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Browser Wars Mark II
Nigel McFarlane writes "I have no life (humour) other than to write articles about Web technology and open technologies, and the way they mediate, enable and transform our public places and our participation opportunities. Mostly I write about Mozilla and Linux, but my latest effort is an attempted wake-up call over Web standards and the future of the Web." Self-deprecation aside, it's a decent article that summarizes the stakes well.
K-Meleon for Windows. It is Gecko without the Mozilla GUI bloat. Kind of like Safari is to the Mac.
Just as good software should be modularized and decentralized, a web browser should be just that: a secure configurable and stable html viewer. What's wrong with external video and audio players? Even flash sites could be viewed that way.
They are mostly games and fancy bloated intros mostly anyway.
This is getting to be annoying, reading all of these browser wars articles. This one happens to be good, and just makes me think - how can we, the developers of the web, stp this from happening?
Simply by NOT USING new MS technology if it alienates anyone on any platform.
It's up to us.
Quote from article: "Beyond the Foundation are many other Mozilla-enabled browsers such as Konqueror and K-Meleon"
I was under the impression that Konqueror used KHTML and not gecko...
save the GNUs!
Microsoft is attempting to reinvent the Internet with it's .NET initiative. This initiative will include MS Specific code for web services, which will undoubtedly break interoperability between platforms, and between browsers.
Microsoft wants you to use the MS Internet(trademark pending), and will make certain that HTML and XML become irrelevant. Windows.Forms is the future, unfortunately, and because they control the specs, they will win the next round of browser wars.
Konqueror is Mozilla-enabled only in the sense that Konqueror implements the Netscape plugin architecture, as does Mozilla. Konqueror does not use the Mozilla rendering engine (Gecko), but rather uses its own engine (khtml).
Until Mozilla is "backwards" compatable enough with IE to run games from the likes pogo.com then I have to stick with IE on Windoze.
Gotta keep the wife and kids happy and numb, or else they might figure out I spend all that hard earned money at the strip clubs.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
Gee, why are the pages so small? The printer version is much easier to read. Anyway, for the latest word on mozilla's support of css3, don't miss Anne Van Kesteren's report available since Wednesday May 19th, 2004.
everyone to the trnches ;-) snigger
so the fight is not over firefox will fire a shell at i.e.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
http://reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml
In summary, the main reason why VHS succeeded was that it was superior because it had longer recording times. Betamax was crippled because the original tapes could not hold a whole movie.
A little off-topic, but it may be useful:
If you need to know which browser is your visitor using, I recommend you to use this Javascript Browser Sniffer instead of Mozilla's one. JsBrwSniff is far better: it supports 30 browsers, 14 browsing engines, 25 operating systems, 6 and detects the Flash plugin. It can work on the client-side or on the server-side.
Next version is supposed to find also Adobe SVG plug-in and Adobe Acrobat plug-in.
There's a demo here.
Beyond the Foundation are many other Mozilla-enabled browsers such as Konqueror
I stopped reading here. Well a bit down there's this
Non-Mozilla browsers such as Safari and Opera
Huh?
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
Maybe im missing something but it seems pretty simple that a good browser should:
a) Support 3WC standards to the max
b) Have a separate and intelligent module for rendering badly coded websites that dont follow specs
c) Use the philosphy that the user gets the final say in what happens on their computer - if they dont want extra windows opening etc then thats their choice.
oh and d) not be full of really stupid security holes.
but of course the general public dont want that..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Dear Nigel McFarlane,
;-) ).
Take a look at great male specimen here at slashdot. They write about various emerging technologies every day. Their posts are humorous and insightful (I browse at 4
Do you seriosly imply they have no life too?
I'm very surprised.
I stopped right when I ran into this sentence:
"Examined objectively, VHS just wasn't as good as Betamax."
I stopped not because of a difference of opinion, but simply because the author displays an ignorance of why VHS "won". Hundreds of authors have rehashed this canard so I won't repeat it here
But if the author doesn't understand why VHS won, then its a good bet why he can't or won't understand which browser will win and why.
Its hardly even worth discussing the article.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
And it's free (LGPL)!
Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite
Jooleem. Get Addicted.
Show a non-geek firefox (no, not the movie, they'll never forgive you)
;)
So far every person I have shown firefox to has installed it and started to use it, even my cousin's kids. The older one even thinks that Linux is cool, which came as a bit of a shock to me
Personally, I found the article reasonably interesting, though I didnt think it said things that haven't already been said many times before.
I did get the impression that some of the research was a bit thin. e.g.
>Beyond the Foundation are many other Mozilla
>enabled browsers such as Konqueror
Well, Konqueror isn't mozilla based - it uses KHTML as its rendering engine, which is also utilised by Apple's Safari browser. Mozilla isn't the only open-source standards-compliant web browser engine out there.
David
Even Copernicus only got it marginally better than Ptolemy but it was better ENOUGH to serve for those who ehanced it, like Kepler. The point is no one really cares how great it is, it has to be only good enough to be absorbed.
And on a practical level Mozilla is far slower on older machines which is a huge disadvantage.
The next disadvantage is that you have to DO SOMETHING, e.g install it - you geeks would be amazed what a huge problem that is for 99% of mankind.
Near monopoly of MS Explorer has made itself vulnerable to malicious attacks. As a result Exlorer is more suseptible to virus attach then any other leading browser. But still for a common user there is no reprieve. They continue to use what they got with PC. If your expertise level is little higher or you are engineer (that too computer) you may switch to other browser like Mozilla. Other option is netscape. Spyware industry is thriving on loopwholes of Exlorer.
