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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.
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 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
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
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.
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.