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."

Comments

can you say 'monopoly?'

[Anonymous Coward]

this is a classic sign of monopoly. no incentive to change, no incentive to repair, no incentive to improve, no incentive to innovate.

Re:Can't say I have much sympathy for them.

[kontos]

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.

This is nothing new

[FunWithHeadlines]

As someone who has been following the computer industry since the late 70s, and thus has seen Microsoft's actions from their earliest days, this is hardly new behavior:

• 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.

Why should they improve IE ?

[Krapangor]

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.

Hey Dumbass

[GusCubed]

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