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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.
Wait - Microsoft are going to be the first browser developers to release the new innovative "Do you want to run this plugin? [OK]" pop-up technology! They're way ahead of the game!
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
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."
According to the purists, some effete board such as the W3C sets the standards instead of the market leader Microsoft Corporation (who really sets the standards).
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
...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
Let's get Apple to port Safari to Windows just like it is doing with iTunes.
It's a bloody great browser... although having thought about it, theres no reason for Apple to let the hoardes have its pretty software for nothing...
I can tell you this though... if you think your browsing and computing experience is slowing down in terms of innovation and invention, switch to the OSX platform... my god, there's enough new stuff every week to make you do a sex wee.
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
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
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.
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 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.
In related news, ruthless dictators neglect the human rights of their people.
Phlegm at 11.
Tim
(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?)
Use MS tactics! Force a new browser on them!
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.It is better known than mozilla, opera, and clones.
Obscurity is an evil now?
The only way to stop the cycle is to enforce the ruling to have Microsoft remove the browser from the OS.
Alternatively, the OEMs could start placing icons for Firebird and the free version of Opera on the desktops. Unfortunately, Microsoft would make their lives difficult if they tried the way things stand.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
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
... 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?
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.
.
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.
(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])
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?
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....
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
Just what are the agent stats for /.? I'd be curious if the community is eating it's own dog food ?
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." -- Marx
...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?
Oh IE, why can you not support an open standard correctly?
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...
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.
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!!!
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)
"...introduce 5 people ... and then ask those 5 people to introduce 5 more..."
Last time I heard this kind of proposition, it was from an Amway salesperson. Didn't work then either.
Pyramid growth doesn't work if there's inertia in the first few levels. And there will be lots of inertia. As soon as you tell grandma that she's got to "download" something and "install" it, her eyes glaze over, she gives you a polite, "Yes dear. Of course I'll try it." and she goes back to her AOL/IE prepackaged system to check on the grandkids' picture.
JoAnn
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
Pivx was the company that had a website with a list of 31 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. Two days ago they pulled it with what sounds like a nice way of saying they were pressured to do so.
Adobe needs to quit complaining and to start profiting from Microsoft's stagnation. Macromedia makes plug-ins for web browsers like Shockwave and Flash. These add-ons come closer to true innovation than CSS or Javascript.
Macromedia also uses their popularity to get into the middle-ware market with Coldfusion competing with ASP so Microsoft is effected. If they had better (standard) CSS and Javascript support on Explorer that would take market share from Flash and thus Coldfusion.
The only thing holding innovations like Flash back is their reliance on proprietary software. If there were open source equivalents to the Flash plug-in and authoring environment then the technology could really take off and maybe become more standardized and integrated into most browsers.
Companies like Microsoft and even Macromedia can not afford to liberate their technology to the degree it takes to change the browser. Our only hope is projects that are open to the public.
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
I have been watching the browser stats at my wife's Hot Sauce store and mozilla ranks lower than all the search engine spiders! Sad indeed.
Is there some global browser stat site similar to what netcraft is to servers?
To encourage participation I recently added a browser aware cart (flexcart) that gives a 5% automatic discount if you are using a 1.0+ mozilla client.
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
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 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
Scientists have discovered that the liquid phase of dihydrogen monoxide has a peculiar property called 'wetness'.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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".
...is Google's Zeitgeist IMO (see "Web Browsers Used to Access Google"). Charts-only, no figures though.
I've been testing Mozilla since the 0.6 release, I think, and I switched to it as my primary browser just before it went to 1.0. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was that IE couldn't properly render sites that were being Borg'd into MSN (i.e., ESPN). Mozilla had no such problems.
Tabbed browsing and popup-blocking were merely the icing on the cake, but now that I use Mozilla as my primary browser, I cringe when I'm forced to use IE for anything.
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
I'm writing this as a person who only recently went back and took a look at a browser OTHER than IE. Back in the early days of the Internet, I was a diehard Netscape user, but was quickly converted once IE passed Netscape in functionality and correct rendering of pages.
.com to the end of everything, and I haven't found a way to disable that "feature."
Just this past week, I've installed Mozilla Firebird on both my work and home computers. I love the tabbed browsing interface - which is one thing I think IE needs to avoid losing market share to Opera and Mozilla.
I do see a couple of problems with using Mozilla as my full-time browser, though. First, is that (like it or not) many more pages are designed to work correctly with IE - without any consideration for other browsers. The company I work for is guilty of this, but I can't necessarily blame them because the other browsers have such a small market share. Why waste expensive development hours on something that a very small percentage of users will ever notice?
The second problem is that the Mozilla Firebird browser doesn't work nearly as well with accessing our Intranet sites at work because of all of the strange URLs that we have. It wants to add
Overall, I'm really impressed with Mozilla, but it's not quite to the point where I can quit using IE and switch over. That's where they need to get before they can possibly win the browser war.
Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy?
Microsoft "abandoning 'innovation'" is like hippos abandoning spaceflight.
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
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.
This doesn't help ppl switch because if they use IE it looks like a poorly designed page and thus they make think similar things about the browser.
I agree... I've made this very mistake with clients in the past. When things don't look good under IE 5.5 or sometimes even 5.0, they don't look at you as a cutting edge developer who they want to support, they look at you as someone too stupid to use conventional, reliable web coding techniques that work across browsers.
Still, even if you tend to the idea that the standards that matter most from a practical standpoint are de facto standards -- something which is certainly true when it comes to going to bat for your client -- the current state of things is *still* a problem. CSS wasn't just invented as a religion (though it's been adopted as such among some people) -- it was invented as a good solution to some practical problems. There are layout/design tasks made orders of magnitude easier by CSS (and a few that are impossible without it) -- and they'd be easier still if IE played to the standards. But they don't, and in that sense, Microsoft's refusal to invest the resources it would take to make this possible is a robbery of time and therefore money from web developers and their clients.
Tweet, tweet.
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!
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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