It is high time for Microsoft to correct Exlorer.
AOL browser is no challage, it is so primitive, sucks lots of memory, I haven't meet anyone who like AOL browser. People who use AOL only use it to connect to internet.
I like Netscape and Mozilla though.
Nice Article, Happy to know improvements are coming. Bye bye spyware...
I found it odd that the author listed Konqueror and K-Meleon as running off the Mozilla rendering engine
Beyond the Foundation are many other Mozilla-enabled browsers such as Konqueror and K-Meleon
then proceded to say that Safari is a non-Mozilla browser (Which it is, but it is based off the Konqueror rendering engine which he named as a Gecko browser)
Non-Mozilla browsers such as Safari and Opera ensure that the web has not yet been reduced to a two-horse race between Microsoft and Mozilla
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
I don't know about you guys, but I refuse to use the bugridden POS that MSIE is. I haven't wasted one byte worth of bandwidth to download .NET and damned if I will. I don't want it, I don't need it.
I know this isn't everyone's aproach. It's probably just /.-zealots who does things this way, but -we- are the geeks. We are the ones who make and maintain the net. Sure there are some noobie-tools like "Front page", but in my experience the noobs still needs help getting the stuff uploaded.
We shouldn't allow Microsoft to take over the net. When doctoring your none-geeks friends machine, simply remove all MS-conspiracy related trash you can find :)
In short, preach and even pressure people who aren't too talented when it comes to computers. Tell them that you will only assist them, if you are allowed to remove and replace "security risks" and "faulty products".
Surely, they cannot object to that? *hope*
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
All we care about is which one works.
For some reason I don't seem to be able to get away from IE. Whatever the reason there are still many (important) sites out there that still just don't work (properly) with non-IE browsers.
In general though, I will use Opera on win32, Safari on OS X and Fire on Linux as my preferred browsers.
That does not not mean that I don't ALWAYS try and use IE (on OS X and win32) when I find that the others still don't quite make the grade in site compatibility.
Same as the silly Beta vs. VHS war. The one that wins is the one that has the most support, and is therefore the better (out of a consumer point of view) browser.
And I think that's all that really needs saying.
PS: In my opinion, the best browsers are:
1) Safari (much faster than Opera on any platform)
2) Opera
3) Mozilla
4) IE (If it had tabbed browsing, it would be better than Mozilla!)
The browser wars of the 90's are over. Nobody is "selling" their browsers for their proprietary features. This is why you don't see many (well, not that many) IE-only pages any more - people want to be compliant.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer is too old. Features that almost every other browser has, like tabbed browsing, skins, etc. are not included, and there are so many holes it's like Swiss cheese.
Microsoft isn't pursuing it because there's no money in the browser market. As the article says, Apache is free, HTTP is free, most browsers are free, PHP, Perl, HTML, MySQL, and almost everything Internet-related is completly free (not always as in speech, but free nonetheless). Microsoft has no motivation to make an amazing browser, because it doesn't get them anything but a name (which they already have).
Over the next few years, the only good browsers will be coming from groups like Mozilla who aren't in a money-making business at all and only want to have a great, stable, secure, fast, and standards-compliant browser. They don't want to necessarily dominate the browser market (though I'm sure they'd love that) - they just want to make a good product.
That is why the browser wars are over. The good browsers will rise, the bad ones will fall - and the good browsers will only come from developers who are in it for "the cause" and not the money.
-- If you can read this, you are too close to my signature.
Beyond the Foundation are many other Mozilla-enabled browsers such as Konqueror
...
Urmm, unless im missing something brutally obvious; I thought that konqueror was based on khtml and not mozilla.
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Yeah, after the server starts to spew out smoke, you would want some mirrors, and I have no clue where the silence fits in here.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Ugh...another buzzword and acronym-filled article. For instance:
It's the presence of standardized data in web content--whether current standards such as XHTML or some yet-unknown future standards, perhaps based on XUL--guaranteeing that the web will remain a global commons, an information highway, and a free marketplace.
XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML; XUL is an XML-based language that describes a computer application's graphical user interface. Not the same thing. But anyway, onto the larger pointof hysteria:
Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web.
Microsoft doesn't hate the Web. The Web has created a huge market for Microsoft in personal computers. Tons of PC sales are rooted in people wanting a computer to examine the "Internet" and "Web" things they've been hearing so much about. PC sales = Windows sales = Office sales. Microsoft doesn't hate the Web.
When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts. Over here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of web sites.
This statement assumes the basic workflow:
Step 1: Develop Longhorn with Web-tainting features
Step 2: Release Longhorn
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: Profit! (and dominate Web)
No. First, you have to ensure that people will upgrade. Longhorn will be coming off the longest active life cycle of a Windows product ever; Microsoft will have to demonstrate in spades that Longhorn is worth the upgrade price, elsewise it will take at least 3-4 years of OEMs shipping Longhorn on all new PCs before it starts to attain ubiquity. Given the current ~2006 release date for Longhorn, that's 2009-2010. A lot can happen technologically during that time. Second, this assumes that the Web won't adapt to Longhorn-specific features, which it almost certainly will (and has adapted to hostile technologies every time before, often by marginalizing them). Third, it assumes that the same disparity between IE and all other browsers will remain basically static. Macs continue to sell well. Mozilla/Firefox/Camino continue to grow in popularity. XML continues to grow in popularity (which IE has significant problems with). Etc. Oh, and likely Longhorn-specific Web stuff will require server-side support; not likely to be included in Apache, which is the majority web server by a significant margin.
