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..."
How about making Mozilla and FireFox a bit faster and less memory hungry? I know, I know, I should buy faster computers. But there are so many cases where that's difficult or impossible. I would love to recycle older machines as browsing-boxes for friends, relatives, even libraries if only they ran Mozilla somewhat faster. There's still life left in a PII-350.
The Surfin Safari webpage shows David Hyatt's public weblog discussion on the matter of the Safari HTML extensions, it is a very interested read. (David Hyatt is the lead engineer at Apple on WebCore, Safari's rendering engine.)
I like competition as much as the next guy, but I'm worried that if this turns into a "Browser War" we're going to end up with conflicting standards: widgets that only work with Microsoft products, and then widgets that only work with Mozilla/Opera/KHTML. And then we'd be stuck coding two different versions of each widget, or doing hacks like are currently done in CSS to get it to work on winIE.
I have about a dozen IE only sites at work, where our IT peeps (who get microsoft perks) use plugins, scripts or even .net that you must use IE.
One such work order system works flawlessly under mozilla, I had to use proxomitron to re-write the javascript code on the fly to get it to work.
If someone writes a plugin thats IE only, most likely microsoft is there somewhere, with its fingers in the mix.
I can deploy an IE patch to 5000 systems in an hour.
Check out Remote Desktop for Apple. I am sure their are plenty of Open Source alternatives. Hell, I could even write a Windows AT job that checks a directory and runs any executables inside it. All you have to do is write a self-installing executable(most have -silent installs).
These browsers are good bets from a security point now, but why would they be safe in 6 months
Stupid Questions. Administrators have to be ready to update software and I consider it their job to know what exploits are in the wild. Yes, this means you have to do a job and be aware.
I think my point is this, switch browsers because it's a better product for *you*, don't switch because of security.
Not really a lot of questions here, but you switch because of security in the business world especially if the other product is a liability. Due to IE, Windows is becoming a liability. The switch makes sense if you don't want to jump to a more secure OS like Linux or OSX. And yes, these OS's are more secure whether you want to believe it is the minor footprint, obscurity or whatever. The point is, they are not a liability at this current time.
I care more about a web content war. Like when is there going to be an open source initiative to put Flash out of business?
As soon as most of the people on the web have broadband, such content will be king.
Open Source Sushi
Does anyone honestly believe Microsoft will be vanquished? It will never happen. Either they'll keep their ridiculous monopoly as it is now, or in a perfect world, this new standard providing more functionality and security than IE and people start switching.
There are people still using Windows 95. There will always be people using IE. A lot of people. We can hope for MS to lose a chunk of their browser share, but that, in turn, could force them to up their standards compliance.
In a couple years, if 40% of the people are using non-MS browsers and the number is a rising trend, that is something they would obviously be taking seriously and would likely roll out better standards support. Or... I'm living a pipe dream. Time will tell.
Example's ?
I have been using Linux only browsers for 4 years and have had no problems with any webpages displaying incorrectly. As a matter of fact the only things I have heard of not working correctly are some streaming media type's (mms:// URL's) and little sites that were made using WYSIWYG tools.
And I wouldn't hold my breath about it being an IE only web, the more major site's and groups bash IE and promote alternatives the more it hurts MS, no matter how hard they try they wont be able to prevent people leaving their platform until they actually FIX the problems.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
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. Instead of scoffing at the notion of web apps, people should embrace it as a new paradigm. Faster, cheaper, cross-platform, what could be better?
Microsoft was headed down this road with IE, but suddenly they realized that they couldn't continue or they would make the Windows API monopoly irrelevant.
IE development came to a screeching halt and they decided to come up with a perverted proprietary work-around to implement the same thing in a way that wouldn't threaten Windows (XAML and Avalon). XAML is essentially a fancy mark-up language (like HTML) that, coupled with C# (instead of JavaScript) creates rich client applications that are compiled windows apps. Throw in a little Indigo to make the apps web-aware and you've successfully recreated the wheel.
It only seems natural that someone else would want to carry the torch of rich browser-based apps. Most of the things these guys are talking about are already possible in IE. They're just trying to standardize it so people can roll up their sleeves and start writing cool apps.
IMHO, just going off an a tangent: I think many of us have been misled. Something else is quietly brewing.
.NET. Detractors may deride it as much as they want, but I believe this Microsoft's strategic weapon. Imagine a browser that can run a native lightweight UI (through Avalon). Imagine a world where such applications are trivial to build.
.NET, your knowledge in a .NET language like C# (and even your code!) can more or less be reused in ASP.NET, and in frameworks like .NET Compact.
.NET. .NET just works, for the most part. You can actually build usable GUI apps with it (unlike Java. The only decent GUI apps are SWT-based and even those feel klunky). And it will be interesting to see how things will look like in a few years.
.NET architecture -- which incidentally, was not conceived by Microsoft so much as it was by Anders Heijsberg who was pilfered from Borland. You can see the elegance of Borland engineering exude in .NET. Yes, I am a Borland fan.)
The stagnation of IE has been made to be seen as a bigger issue than it really is. We see Firefox making headway now and we are happy, but in reality, from a strategic point of view, it is no threat to IE in the long run unless it makes some fundamental changes.
If Microsoft gets its way, the fight is no longer going to be about rendering web pages.
I submit to you that this is due to
Right now, today, we are already beginning to see things like WYSIWYG HTML editors built with ASP.NET, that work like a native application embedded within the browser. (take a look at this, Devedit. Requires IE.
