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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.
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!
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).
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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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
[Flash sites] are mostly games and fancy bloated intros mostly anyway.
So what? The fact is, people use them, and it's a lot more convenient for them to load up in your browser window than to have to load a new program just to browse a site that someone has written in Flash. The most important thing about a browser to most people isn't stability or even features - it's convenience. If you had to load up a seperate program to see a movie trailer or listen to a song sample, it would annoy people to the extent that most of them wouldn't want to use your browser.
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.
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.
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.
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
Have you ever tried removing something from someone's machine? They complain enough if you get rid of their Bonzi Buddy or Comet Cursor, let alone their browser.
Seriously though, removing their programs is not the way to go, and will just make people annoyed. The reaction you get if you introduce them to Firefox or Opera as a 'cool new browser' is totally different to what you get for lecturing them with your tinfoil hat on. If you give people a better alternative, they will (probably) use it, but if you try to preach about W3C standards they'll just ignore you.
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.
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.
There should be a new logical fallacy called "fallacy of false convenience" or something like that. this is where some poster attempts to throw some bullshit by you by starting with reasonable premises and then hoping tht you won't notice the sleight of hand.
Let's look: "good software should be modularized and decentralized." This is a reasonable propositon. but looks at where he goes from there: "a web browser shoud be just that .. a secure configurable and stable HTML viewer."
Im sorry, you conclusions do NOT follow from your premises. You have instead chosen an arbitrary standard that you happen to agree with and more or less declare this to be 'obvious' when it in fact is not.
Why should a web browser be a secure configurable (stable i'll take for granted) viewer when it is clear to anybody that today's web is much more than that? why do you NOT have a problem with your web browser being able to view a myriad of image formats but not a myriad of video formats? is there some fundamental difference? NO! or are you suggesting that maybe image viewing should be shucked out an external program? No? Then why is your line in the sand so 'obvious?' (remember, there are lynx users out there who WOULD say that the image viewing should be shucked out to an external viewer and who used to campaign against any web page containing any non-essential information in graphical format; clearly technology has passed those people by).
For that matter, why shouldn't you have a different program to display each letter of the alphabet, or each color? That's modularized and decentralized, no? While that is of course a silly example, it just goes to show that _your_ definition of "what some AC thinks a web browser should be" is not necessarily what follows from your premises just because "games and fancy bloated intros" don't suit you.
Only on slashdot would your sort of wishful thinking be marked 'insightful.'
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.
While I certainly don't agree with the AC you're replying to, I have to strongly disagree with you on point A, the use of Flash type stuff for site navigation. It's at least as bad as frames in terms of bookmarking, printing, linking, etc. It fundamentally breaks the web.
While I'm as big a fan of Homestar Runner as the next guy, there's a time and a place for everything. If we're gonna be all idealistic about the very future of the World Wide Web, we've got to seriously question the use of technologies that run counter to basic low level web navigation.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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.
I'm not sure why the parent post rates a +5 Insightful.... Maybe it's because the subject line has a magic name within it, giving rise to the thought "somebody's agreeing with Linus so this must be an insightful comment, since Linus is our god." Come on people - Linus is just a guy, and he puts his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us.
All of the web browsers I have used only render HTML and plain graphics formats. Yes, Flash displays, and so does embedded video and music, but that is actually done by external video and audio players like Quicktime, Real, or Windows Media. It's certainly not the browser itself - it's just a container for this stuff.
What do you think plug-ins are all about?
As for the secure bit, well, most browsers could do a much better job of sandboxing plugins.
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.
Many people out there who are hard of hearing or seeing use accessibility tools to use their computer. With something like standards complaint HTML, this works just fine. A blind guy can have his computer read the content off a web page. But with something like Flash, such programs just don't work. You haven't cut him off from using your site with his favorite browser, you have cut him off from using your site period.
Do the world a favor and whenever you see a site that relies on flash without an alternative, send an email to the owner of the site informing him that his web designer is an incompetent moron (though you might want word it a bit nicer than that).
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Well, let's see... Here are some of the most obvious problems with sites that use all or mostly Flash-based content:
I'll admit, the last point is a bit over the top, but it is one of the complaints commonly found on Slashdot. The first three points comprise my main beef with Flash. Flash is a good technology, but it is not a replacement for open, standardized, and accessible formats like HTML, XML, and CSS.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
>Linus is just a guy, and he puts his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us.
Actually, this may not be true. Linus, like most Finnish men, probably sits down and pulls both legs up at the same time. Time-honored tradition here.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!