So I really don't buy the author's arguments here. I have no doubt MS will continue to taint the Web with MS-specific features, and I have no doubt that the Web will shrug it off. That's okay - Microsoft has other businesses. They're not now (and never have) put all their eggs in one basket.
- "One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it."
- "...individual action is still important, so choose a standard compliant browser if you value the web..."
- "Standard data guarantees that you won't have to migrate to Longhorn in order to stay where you are."
Seriously, that was way too much reading, just to hear the anti-Microsoft banter at the end of the article. I wholly agree that Microsoft has done their fair share of "looking the other way" when it comes to standards-compliance, but I didn't read a single cited/quoted source confirming the argument that Longhorn == armageddon. When I think about the current PC market's level of saturation, I still wonder how MS is going to pull off a new marketing scam that actually gets people to upgrade or switch to Longhorn. I really wish we could get away from these "the sky is falling articles" because every time I read one, I never see its threat materialize. I guess just take it for what it is, one person's opinion.C. Griffin
"Can I keep his head for a souvenir?" --Max from Sam 'N Max Freelance Police
I run firebird and IE, and while i use firebird in some cases and it *does* have a number of neat features and IE *does* have a number of annoyances; i could just as easily reverse the terms "firebird" and "IE" in the beginning half of this sentence and I'd be just as accurate.
IE, by the way, is massively more sophisticated than firebird from a developer's perspective. I can embed IE inside of a windows program transparently. This provides a great many USEFUL features that mozilla can't even dream of as yet.
but no, what are mere facts compared to your baldfaced assertions.
Fascinating article. Unfortunately it does not back up one of its main claims, that Longhorn will lock in webdevelopers. How exactly is that possible?
Not a troll... just genuinely curious. Have I missed something really obvious?
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Start digging.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Of course that is not a 'plain fact'. IE does a lot of things that Mozilla doesn't (form entry isn't broken, for example). On the other hand I'm sure everyone here can name plenty things Mozilla does that IE doesn't. Mozilla may be better in the opinion of the author, and it may be better at the things that matter more to the author, but to state it's superiority as fact is a perfect example of ignorance.
The fact that the author can't spot the difference between KHTML and Gecko shows he is no position to be comparing browsers.
Useful thx. Currently the JsBrwSniff the project are looking for a logo. I can't draw myself but I guess a picture of a "sniffer dog" combined with say the anybrowser logo might do the trick. Anyone?
Face it...who do we really have to blame for Microsoft's domination here? Back when the Web really started to get on its feet, we geeks and technical users were the early adopters and were the ones who showed everyone else the Internet. And we dumped Netscape like a cheating girlfriend when Microsoft came out with something a little better. We are the ones who made Internet Explorer popular. If you still used Netscape, or "Nutscrape" as it was dubbed, you were laughed at. And now, the number of casual Internet users far outweighs the techies and geeks; it's going to be almost impossible to reverse this trend.
is not going to be released until 2006. In the meantime any professional web designer worth her salt is developing with standards. People like Zeldman are doing a great job of spreading the word to the design community. Web designers and developers are on the front lines of this war - not the consumer. It doesn't matter how many of your moms are using FireFox, if her bank site only works with IE then she she will only use IE. It is up to the designer/developer, if we want a standards based infrastructure then we have to impress upon our clients how using standards will save them money and improve their ability to communicate with their clients. We then have to have the discipline and the knowledge to build our web based applications to conform to those standards and to avoid Microsoft only features. If we can accomplish this, then Microsoft will have no choice but to create a browser that conforms.
I honestly don't think people care about the browser war. People will generally use whatever is closest and works, and a smaller percentage will pay attention to performance/utility details and thus use the better product.
I remember, back in the 90's, shaking my head even at the term 'browser war'. It seemed ludicrous, if only because the idea that there could ONLY BE ONE BROWSER FOR EVERYONE was childish. This isn't Dune spice, folks.
The author certainly has a point, regarding the upcoming fight for standards-compliance. However, 'standards-compliance' is a bit of a canard; no one knows enough about the standards to know who's 'standards' are the real (read: good) ones.
And sentences like "[o]ne of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it." aren't going to engage anyone in a rational debate.
You like your browser? Think it's King-Sh*t? Then tell people and switch them over - but then let them ultimately choose to keep using it or not.
M2c
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
No, its not a non-sequitur.
A non-sequiter would be "Since you don't like chocolate, you probably won't watch the race with me this afternoon.
The original poster simply said "If you can't understand why one technology succeeds over the other, then your article is not good analysis"
Indeed, the article is flawed, and the original poster had it exactly right.
The article doesn't exactly say. It just says "beware the coming of the longhorn!" in a scary voice. Well, an attempt at a scary voice. Or something. Either way I don't get it.
dare I say that it's FUD?
but for what purpose?
Ahahah, astroturfing are we? I notice that you still haven't learned to use apostrophes properly.
Uh, I can embed Mozilla in the same number of Windows Apps as I can with IE. Furtermore, I can embed Mozilla inside of a Linux or Mac OS X program. This provides a great many USEFUL features that IE can only dream of. Oh wiat, thats right, they canceled IE on Mac OS X, so they don't care! Add to that that FIREFOX provides a consistent feature set across multiple operatating systems. I guess I really can't see your point.
You completely missed the point, making it seem like it's all good, whereas the article warns of a great threat. Go back and read it again, or read this post of mine for a summary.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
huh? are you still trying to justify your incorrect usage of non sequitur by using ad hominum?
no matter how you want to spin it:
(a) the original article was bad, shoddy analysis
(b) your use of non sequitur is incorrect.
if you'd like to correct either of these statement, the space is available below, but you've dug yourself an even bigger logical hole; re-reading it, you've hit bedrock and have now started blasting.
