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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.
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.
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..
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Konqueror will use whatever KPart you throw at it, which very well could be Gecko. But KHTML is the default engine.
- "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 have to agree, although I did read to end out of morbid fascination. Most of the article is just cheerleading for Mozilla, I dont mind that, even if he is way off on some points, but I think it should be pointed out that while Mozilla is good it has taken an inordinate amount of time to get here and has not been a smooth ride. Mozilla is not the cure for cancer. It just lets me read pages on the web or send email, nothing groundbreaking there. I wont even start on the Betamax thing for delusional examples.
The author makes the usual MS are trying to take over the world but provides no proof or indication of how this will actually happen so I take it as (based on the article) a highly biased guess.
Lastly by harping on about current standards the author clearly shows he does not have the faintest idea about where the web and desktop applications are going.
He does inadvertently raise one interesting point though. A two tier web might not actually be a bad idea. A 'commercial' one tied into useful services with rich clients delivered by XUL/XAML and another 'information' (I think information is batter than his hippie description) type web where you can use the browser of your choice. But as for saying
the new browser war is a fight for the survival of the web itself
what a load of sensationalist bull.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
There are still people out there using Netscape 4, or Windows 98. Like anything else, if you don't get them on the first go, making changes to an already existing infrastructure is hard. People won't swallow something new unless there is a compelling reason to do it.
The only reason we have stronger copy protection on DVDs is because they did it right at the critical point: the change of media. If we had region-free DVD players with no munging of signal (ie: you could copy the output easily) right from the beginning, the MPAA would have never been able to slip them in later. Consumers would have laughed at them, right to the bank.
``how can we, the developers of the web, stp this from happening?''
The answer is: develop our own technologies, and ship them before Microsoft ships theirs. Make a lot of noise to get people to notice. By the time Microsoft gets its technology out, me must have established a solid userbase. Then, we just hope we can stay ahead.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So far I've gotten my mom (!) and a coworker permanently switched to Mozilla-based stuff, but it ain't as easy as one might think.
Each one teach one.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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 kinda look at things the other way around, if a site doesn't work in what ever browser I'm currently using, then it just wasn't that important.
IE is a crappy browser simple things like CSS and png isn't shown correctly, there are no tabs and I find it to be kind of slow (yes slow).
By the way, what do you mean that Safari is faster than Opera on any platform? Safari only runs on MacOSX.
I've been kind slack and haven't checked Homestar Runner recently. Yes, I'm a bad geek. But one thing I can tell you off the top of my head is that they do embed each page in its own HTML page, so I can send a friend a link "homestarrunner.com/sbemail42.html" which, unfortunately, is not the norm for flash-based sites.
What's that old saying, there's a rule to every exception, or something like that?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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.
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"
This one happens to be good, and just makes me think - how can we, the developers of the web, stp this from happening?
By breaking IE. As content providers and web"masters" we have control of the web. My website intentionally renders very poorly in IE. I use PNGs with alpha transparency. I delay serving pages on the server side to people using IE. IE is a second rate browser, and as a result my website gives it second hand treatment.
If Apache shipped with a module that fed pages to IE slower than W3C compliant browsers, it could dramatically affect the landscape of the web. Why does Apache not use it's monopoly power to better it's cause? That's the problem with the open-source crowd: We're too nice. The corporations are playing hardball, and we're still playing Mr. Niceperson.
Before someone posts a rebuttal to this saying, "But then your website is not being standards compliant and open to the web... boo hoo hoo..."; let me preempt them with this thought:
Why should I as a content provider, have to cater to someone who wants needs(or wants) to visit my site when THEY have selected to use a crippled peice of software? Why should I have to develop 2 websites (one for IE and one for the rest of the world W3C)?
I shouldn't and I don't. In fact, I'd like to propose a day called the "Great IE Blackout Boycott".
Let's get as many webmasters as possible to all stop serving pages to IE browsers all on ONE DAY.
Or better still, why don't we build marketing hype like a corporate entity and then on some predetermined day, we all advertise and market Mozilla/Opera/whatever and redirect IE lusers to it. Effectively a Dragnet to convert the IE sheep that are using IE because they don't know about anything else. If 30-40% of the web suddenly advertised a new browser on the same day, I bet a paradigm shift would occur.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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.
Actually, Microsoft may not hate the web, but they certainly view it as a threat to their business model. Microsoft's business model is based on owning the underlying platform. If the platform is commoditized, then they would have to compete on quality, something they've not historically been very good at.
