf the net with I.E. ,-)
how long before M$ extends and innovates to the point that we find using the net requires using M$ OS? think it's impossible? there was a day when I thought the net was inherently cross platform and didn't worry about things like banking, viewing videos and other technologies that are now increasingly only accessible by IE or some Windows component like WMP. Slowly but surely M$ continues to put a stranglehold on browsing the net. Whatever proprietary technology they incorporate into Longhorn that is not available on other platforms will further this hegemonic, monopolistic behavior. the trend is for more and more web sites to be accessible only by IE and when Longhorn comes out you will see innovations that will further "enhance" the user experience (read "require the latest M$ OS). cross platform support for the net is at great risk.