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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."
this is a classic sign of monopoly. no incentive to change, no incentive to repair, no incentive to improve, no incentive to innovate.
No, their problem is that they have a choice to make: a standards compliant website that doesn't look right in IE, or an IE compliant website that is not standsrds complaint, but looks good to 90 percent of their users.
SM MBL-VIR looking 4 SIG 4 LTR. must be DDF, no 420, SD ok.
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.
- 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.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.
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
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
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
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!