I don't think that's quite true. I think there is still plenty of room for commercial PHP development apps - providing they are good ones. So if Microsoft developed a really great tool I might consider buying it - well that would depend on whether it was a truly exceptional tool or another abomination like Front Page.
There is room to make money based off of free languages - you just can't force people to pay money for your tools anymore!
I don't see Microsoft's decline happening any time soon.... http://groups.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html I may not like MS strong-hand tactics, but I really do not like developing websites for multiple browsers. I'll gladly stick "IE only" on my sites and catch 95%.
There are many web sites that have supported IE technologies since the last browser wars began. Many of these websites are now dead. The sites that were founded on Open technologies such as Java and Apache, are mostly still running. This is a trend not a fluke. I for one have never thought of downloading or supporting any M$ technologies PERIOD. I have a pretty high level in my IT infrastructure and my bosses and peers listen. They do not stop me when I say that open standards based technologies are the only way to build a strong, safe and supportable infrastructure. I for one build all my web systems (Thousand user workflow systems) based on Mozilla technology. Although my corporate standard is IE, I completely ignore that and stick with Mozilla as a base. My tools, although with very complex dhtml, still work in IE. I completely avoid using any technologies that are only driven by IE. I know that there are many others in IT organizations that suppor the same concepts. And I know that due to my personal success in delivering secure, fast and mainable products, I will be on that board shooting down decisions to move to any standard blocking technologies. In the first browser war, it was won by the consumers. The second war will be won by the developers and the big players run their apps on unix not NT. So sure there will be many of the small websites - that don't work in Mozilla now and as such I avoid - that will move to longhorn, but I know that I will not and many others will not use. Sure, people who are stupid enough to put their eggs in that basket will say to themselves that they are happy, but in reality they will only be selling themselves short. JD BTW - I am sure that Apache will still be available for Longhorn!
I hate the statement: "Dvorak superiority is a myth." The ergonomics of the Dvorak keyboard are far superior to Qwerty. Economists are in no position to debate that superiority.
In terms of the cost of switching to Dvorak then Qwerty probably has the advantage. Replaceing all those keyboards and retraining typeists would be a huge expence for little economic gain. I am suspecious of any study that shows a huge productivity gain from switching to Dvorak. Dvorak users may type faster, but most keyboard users I know are not limited by their typeing speed.
Certain economists like those who wrote the Qwerty article above hate the Dvorak keyboard. Dvorak shows that the market does not always choose the most advanced (high tech) products. There are some theories of a free market economy that rely on the market always chooseing the best. Unfortunately the Dvorak keyboard delivers quite a blow to these theories. If these economists were scientists they would rework their theories.
The Dvorak and Qwerty keyboards can be added to a list of technologies that show that a partial solution that is out first will have an advantage over a perfect solution. It is an example of The Rise of "Worse is Better". Backwards compatibility is part of the same picture.
Really, I think that many people avoids using replacements for IE just for the fact that one or
more pages doesn't render (like my employeers intranet... sigh).
For the mozilla project it would be a trivial technical solution to implement (on Windows
ofcourse) but it would make the browser experience so much nicer. A page that doesn't render? Open in IE.
Actually, when I think of it, its probably fully possible to embedd IE's renderwidget inside a
Mozilla/Firefox window (advantage: all bookmarks are kept in the same place). Add the preferences
option "Sites that should always be viewed with IE" and never bother with that small incompatibility again.
Since Mozilla is the underdog (and OSS) there really isn't any prestige or pride to lose from this.
Microsoft does not *have* to win this war. They have ideas, developers and a huge marketing department to tout the advantages of their products long before they hit the market. And that is exactly where their weakness lies.
It will be more than a year and a half ere Longhorn comes out. Until then, we are unlikely to see any groud-breaking new technologies from Microsoft. Let's jump in that hole! We know what needs to happen:
1. The web provides a lacking user experience, because web forms are hardly interactive and don't integrate with the native UI elements. Java hasn't solved the problem, because it's noticably slower than native applications, and it's plagued by incompatibility issues (mostly thanks to Microsoft).
We need to develop and standardize a cross-platform technology that enables web pages to be indistinguishable from native applications. A number of technologies that touch on this idea: Java (slow and incompatible), JavaScript (slow and not powerful enough), XUL (slow and not widely supported). It is also interesting to mention the X Window System, PicoGUI and such in this respect.
2. Innovate. Come up with any ideas that can improve the Internet, but also our local systems. There have been some good ideas by various individuals, but our operating systems offer hardly any substantially new functionality over UNIX systems from two decades ago, and the leading desktop environments mostly clone MS Windows functionality, whereas many other projects have a much lower level of sophistication.
There are many people with good ideas, and many talented developers. Somehow, many good ideas seem not to get picked up by the good developers, meaning that good ideas lack good implementations and good implementations lack good ideas. Maybe we should make a roadmap; we want extended attributes, live queries, and user-mountable tar files and FTP sites in the next kernel version, access to those features in the next release of the desktop environment, ZeroInstall in the next distribution, etc.
With all the potential that F/OSS has, and the willingness to beat proprietary competitors, we can at least try to leap ahead of Microsoft, instead of throwing in the towel before they are even close to release.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
For some reason I don't seem to be able to get away from IE
Yeah, there's a reason for that. It's because you haven't tried. I work for a pretty decent sized company as the IT Manager. I have installed Firefox on several of the more skilled users machines and every personal machine I've worked on. I know how it works. People don't want to change because they like IE.
