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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."
Huh. I wish.
this is a classic sign of monopoly. no incentive to change, no incentive to repair, no incentive to improve, no incentive to innovate.
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."
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
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.
While a lot of slashdot readers probably don't use IE as a main browser, your average Joe Blow isn't going to download and install an alternative. He probably doesn't even know what a web browser is. IE is his "internet". Take a look at Google's latest zeitgeist and you can see that IE 6 is way ahead of other browsers for Google hits.
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.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!!!!
Remember, IE picks up a ton of users via AOL. AOL uses the IE rendering engine.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
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.
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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.
Published standards are legitimate; anybody can implement them. Nobody but Microsoft can implement Internet Exploiter's soi-disant "standards".
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?
(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?)
Having done actual helpdesk/tech support work for a number of years, I feel somewhat qualified to say something here.
The above is true, but very far from being the whole story. A lot of users use IE for a much better reason than just ignorance: because the web pages they view look right in IE. I've known plenty of folks who didn't want to use Netscape 4.8 (at least when that was an option), Netscape 6/7, other Mozilla derivatives like Firebird- not because of a lack of knowledge, but because those browsers did not handle the pages they viewed very well.
IMHO, things are a lot better in this regard today, although there are still some of these issues.
Standards? Users don't give a flying flip about standards. They just want the page to work as expected, as they used to. I personally am not aware of big chunks of implementation that IE supports that Mozilla does not. Hell, I don't know any pages that don't work fine in Mozilla (but do in IE) at all- but I do know that I still hear these complaints, even though none of the pages I browse have any issues. But then again, I can do the vaaaaast majority of my browsing using links in graphical mode.
Use MS tactics! Force a new browser on them!
In the Mac world, there is Safari. I'd guess that around 60% of Mac users now use Safari, instead of IE or Moz, a higher percentage when looking at Mac enthusiasts. Apple is in the position to ship Safari with new machines, or with the OS. These users may have used IE in the past, but when they try Safari, they find they like it and that it supports the pages they need to use. No wonder they keep on with it.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
...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?
Of course, people could have set their browsers to lie about their real identify.
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...
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)
Customers and money, you mean?
The sad thing is that standards-compliant doesn't pay the rent, and there are a large number of us trying to create standards compliant while trying to earn a living. It's a difficult balance to trade off, and after _two_ years of struggling and quietly putting in CSS whereever possible, my boss starts asking about it.
Hoo-bloody-ray.
There's a chasm yawning between commercial reality and a dream of standards compliance that some of us have been trying to bridge, but the real benefits will only come when;
- Governments start to _demand_ standards compliance.
- Other devices start to reach critical mass in the electronics market.
Until that point, there will be no compelling reason for the vast quantity of designers to do anything but design for IE, especially under todays squeezed budgets. All 'we' can do is try our best to convert the PHBs slowly and steadily by telling them the upsides. And there's no bloody way you'll get a user that doesn't patch their OS to change browser.Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
The problem is, you can code for "standards compliant" all you want, but until that standard is used by > 2/3 of your visitors, then you're wasting your energy.
When it comes to real-world business, ideology is about as useful as a money shredder. You don't tell your customers to upgrade or change browsers. You adapt to your customers, or your competition will.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
In other news, water runs downhill, the sun rises in the east, and Dubya is dumb as a brick.
Actually, I haven't ever really seen much "innovation" from Microsoft, as Linus pointed out in his recen tinterview. Microsoft is not a particularly innovative company. They're a good publisher and good and monopoly management, but most of their products were purchased from someone else *after* they were developed and did well. (Folks could learn something from this -- the way to succeed in business just isn't usually small innovative engineering firms, but companies that let other companies try things out, make mistakes, and then just purchase the ones doing well (yes, at a more expensive price, but sans all the deadweight of failing companies).
May we never see th
Stable is discussable (is this an english word?), but definitly not quicker. The fact that IE loads a lot of dll's during Windows startup makes my system slower during startup. You can for example enable this feature in Mozilla for Windows as well, which makes it as fast as IE. Don't know about NS though.
Disclaimer: This opinion was created without the use of any facts
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
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
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
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 agree with this. I stopped using the normal IE a few months ago and now I only use Avant Browser. What I really missed from IE was tabbed browsing and popup blocking, and Avant offer these two. It's really great. I've used tabbed browsing in Mozilla, and I think I've read somewhere that there is now a popup-killer built in the browser, but Mozilla never really did it for me. I always found it slow to start, huge memory hug (IE is too, but it's already loaded whether I use it or not, while Mozilla just adds to the total memory used) and most importantly, doesn't always render web pages correctly. I rarely if never see a rendering bug with IE, though I've read some people have problem with CSS style sheets. I'm not sure exactly what these are, but anyway, the pages always look just fine, so it must be a pretty rare bug.
Anyway, the point I was trying to get across here, but lost track of, is that Avant is really shell around IE. I'm even considering making a donation to the author, since it's a really great product. I've done the same in the past with Reget, and never regretted it either.
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".
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.
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.
--
$tar -xvf
Well, that's pretty interesting... So you figure the case was hobbled long before Bush dropped it? Well, that's interesting because the case had ALREADY BEEN WON, and Microsoft had ALREADY BEEN FOUND GUILTY. So, how do you figure Reno let them off the hook?
It was your hero, President Bush, who decided not to pursue the case any further, because he is 100% pro-big-business and where will you find a bigger business than Microsoft? Bush took a case that had ALREADY BEEN WON and basically, let Microsoft off the hook.
Think of it in terms of fishing. Janet Reno and her crew caught a twenty-foot marlin, wrestled it into the boat, and picked up the club to bash it in the head. Then, before the death blow, the boat changed crews -- Clinton, et al, got off and Bush, et al, got on. Bush looked down at the marlin, asked "what's that doing here? Get that thing off my boat..."
Bush bashing? No. I'm calling a spade a spade.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
1. Mozilla allows me to see the popups I want to see.
2. You don't have to go into the prefs, just go to the bottom right and look for the little icon, single click and click add when the box shows up.
What sucks even more is that if a page looks bad in IE, they discredit the page. If it looks bad in Opera or Moz, they discredit the browser. #$@(% pisses me off...
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
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