Slashdot Mirror
Browser Wars 2004
J. Hobbs writes "Recent posts on David Hyatt's site describing the new technology he's working on for Dashboard, coupled with recent announcements from the newly formed WHAT-WG alliance (Apple, Mozilla, and Opera) could add up to a potentially new kind of application development and deployment that I explore in this highly speculative essay. See if you don't agree..."
I'd like to see Internet Explorer become obselete as much as the next guy, but the more IE continues to develop--as they inevitably be forced to do if this plugin is released--the more competition there will be on the browser market. That's a Good Thing.
Sure it is good one but I'm looking to get rid of IE bugs,virues etc first. Browser must be fast and should have simple built in option to clear cache, priacy stuff as soon as you close it.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
Seems like we've been there before with MSIE 4. It didn't work well then, why should we expect it to work well now?
-- There is no spoon. Only fork.
If you blur the line between desktop and web browser, the don't you essentially become no diffrent than Internet Explorer, only cross platform? I suppose it could be neat if done correctly but I fear that this could just open Mozilla and others up for some nasty Internet Explorer-esque exploits.
I see a lot of news lately promoting a movement towards 'alternative browsers', and while it sounds interesting, I think there are some downsides.
1. How will I update this browser when the next security vulnerability affects my new browser? How will home users, or worse yet, businesses, patch these vulnerabilities? I can deploy an IE patch to 5000 systems in an hour. How will I do that with these alternative browsers?
2. These browsers are good bets from a security point now, but why would they be safe in 6 months, or a year? As these browsers gain market share, they will be everyone's new favorite target, and there for no better off. Additionally, users will clamor for the same features, bells, and whistles IE has, so these new browsers, I believe, will become just as big, from an attack vector standpoint, as IE is today.
I think my point is this, switch browsers because it's a better product for *you*, don't switch because of security. Why not? Because anything computer related will be compromised.
Bottom line.
If you want to be completely secure, unplug your computer from the internet, and buy a roll of stamps.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
Ummm...that already happened. Where have you been?
-- There is no spoon. Only fork.
Which planet do you live on? Microsoft has approximately $55 billion in the bank. Do you have any idea at all what that number means? For example, after subtracting a $400 million fine from the European Union, MS would still have ... $55 billion in the bank (to the same precision).
Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, Opera, and Sun are interested in not being caused to become financially insolvent by Microsoft. Some of them won't make it. IMHO Sun will be the first to die, but all of them are in danger. They are definitely not the slightest danger to Microsoft.
>I can deploy an IE patch to 5000 systems in an hour. How will I do that with these alternative browsers?
The same way you do the IE patch - using SMS. If you use SUS instead, then add SMS to your list of neat-o technologies and voila.. you can push out auto-updates to ANY app - not just MS ones.
Thats of course ignoring startup scripts, domain login scripts, and good-old-fashioned "You must install this app or your email access will be restricted until you do". Lots of alternatives.
>These browsers are good bets from a security point now, but why would they be safe in 6 months, or a year?
Because they are designed with better security paradigms - they don't by default trust DATA as EXECUTIBLE CODE.
>As these browsers gain market share, they will be everyone's new favorite target, and there for no better off
Wrong. See Apache v. IIS. Far more Apache servers, and its attacked far less than IIS, and far less effectively. Market share != vulnerability. Even if it did, alternative browsers wont reach "majority" status for AT LEAST two years - even at the current-this-week migration %'s.
>Additionally, users will clamor for the same features, bells, and whistles IE has
Users already clamor for the features, bells, and whistles that IE *DOESNT* have that the other browsers have - tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and *real* css and png support. So much so that - oh look - SP2 will fix some of those "issues".
>don't switch because of security. Why not? Because anything computer related will be compromised.
Somethings are compromised more easily - security is rarely black and white, and it definitely isnt here.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
Stop it. Just stop it.
The web wasn't built for all these crazy extensions or streaming media.
Build and deploy us a better Internet before added to the pile of restless options.