But it takes about one day's use to break the habit. Teach them about tabs, show them popup blocking without a third party application, show them middle-click-opens-a-background-tab and let them play for a few hours. That's all it takes.
That doesn't even MENTION the massive security holes they avoid by simply not having ActiveX or IE's scripting problems.
Anyone who uses Windows and insists on IE does so only because they haven't tried. Of this, I'm positive.
Unfortunately I can't read it, because the stylesheet specifies a foreground colour for the body text but no background colour, so I get black on black.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
"Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web"
... and my blood boils.
I feel bad, when someone talks bad about anyone(even MS), but i know there is no alternative better way to express the current situation. If it happens to the M$ PR department to express the same, they will do it so nicely so that the common man can't understand
...and lo and behold it doesn't work, but there is a trick that works on sites like this 9 times out of 10, it's called user agent switcher and allows you to pretend that Firefox is another browser. Doesn't get around sites that use javascript to detect your browser (and then bitch and moan that you are using Netscape 1.0 or somesuch rubish), but the ones who do it on the server side are easily fooled by this. Once you've finished on that site, simply change it back to the proper string via the user agent selection menu (so that websites get real stats).
Hope that helps!
Oh..and another trick, I found myself continually going for the IE icon instead of the firebird (at the time) icon, so I simply mapped the ie icon to open up firebird! In a day my browsing was transformed and I have not looked back.
The only reason I now use ie is to check sites I'm working on, but normally if they look good in firefox they'll look good in ie too (I only use hand-coded html, it's simpler to make it cross browser compatible)
I am NaN
A successful business is kept alive and grows, not through forces of conviction, but through the forces of convection.
...
1) Put up a site where people can "order" Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, et al
2) Charge a reasonable fee (e.g. $5-15 USD, not $50-150 USD and not $0)
3) Take the proceeds and pay for as many ads as you can afford, all clicks pointing back to the web site
4)
5) Do not profit -- put all proceeds towards more ads
With a machine like this, you will blow away all competition.
When Microsoft tempts these organizations and communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts.
.NET to a stalemate. In the end, Longhorn will at most be able to lock down the United States and perhaps a few vassal states. Like DMCA and PATRIOT ACT, it'll be just one more buckle on the technological straitjacket that surrounds the USA.
If Microsoft had been able to complete Longhorn a couple of years ago, this strategy might've worked. But now large portions of the web are outside the reach of Microsoft's potential ability to control them. China most prominently, but even in other places W3C standards will maintain enough of a foothold to fight off
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I just had this thought that I would like to share.
.NET, and presumably, the money will be in the server-side implementations (to boost adoption, they will want to distribute the clients like free beer). However, many servers don't run Windows and won't run Windows (e.g. because of the security holes). This may be why MS submitted .NET to ECMA: .NET gets ported to other platforms for them, so that applications based on it will run even on non-MS systems. At the same time, MicroSoft controls the "real" .NET, so Windows will always have new features first, and leading applications will work on Windows better, so there will be a strong argument for using Windows, even on servers.
The article asserts that Microsoft is trying to grasp the web with its own technologies. Presumably, these will be based on
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
From a *web* developer's perspective, Firefox is far more sophisticated than IE. IE's CSS support is abysmal. It can't seem to get something as simple as fixed positioning or negative margins right (I won't even go into its floats and box model). Other standards are even less supported: for example, if you use IE6 to view an XHTML 2.0 page, it asks you where you want to save the file. The only way to judge how technically sophisticated a web browser is is by seeing how well it does what web browsers do--which is display data in standard formats the way the standard says it's supposed to be displayed.
(Plus, Gecko is just as easy to embed as IE, and it's cross-platform.)
That's some pretty poor self-deprecation. Not that I could do any better.
Honestly. Over half of the hits to autopr0n (NSFW) are from people using mozilla these days, only about 30% or so use IE, and that's with over half the visitors using windows. It seems like IE is on the way out, now that other browsers are "just as good" (Or at least have the one feature people really want, popup blocking). It's really surprising to see, and maybe I don't have a very good sample, but I really don't think people can simply "code for IE" the way they used to.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
what we need is an awareness campaign. remember those 'best viewed with' buttons from the mid nineties? we need to bring those back. even if its not true that your site works better with some particular browser, something like this would at least spread awareness of the alternatives out there.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
The Mozilla browser is technically better than IE. That is plain fact.
How about backing those statements up with some data?
You may think you need to know, but you'd be wrong. Simply make use of open standards and you'll be fine.
e.g.
http://www.tigertrackgps.com/
Doesn't bloody work because half the site is written in javascript which attempts to detect my web browser, because the version number is below 4, I'm apparently not allowed to see their site and I've chosen one of their competitors instead.
Deleted
They're what's ruining it in the first place
I didn't say knowledge of why VHS beat Beta was a prerequisite for understanding the browser wars (please re-read).
But the author himself presented Beta vs VHS as an example of the market rewardarding an inferior technology because of "other" reasons. The example, while appealing, is not backed up by facts and would appear to be false based not only on serious analysis but on anecdotal evidence of people who were alive and choosing a format those many years ago.
And if his primary example is wrong that he is using as a parallel to the browser wars, then it removes a large part of his assumptions, and without those assumptions, he hasn't properly supported his conclusion.
