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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."
...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
"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.
... 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?
Of course IE gets them revenues - it is basically only usable on Windows, and therefore another way of locking people into Windows. Yes, there was a Mac version, but it wasn't (from what I've read) a very good version, and has been left to die now.
How many web sites still say "requires IE5+" or whatever? How many websites rely on IE's quirks? By abusing their monopoly position, MS made "the web" and IE synonymous for most users, and required for many things (online banking, for example, often requires IE).
Of course customers want good browsers. They just can't see them past the big blue e on their desktop.
The crazy thing is, CSS support is the least of IE's complaints. The security holes are a bigger one. Lack of native popup blocking. No tabs (which I've really gotten used to). And I really like Mozilla's integrated bookmark bar and search bar.
IE is simple (mostly), but there's LOTS of room for improvement. It's no longer the best browser by any measure. Monopolies suck, plain and simple.
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
"Maybe said developers will start coding more standards-compliant webpages."
Actually, I do. The main problem is that the customer throws a fit if the page doesn't display 'correctly' in a browser with the largest market share, which means you end up compromising the stylesheets and markup to please them, usually squeezing your budgets because you're competing with 'HTML 4.01 transitionals'.
So please don't blame developers; we've been badgering MS on regular occasions to fix their browser to match the recommendations that they helped to write in the first place.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
Perhaps a smaller, niche market OEM could start marketing "Security-Enhanced" desktop computers that come with built-in firewall software (a la Zone Alarm) and either Moz or Opera as the default browser. Then, instead of recommending someone like Dell or Gateway to friends and family (to get them out of our hair for support issues), we could recommend this special OEM's "Security-Enhanced" computers. Hell, Alienware could do it since they're into selling bleeding-edge systems for a premium.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Even though Microsoft lost, Bush's DOJ stopped pursuing the case and that was that. Nothing ended up being done.
This is just blatant (and incorrect) Bush-bashing. The Clinton administration had backed away from going after Microsoft years before (and the states coalitions self-destructed almost as soon as they started, once MS leaned *hard* on OEMs and parts suppliers all over the country.) In fact, the DoJ began actively "losing" their case long before Bush was even a candidate. They did this in many ways, but mostly by restricting the entire argument of MS's misbehaviour to one tiny thing, which was a relatively small offense, given al lthe MS had done wrong: bundling the browser with the OS. Other huge infringements that could have been used were completely ignored, as MS had Reno bought and paid for within weeks of her press conference announcing the DOJ was going after Microsoft. The things ignored included the truly damning evidence from the Caldera suit, which clearly showed Gates and other top MS honchos were directly involved in deliberate efforts to ensure that other products could NOT operate with Windows, even if that meant adding encrypted code specifically to break those products: a very clear abuse of monopoly power.
In reality, the Bush administration just looked at the hash that Reno and the DoJ had made of an eminently winnable case and (quite correctly) decided that there was no point throwing good money after bad. The damage was done - Reno and the DoJ had had the best of all possible positions, and totally blown it. As much as I would have liked to see things turn out differently, this was the right call, given the situation.
And yes, I'm pretty familiar with what went on, as I was up to my armpits in IBM lawyers dealing with this from IBM's perspective for quite a while, and left Dell to avoid having to lie to the DoJ to protect Microsoft, which my boss quite probably would have expected had I stayed. (He did not hold a particularly high view of the law, even after being directly responsible for Dell having to shell out the largest corporate fine in Federal Trade Commission history - with "no admission of wrongdoing", of course...)
There's no question MS abused thier monopoly power, but the Sherman antitrust act has really been a complete joke since the forces for monopoly managed to keep Teddy Roosevelt from being elected president in 1912. (No that I think they were directly implicated in his shooting (there's no evidence I'm aware of there), but they cetainly did everything they could to capitalize on it, kmowing that he was the only candidate that would be sure to cause trouble for the monopolists, and would very likely ask Congress for even stricter regulations and penalty of monopoly abuse. The game's been over since then, and the monopolists won..)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
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.