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
Mod me flamebait, but are we intentionally excluding Microsoft from the browser development community now?
LOL! Are you kidding? How can these companies be excluding MS from a market that MS utterly dominates? They're not excluding anyone, they're fighting for relevance - if all else fails, this will be their last great act of defiance.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
While the current extensions are being written by an open source, open standard consortium, that still doesn't solve the problem of a possible standards war.
The problem, as I see it, is rather that once these standards become, well, standard, MS will pull out it's old standby, embrace and extend. We'll see a system compatible to Dashboard and it's Opera and Mozilla equivelents, but extended so that new MS Dashboard widgets are not compatible with the others.
The hope, I guess, is that the combination of the huge security problems with IE and these new features will allow Safari, Opera, and Mozilla to hold a plurality of the browser market, so that MS won't be able to use their market dominance to embrace and extend. It should be pretty interesting to see what happens.
Narrative
What happened to programming everything in assembler via a command-line?
Damn all this new-fangled technological progress. Let us embrace stagnancy, because it's old, which makes it better.
All Microsoft has to do is to make their "Dashboard-alike" support just slightly broken and keep it that way. People will be forced to choose or keep separate development trunks, and we have the same fucking problem that we do today.
Why? Cause the damn browser is bundled into the OS and people can't choose to use one that isn't broken.
Fuck you DOJ. Do your damn job already.
ActiveDesktop. Ads and crap floating on the desktop. *shudder* The sleazy side of the 'net always takes advantage of the new-fangled technology we think is gonna be so great and utopian.
You have a point, but you overstate it (and probably some grumpy moderator will mod you down for that...)
Some of the post-HTML standards are really beneficial. For example, the separation of document structure from presentation style (using CSS) is good, because it simplifies website maintenance and will allow programs to make sense of web pages. We're not there yet, but there's progress toward some really useful goals.
But the addition of a bunch of features just for eye candy ("very, very, very cool stuff" as the article referred to by the story puts it) is a giant leap backwards. It's just like flashing popups. The kids and the salespeople yell "wow! cool" for about 3 weeks and then suddenly they're no longer cool.
When I use the web, I want information. Stuff that looks like a video game in attract mode is just a timewasting distraction. Unfortunately, much of the advocacy for change is coming from graphic artists, not from real users.
Please.
When was the last time standing in front of the bleeding edge of technological progress and screaming 'Stop!' did anything except get you cut off at the knees?
Those of us who are, in fact, interested in what advanced content tools are authentically useful for are uninterested in your neo-Luddite tendancies. Lynx is a fine browser for those things that can be represented in text, but if you think that everything the web is good for can be presented in Lynx, you're living in a dream world. Or 1991.
I am pretty sure that no other browser can compete with IE until it achieves one thing: IE compatibility.
IE has one thing that no other browser has: it shows almos Every Single Page as it was intended by the designers.
I know, I know, web designers' fault. They should create cross-browser pages, but they don't.
So, while MS does not respect W3C standards, the only way to compete with IE is being able to render the pages exactly like IE does. What would be better is to provide the user with an option: "show this page as IE would or show it as it should be rendered attending to W3C standars".
Until then, we'll be in a IE driven web (which, btw, is cyclic, designers design for IE 'cos the own the market, and users use IE 'cos the web is designed for IT).
P.S. I know, Microsoft is bad. And ppl use IE 'cos is there, but ppl does not change browsers due to what is stated above.
--krahd
Mod me up, Scottie!
mod me up scottie!
> have my webpages render
> perfectly just using TABLE tags.
For you may be, can someone that is blind use it as easly then if you designed the site well, using CSS?
Nope.
Would it of taken longer to design?
Nope.
You are what is wrong with web design, move into the future, data seperation is where its at, baby.
