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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."
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.
(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])
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....
Word Processors: What else can they add? Word integrates with every thing else in the Office suite, has about every feature I can imagine..
Programming tools: the Vis Studio IDE, frankly, rocks. I can dynamically recompile code, make changes in a C project as I'm stepping through it. Dyn-o-mite! Again, I can't think of anything I would want it to do that it doesnt.
If anything, these have too many features that I never use.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oh IE, why can you not support an open standard correctly?
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!
Speaking of innovation, from the story posting:
There's 31 un-patched holes in IE, but MS won't talk about it...
How far have we come in forgetting how to use English? "There is thirty one un-patched holes"!?
- Disgruntled Coward
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.
I use Mozilla for the day to day browsing but I still have to use IE to access my online banking application.
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
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.
Safari is based on the KHTML engine, so the closest I've see to getting Safari ported to Win32 is the khtml-win32 project. Another possibility is kde-cygwin for the whole kde package...
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.
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();
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
I think the point many have made here that when MS's competition doesn't exist, innovation slows to a trickle is correct.
.NET, and would disagree about no innovation in the Visual IDE.
.NET developer (for both leisure and enterprise software), I have observed that Visual Studio .NET contains many features not integrated in other developer packages (KDevelop, Boreland, etc...) I was happy to see Borland stepping up to the fight with C++BuilderX as that means alternatives are starting to emerge.
For your example of Programming Tools though, I would say Java technologies are what has force MS to create
As a Visual Studio 6 and
IDE slowed to a trickle? Have you even looked at them recently? In the past two years the engine was entirely overhauled, and languages brought significantly closer to spec, remote debugging introduced, portable emulation for debugging provided, etc. And in a year's time another version will be out that provides significantly more features.
Your breath smells when you talk out of your ass.