While I'm sure I have used non-sequiters in the past, and will unwittingly use them in the future, this is a case where it is not a non-sequiter, but goes right to the heart of his argument.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It combines the best of both browser and more, what a moron to ignore something like that. http://www.myie2.com
The one valid point I see this article bringing up is the developer support of the underlying languages. I admit, I am anything but a good coder. I dabble in PyQt, PyGtk, HTML, PHP. And I can tell you that if there was anything that let me write a simple web based application that was easier to use than PyQt, I would use it. That is where I believe the future of the web is going. This is what I would like to see happening in the browser.
once more into the breach
My mum and dad would like to know why on-line banking doesn't work any more, please. Apparently their bank's web site has turned into some sort of marriage counselling service and warned them that they were "incompatible clients" or something.
No, please don't. The word "preach" almost implies fanaticism, and you are clearly a fanatic, in the same way RMS is clearly a fanatic. I have nothing against you or your right to believe passionately in your cause, but please understand that ultimately you are doing more harm than good, because you are burying your head in the sand. Fanatics rarely convert people long term, and they alienate far more people than they bring in.
If you want to help, then don't preach, but educate. Install Firefox or whatever alongside IE, and explain that they can use either program to surf the web, but that Firefox is safer. Make sure they know how to find IE if they come across a site that's "broken" so it doesn't work with Mozilla. But be objective, and don't stop them doing what they want to do. Evangelism is the #1 way to make smart but uninformed people think you're talking crap, and those are exactly the people you need to convert first.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It will take more than that I am afraid. The open community needs an alternative to microsofts longhorn/avalon architecture. If ms is able to pull it off and get consumers to demand the kind of interactivity/useability that comes with avalon, then web developers will be forced to provide it. If ms is the only developer of said tech, and they block use of the tech on non windows platforms, you will be screwed.
That being said, they've tried similar strategies before with wma and drm and have failed to gain the market share to block out mp3 and other alternatives. But, that doesn't mean they will fail this time.
I think some sites already have this... the page will not load in IE until the top banner is finished loading, while in Firefox it renders instantly...
"It took just one idle hour of web surfing on low security before some pathological web site designer leapt down the throat of my PC through the Swiss cheese that is IE. He totally messed up my computer."
What kind of sites does this guy go to that they can "totally mess up [his] computer." I've seen sites like this, but not in an hour of idle web browsing. Usually, they are associated with crappy freeware, P2P applications, warez, and pr0n. If you are avoiding the above, then most of the rest of the web appears to be safe.
After all, won't Longhorn be released with an updated IE that has popup-blocking, tabs, and ActiveX malware protection? ..Effectively nullifying Firefox's most visible benefits?
And won't the Windows world suck up Longhorn right away, like they did with WinXP?
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
One of the lessons that developers keep forgetting is that databases are hard. Look at the classic troublesome applications: Sendmail, BIND, and Netscape/Mozilla. Each of those programs has its own third-rate home-grown database system. In each case, the database has little or no integrity-preserving or checking machinery. So the database and applications break down.
Microsoft uses Jet, their little embedded database system, for such things. Jet isn't a great database, but it's better than most of the amateur efforts that show up inside open source apps.
If you need a database, use a database. At least something at the BerkeleyDB level.
I write a LOT of e-commerce apps and make extensive use of javascript to talk between frames etc.
Perhaps Mozilla, NS and others should concentrate on making sure pages WORK PROPERLY rather than niceties like tabs in the interface and other "ancillary" features.
I'm tired of forking code, spending 80% of my time to satisfy 3% of users (non-IE). I tell my clients it will work with IE, and then it's per-hour after that if they want it to work with XYZ browser. Thank Gawd NS 4.7 is dead!
These quotes show the type of non-technical pointy-head we're talking about:
...
"Alas, last week I did some brief security testing and forgot to reinstate high security afterward. It took just one idle hour of web surfing on low security before some pathological web site designer leapt down the throat of my PC through the Swiss cheese that is IE."
and
"I happen to be technical enough to go through Microsoft Windows with a fine-toothed comb, twiddling bits over here and checking for secret compartments over there..."
Please. Yes, mr expert, you're such an MS guru that even with your VAST stores of knowledge those evil hackers got you too! If only you were running Mozilla.
What a lame way to start a security argument, not even rhetoric! Just an anecdotal horror story, the kind MS uses to defend THEIR side.
Hypocrisy rears its ugly head.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Might i be the first to say (now that we have gotten off on this tangent):
"Burninate the peasents. Burninate the village. Troooooooooogdor!!!"
Thank you
Sincerly,
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
LAZY! The herd mentality of 95% of browsers will be able to view my work and screw the rest. Well do what you like but it's not that hard to code for 100% of web browsers.
Not to mention not all internet related software are browsers. What of search engine spiders? That fancy flash menu will not get you high page ranking on most search engines.
Not to mention anything that IE can do can be done openly if you are creative and not opposed to learning a new technology. If your only reason for going IE only is so that you can continue to design with FrontPage well I will be seeing you soon in the unemployment line as your coding skills will suffer. How employable will YOU be if your current job goes bye bye! Don't do it only for your boss but for yourself go standards compliant.
Awww what the hell I don't care about Karma.
Got hosting
Look. Lets drop it. Obiously you people don't even know what a good web page looks like so i'm going to direct you to the tutorial of someone who does. (Warning: This site is flash... it'd have to be wouldn't it) Anyway, armed with the advice of this web guru I'm sure we can all make the internet an even more overcrowded, useless dump of misinformation (W3C be damned). Now lets get bloggin'!!!