The competition will be with XAML, .NET Zero Deployment and the likes om them. The initiative described in the article is probably good and all, and I seriously hope they do make it into something. But make no mistake - MS has been working long and hard on getting stuff that blurs the line between web and local pages (or apps, if you prefer that name), and some of it works just fine (.NET Zero Deployment is a good example here). Soon enough, there will be no browser war because the browser will not be as essential as it is today. It still is, though - and that's why I use Firefox whenever I can :-)
Seriously, running richer and richer "weblets" (for lack of a better technology-neutral term) on your local machine, feeding them with remote data and making it all flexible and (hopefully) secure, is a trend that's been going on for YEARS now. A lot of us would like this to feature open standards, open source and other such goodness, but we need to take a long, hard look at the initiatives from MS - their market dominance means that THEIR standards will become a reality.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
MS is already going to do that with Avalon. They have no intention giving up their monopoly by obeying standards. It's useless to worry about what MS might do. They will do anything and everything to stop competition. They have no morals or ethics.
evil is as evil does
So, while MS does not respect W3C standards, the only way to compete with IE is being able to render the pages exactly like IE does. What would be better is to provide the user with an option: "show this page as IE would or show it as it should be rendered attending to W3C standars".
Until then, we'll be in a IE driven web (which, btw, is cyclic, designers design for IE 'cos the own the market, and users use IE 'cos the web is designed for IT).
How would this help? Everyone would turn the option on, so that their favourite websites render properly, and web designers would continue to design for IE because that's what everybody's emulating.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
When was the last time standing in front of the bleeding edge of technological progress and screaming 'Stop!' did anything except get you cut off at the knees?
You have a point, however, your point is worthless unless you can distinguish between the bleeding edge of technological progress and that which is merely new.
They aren't the same thing at all.
KFG
It's much easier to write UI code in HTML with some JavaScript that it is to write the same UI code with C++ or any other language for that matter.
Yes, but that's not because HTML+JavaScript is such great technology, it's because C++ or Java using common toolkits are such awful technology for writing GUIs.
It's also not clear to me why we need a "standard" for this. If you are going to write applications, you can pick a good toolkit to go with that and just use that. In fact, if you like writing HTML-based apps but don't like the constraints browsers impose, chances are the toolkit you already have and use lets you do just that: use its HTML widget. In fact, you'll probably get embedded IE or embedded Mozilla out of that.
I count 10 mentions of .NET but 0 of Mono. I believe your concern is valid and share it for the most part, but shouldn't you mention what is being done about it?
The unofficial
How long will 55 billion USD last once you start paying dividends (as many investors both institutional and individual are clamoring for) and/or buying back stock to reduce the share price dilution due to employee stock options? The world of finance and corporate monetary structures is one just as detailed, subtle, and complex as that of code or computer architecture. Just becuase it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and would to a layperson appear to be a duck does not make it a 100% bonafide waterfowl...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/flashpro/ development/
http://www.macromedia.com/software/central/
Am I wrong?
I love and use Java like hell, even though applets are now usable - but so far only Flash can really claim write once, run anywhere ubiquity. I don't even think XAML stands up to it and Flash is already pretty much in every browser from Win, Mac, to Linux....
"Imagine a browser that can run a native lightweight UI"
If it's native, wouldn't that be heavyweight? I thought lightweight was the exact opposite of native. :-/
At any rate, I'm pretty sure that you can interact with XUL via Java instead of JavaScript, if you really don't want to deal with JavaScript.
And at the point where you're writing purely XUL + Java, I don't see how writing XAML + C# makes life any easier. If anything, it's learning two more languages than the average developer already knows (most people already know Java.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Building applications that require a specific browser is NOT a Good Thing. Applications should be built that require standards based browsers and browsers should be built to standards. Writing applications that require the use of Firefox is just as bad as writing applications that require the use of IE. If an application is written that requires a standards based browser and it doesn't work with IE, then it means the IE could become irrelavent.
Internet Explorer 6 gets CSS 1 almost completely right. ... if you set the correct DOCTYPE.
I always wonder if these slashdot bitches even bothered to try that before complaining.