One might argue that we can sort of already do such things using XUL, Javascript, DHTML, Java etc. That's all nice and well, but how many technologies do you have to learn to build a simple app?
With
This was the dream everyone had for Java, and from the way things are going, it looks like this dream will come in to fruition in the form of
(btw, I am no MS supporter (my main machine is a Mac OS X box). But I have to admire the
That's great and all, but as a practicing web developer, I can assure you that dealing with MSFT's various idiocies as embodied in IE is a titanic pain in the ass. Just to pick one area where IE's stagnation is very much a big issue if you do this for a living: CSS support. They barely support CSSv1 correctly even in the latest IE, and anything later than that is totally haphazard. As for why CSS is a big deal, well, this comment box isn't big enough to contain all the reasons behind that. I'll leave aside for brevity all the other ways that IE makes our lives difficult at work!
As for the rest of your post, despite how much I'd love to use web-like tech to make traditional applications, I don't see that working. It's been tried before by quite a number of people unsuccessfully, and C#/.NET/blahblahblahbuzzwordsoup isn't different enough to really stand out. I find it ironic, to a degree, that you ask "how many technologies do you have to learn to build a simple app?" when you yourself list quite a number in relation to the MSFT development paradigm. .NET is a bit better
than the trainwreck that is traditional win32 development, but not by a whole lot (see Joel Spoelsky's writings on this topic, that I'm too
lazy to link at the moment). Fred Brooks said it best those decades ago, there is no silver bullet in computer programming, and there never will be.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
What I'd like is the ability to split a browser window and view differnt parts of long pages either alongside or above/below each other so I can compare page elements. It would be nice to be able to split two different pages the same way too - sort of like a personalised version of framesets.
In-page bookmarks, with the option of being temporary or persistent would also be handy for navigating through large documents.
Another nice-to-have would to be an option to open all (or settable a maximum number of) the links on a page as tabs so they could load in the background and be there when I'm ready.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I remember having to refuse to use a work intranet site once because of bugs like this. The IT team eventually caved and fixed the damn thing.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
wait a minute! are you saying there's a relatively painless way to get IE-specific javascript to work in mozilla variants?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
That it is the webforms stuff that goes first is not at all surprising, as Hixie isn't very fond of XForms.
Anyway, I think it is pretty straightforward: The guys forming the group didn't want MS on board. It's probably a matter of personal taste, not a big attack intended to bring Goliath down once and for all.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
1) They are running out of cash.
or
2) Their revenue projections are showing trouble ahead.
Clearly (1) doesn't apply as they have $55 billion. So the answer is (2). They are having to seriously slash their prices to compete on large contracts with Linux quotes.
Microsoft is not unassailable. As regards browser market share, the market share figures have started to slip for the first time in more than 5 years.
20 years ago, IBM seemed to some to be in an utterly dominating position. Their dominance had a rise and a fall. So will Microsoft. The signs that they have already passed their peak are there to see.
Dont know if this idea has been suggested yet, If a website can not be viewed, Firefox could either check for a cached version on your computer or from another source (eg Google, Archive.org) and automatically display that page instead. Maybe a notifier somewhere in the browser letting the user know they are viewing cached content?
My suggestion would be a simple and intuitive way to change the settings to be identical to the default settings on IE. I've been trying to convert my fiance to firefox, and she gets frustrated with any difference between the two because she's used IE for a while. I don't necessarily think that all of the defaults should be the same automatically, but some simple method that novice users could use to make the functions (such as prompting when saving information) the same as they are typically in IE would probably help Firefox be more used by novices, who I'd think were a lot of the market.
Come off it. All the other major browsers support 99% of the CSS, DOM, etc specifications, so it's unreasonable to criticise Internet Explorer for scraping by with something like 50% support for them?
Nobody advocates authoring to the specifications, using each and every feature, and to hell with the browsers. What people actually advocate is authoring to the specifications, avoiding the troublesome areas that Internet Explorer can't cope with. The 99% support that the other major browsers offer is certainly adequate for that development method.
The early days of the Internet were in 1996? Fascinating!
Back in 1996, 'commentators' were idiots. They talked about Netscape making the "OS obsolete," Java destroying Microsoft, the web being replaced by "pull" and all sorts of other retarded nonsense.
However the ActiveDesktop wasn't retarded nonsense then nor at any other time. Let the behavior of the desktop be defined by human-readable markup and let it embed user-desired components. Why! Components on the desktop! What a terrible idea! Christ it ruined the world!
Actually COM and ActiveX were great ideas, and the Active Desktop, while never really taken anywhere, offered considerable possibility for writing programs to make your day easier. If you disagree it's probably because you're ignorant.
No, the problem with Microsoft's plan was the implementation of their security model and the laxness of certificate issuers. Not that this mattered for the Active Desktop.
As I remember it, every sensible commentator out there was saying that ActiveX was a dystopian disaster just waiting to happen.
The big issue at the time was that IE3 would automatically run ActiveX stuff without any prompt at all. That was fixed in IE4. People were also incorrectly comparing it to sandboxed Java Applets, when a better comparison was non-sandboxed Netscape Plugins.
Realistically, ActiveX has not been a huge security problem or a "dystopian disaster" (rolls eyes). ActiveX is just one of a thousand ways of doing social engineering hacks. IE's *real* security issues are in it's HTML renderer and shoddy Zone system.
It's time to drop ActiveX as a mindless Bash Microsoft point. Mozilla.org has ripped off the idea, and they've shown even the Anti-MS people that it can be useful and convienent.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.