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
But, rendering... Some pages aren't correct, thanks to web monkey's using IE's HTML additions. That's a real chicken/egg problem. And WTF, opening ifilms.com with firefox causes media player v6 to load instead of v9?? I didn't even know v6 was installed! It had to download the fricken codecs.
Still, I'll set it as my default for awhile, see how it goes.
Firefox still uses XUL, the GUI bloat of Mozilla. K-meleon and Camino and the like use native GUI elements.
Microsoft has been retooling the web for sometime now. It has worked well for Microsoft because pretty much no one is paying attention to what they are doing. Since the web is one of the few things MS cannot buy outright they have had to use other methods to gain control of it and for the most part it has worked flawlessly. Since most users will use IE on the web adding features to its content creation tools that create sites that only work with IE under windows is something that will sneak under the radar of most users.
Web standards are the last thing the MS wants. If every browser worked the same that would not give MS an advantage. If the web pages that your business relies on works only with IE and under Windows what will your business have to use to get its work done? This fact has not been lost on Microsoft and day after day many sites are becoming MS only sites where you need IE or IE and Windows to make use of the services the page offers.
Microsoft only needs to add more MS only features to its content creation and delivery tools to shut out the competition. Next time you are on a Mac or surfing with Linux or using Mozilla under Windows and you cannot access a site do not blame the web designer for bad site design. More than likely MS will be involved with that site in one way or another. They have already done a proof of concept when they torpedoed Opera browsers on their own site before Opera exposed them.
The browser should stay put in time now ... getting them to do much more is too painful in terms of the legacy and web model. Like Flash, the new thing should be thin, downloadable apps that run in secure environments (.Net, Java).
Its time to move on. Browsers are for browsing ... duh.
i'm just happy about not seeing that much advertising while i surf. That's why i use Mozilla
Note that the original WorldWideWeb browser and all early clones displayed multimedia in separate windows. It was Mosaic's (and later Netscape's) ability to display images and other multimedia inline that led to the rise of the Internet. Inline interpretation of sound, video, and other applets are just a generalization of that idea.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
I'm sure MS would love to be like AOL was, but they missed that boat. By the time Microsoft started to make inroads into the Internet, people had already realized that there was more to it than AOL.
Microsoft tried to lure people into their own private Internet called MSN, but eventually gave in and made MSN fully interoperable with the Real Internet.
Now that MS has established itself on the Internet and attracted a large number of both consumers (MSN Messenger, Hotmail) and providers (ASP, Windows Media), they can think about locking in again.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The Linux kernel is a great example of what Linus is actually talking about it. Its modularized for sake of programming simplicity, but its not as broken up into little pieces like Darwin (since it comes at a performance cost).
So good programming practice: yes. Modularizing and breaking your program apart for no real reason: no.
"Browser wars"? So, when will we see the efforts to create micro-browsers, suitable for viewing slashdot or news.google.com on the 1.5"x2" screen on my cell phone...and when will the manufacturers give us a magnifying glass, so we can read more than 12 letters at a time....
mark "and the market-droids who decided I
wanted a Web browser on my cell phone
will make a great telescope - a lens
in either ear, and hard vacuum in
between, just like Bush & co...."
You don't want to intentionally break IE.
What every single web developer should do is code *exactly* to XHTML/CSS (and preferably Accessibility) standards. The code should show up fine. The second part is detecting browsers that aren't standards-compliant (all IE, NS6 and so on) and display this text:
"
This website is built according to Web Standards.
[Link to XHTML, CSS, 505 and AAA]
Unfortunately, your browser does not fully support these standards. You're free to continue browsing, but be aware that you may encounter some difficulties. Please report any problems to webmaster@mysite.com.
We suggest you download one of the following browsers to replace your current one. Each one is fully standards-compliant and can be downloaded without charge.
[List of browsers for the platform or a link to the resource page of the site]
['click to continue']
"
It's worked fine on my page -you have to make sure that the message isn't popped up every time the user refreshes, though, for which server-side sessions work fine.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
I realize that, from a pragmatic point of view, what I'm about to say is irrelevant, but...
You say "But, rendering... Some pages aren't correct, thanks to web monkeys using IE's HTML additions." I found that, after a while, I simply came to the conclusion that those pages were rendered correctly, and that the designers of the pages (or those telling the designers how to do their jobs) were just idiots.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. --H.L. Mencken
Personally, I've only seen one page in 4 months that had serious rendering problems with Firefox. For those rare cases you can keep a copy of IE lying around.
I'm now using C#, and the thing is, it means that I now don't look at C++ code with horror. It's readable, as is PHP and Java.
A lot of people are going from VB to C#. The leap from VB to VB.NET is quite major, so why not leap to something that people will view less as being a script kiddie language?
writes Flash, does it not?
Agreed, Flash is only good for a few things, and is commonly used for things it is not good for.
Once the magic smoke's left, most electronics tend to be silent.
;)
In fact, sometimes it goes silent before the smoke goes out! Once those silly fans aren't busy pressing the smoke into the chips, they gout out like no one's business
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
There's only one site I use in IE - Windows Update. That's IT.
Simply (and call me a zealot if you want) if someone took away Firefox viewing of their site properly, I'll take my business elsewhere.
I've already done this. An electric co lost a sale with me, and I wrote and told them why.
I can show you lots and lots of web sites that comply 100% with W3C standards and DO NOT render well in Internet Explorer or Mozilla or Konqueror or some other browser.
There are a lot of problems:
- Browsers usually do not implement the full CSS standard
- There are bugs (lots of them!) in MSIE, Mozilla, Konqueror...