The web is heading in the direction of becoming a commodity platform for building, distributing and running all software. That is something microsoft wants to avoid at all costs, because without the control their proprietary edge gives them, they couldn't keep up their profit margins. Microsoft has tried to kill every attempt at providing that web-based standardised platform. They've tried and mostly succeeded at killing desktop java. They've tried and mostly succeeded at killing any progress on web standards to the point they're actually useful for building complex apps. They're trying to move to longhorn, a new wholly proprietary web architecture, which doesn't just add to the web, but replaces it.
Microsoft's business model is based on monopoly pricing. If they couldn't price like a monopoly, their stock value would collapse. They MUST have control over the desktop market. It is imperative from a business point of view. That's why they're so ruthless in destroying anything that threatens to replace their platform. And that's why the author said microsoft hates the web. It's not that they hate it, it's that they fear it.
> They are mostly games and fancy bloated intros mostly anyway.
I know that most of the /. crowd thinks that flash bloats the interface, but I happen to work for a web development company that has quite a few designers experienced with Flash. IMHO a good Flash interface can enrichen the whole experience and not be used just for banners.
For example, A lot of car sites use flash for presentation and it works wonders.
Check out, for example the new minisite for Peugeot 407 (click the view animation). It's not the best example, but try doing that in HTML 3.0. I'd post a few links to our sites, but don't like the idea of being slasdotted.
boky
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.
Umm, right now, that's the definition.
.Net and WinFX. So we see that as a very big danger. A lot of people today cannot migrate to Linux or cannot migrate to Mozilla because a lot of their internal Web sites happen to use IE extensions. Now imagine a world where you can only use XAML.
.NET extensions. And that has everything to do with browsers, and platforms.
From Miguel's Netcraft interview (also linked on Slashdot):
-----Start--------
Q. What do you see as the greatest danger to the continuing adoption and progress of open source?
A. Microsoft realises today that Linux is competing for some of the green pastures that it's been enjoying for so long; I think that Longhorn is a big attempt to take back what they owned before. Longhorn has kind of a scary technology called Avalon, which when compounded with another technology called XAML, it's fairly dangerous. And the reason is that they've made it so it's basically an HTML replacement. The advantage is it's probably as easy as writing HTML, so that means that anybody can produce this content with a text editor.
It's basically an HTML Next Generation. A lot more widgets, a lot more flexibility, more richer experience - way, way richer experience. You get basically the native client experience with Web- like deployments. So you develop these extremely rich applications but they can be deployed as easily as the Web is. It's just like going to a URL: you go to Google, and you get the Web page and it works. So it's the same deployment model but the user interface interaction is just fantastic.
Of course, the only drawback is that this new interaction is completely tied to
It's massive - I'm so scared.
------END--------
So take your flame elsewhere. Web services are currently SOAP over HTTP. Web services will become XAML, essentially
I'm with linus torvalds on this one
> Just as good software should be modularized and decentralized
So where's this microkernel of Linus's then?
I agree with another poster. you say you can't switch from IE because you haven't tried. I took the plunge about 3 months ago. I was happy with IE, but I wanted to see what the hubub was about. And now, i will never go back to IE. There are very few sites that don't work in Firefox (but they won't work in other non-IE browsers either). I used one site that said "you must have IE" After I emailed the webmaster, they removed that restriction. (dunno why it was even there). And -- there's a nice extension for firefox that adds "open in IE browser" to the right-click menu of a link. This is nice if you REALLY want to read something that won't load in firefox.
There are a few things that I love about firefox -- these were problems that I either didn't notice in IE or didn't think that it was the browsers problem
1)PDFs open MUCH faster in firefox than IE. This is a huge difference. I noticed it immediately. HUGE difference.
2)Popup blocking. Yes, google toolbar does the same thing, but why do you need it. A googlebar is also integrated into firefox. You can hit ctrl+k to get to that search bar. VERY easy!
3) Firefox IS faster. It loads up faster and loads pages faster. Period.
4)Tabbed browsing. I don't use it that much, so this wasn't a huge selling point for me, but its nice to combine pages that are similar into one browser window
5) Firefox loads pages much more logically, in my opinion. its easier to read a half-loaded page than IE.
6) This could be the biggest thing I love about firefox... extensions are easy to find and usually work well and its usually written by someone that didn't like a feature in firefox. Things like the IE link and other stuff are very nice.
Finally, don't confuse Mozilla with Firefox. Firefox is JUST a browser. Mozilla is an entire suite. I, personally, don't see a point for Mozilla because it loads so slow. I use Firefox and Thunderbird -- and I used to work with (and love) IE and Outlook.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
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.
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!
Its been done.
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.