- The DOM is NOT the same in MSIE and Mozilla, so scripting is crippled
If you have a simple web site (and the CSS Zen Garden is a SIMPLE one), you won't need to know which browser your visitor is using.
But if you have and ellaborate web site, you DO need to know which browser the visitor is using, which version and create slightly different code for Mozilla and Internet Explorer (sometimes code can be completely different).
Heck, you don't have a clue what you are talking about! Web programming is a damn!
Konqueror is based on KHTML, not Mozilla.
The general opinion of the reviews that followed that one seemed to be that, simply because Apple didn't include tabbed browsing in its very fast, very powerful and very processor-friendly browser, the software was worth, at most, one star out of five. Several people talked about going back to Mozilla, which at the time was slower and more processor intensive than any of the other MacOS X browsers out there.
I see the utility of things like tabbed browsing setups. But is that feature so important that you'd forsake speed, stability and processor time?
The author is probably right about Microsoft hating the web, and he might even be right in his assertion that Longhorn is their attempt to replace it with their own thing, but he's wrong in assuming they even have a chance.
There are two reasons.
Firstly, the web is about small voices. It's not a medium for selling stuff or issuing press releases (although some people have made money doing that), it's about ordinary people saying stuff.
Remember how the web used to be, before VCs with their carpet bags full of money turned great swaths of it into a cheap version of UHF TV? Doesn't the thought of all the weasels switching to MS-Internet and going away bring a smile to your face?
Alas, it will not be, for the second reason the Longhorn Strategy will fail. Because breaking web compatibility means turning away customers and that's just not good for businesses.
Notice that all the commercial websites still around will work, at least mostly, on all sorts of browsers? Coincidence? I think not! Amazon tests their sites using Netscape 1.x! (Or they used to for a long time anyway--I don't know what their baseline is now.) That way, they know that their site will work on practically every browser out there, right out of the box.
Of course, some of the bigger e-business folks may start supporting Longhorn, but they'll stay compatible with the established standards because they don't want to lose their customers.
At this point, everyone has W3C-compliant (more or less) browsers and servers. They can all talk to each other. As soon as someone switches, they can't talk to the rest anymore and their setup becomes useless. This is why, for example, nobody has been able to replace SMTP, despite the whole spam problem.
I predict that we'll remain stuck with HTML, CSS and HTTP for a long time. The MS extensions will be a kewl technological blip that nobody will use but, if it's good, may well be lamented by future web developers as something that could have been.
I was going to say that SWF actually is an open standard, but I can't seem to find the licensing info for it anywhere. I seem to recollect that they opened the format, but I might be wrong. Anyway, it is well documented at OpenSWF.org.
There are several packages that produce SWF output, and if none of them are as good as Macromedia's products, they probably will be eventually.
I agree totally with your other points. I think well thought out web standards (and HTML is remarkably well thought through) are important for web democracy.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
No mention at all of Opera?
What we need is a list of as many sites that dont work in all browsers (especially those that lock alternatives out completly) and then, for each of those sites, find any competitors that exist that do support alternatives.
For example, if doesnt work with alternative browsers, find that does, so people can switch.
Get used to it. (I use Opera myself.)
What I don't understand is why the rest of the browsers don't at least TRY to support the IE extensions, no matter how non-standard or braindead they may be. You simply cannot overcome the dominance of IE in the browser market by saying "You all need to support standards".
IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN! "You all" ain't gonna do anything together. All these idiots putting up Web sites are using FrontPage and IE and they are NOT LISTENING TO YOU!
Wake up and smell the shit.
Start supporting the IE/FrontPage crap so other browsers can at least TRY to get some marketshare from IE by competing on their OTHER far superior features and THEN try to roll back Microsoft-based site crap.
Going the other way is NOT going to work!
Either that or wait for Linux to drop Windows forever which is going to take another ten years at least...
Stop standing on pointless principle and start fighting back.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"Technically better" to me means what has better standards support. IE's horribly broken CSS support pisses me off to no end. IE is the reason CSS isn't used on a majority of web sites that would greatly benefit from it. I love CSS and as a developer I am extremely frustrated having to make hacks of SIMPLE SHIT so that it looks correct in IE.
There is nothing IE does that Mozilla can't, except install some sketchy software without your knowledge, or maybe run some ActiveX objects that fuck your computer over.
FUCK THAT. IE IS SHIT.
Joseph?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, with comments about evil web sites like He totally messed up my computer. I certainly take this guy seriously.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
If you read the article, he describes how he 'reduced the security level' of IE, and got saddled with spyware. Sounds like driving a car into a concrete barrier at 200 mph a la Princess Di and expecting to live.
I've used IE since 1999. NOT ONCE have i been subject to spyware or anything else. It's a question of safe surfing habits. If you insist on visiting seedy websites that pop up activex warnings-and then moronically click ok, what else can you expect? (The fact that some of these things install themselves without asking further proves why it's better to avoid going to such sites) If you enter a disreputable neighborhood late at night, you're asking to be mugged.
Fine. So maybe Homer Simpson wouldn't know (or be expected to, in today's world) how to bulletproof his browser. This article seems to be written by a self confessed tester of browsers-someone presumably with an IQ higher than Homer Simpson. If you haven't heard of Spybot or other spyware removal tools, and have to lose your data to set it right, who's being a doofus now?
I'm not trying to defend IE here. But to again sit and rant against MS because of one's own incompetence in basic security practices, build up the paranoia about 'Longhorn destroying the web as we know it', 'this is a fight for survival of the web itself'
is pure bullshit.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."