The Browser Wars Are Back?

jpkunst writes "ZDNet UK reports and PCWorld.com report that, according to Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, whose comments came during a discussion with Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, 'the browser wars are back', thanks to the emerging popularity of products such as Apple's Safari and the open-source Firefox. Andreessen warned that 'competition could compel the company [Microsoft] to use aggressive tactics to protect its Windows operating system monopoly'."

Comments

All MS needs to do to compete is imitate

[winkydink]

Just watch Safari & Firefox development and imitate the functionality. Joe User then has no compelling reason to switch.

Not surprising

[Schweg]

This issue seems to have come to a head in the past year or so, particular in the corporate environment.

I am IT director for a small division of a company near Philadelphia, and the problems caused by IE in our environment have increased greatly in the past year. We spend more time than ever fixing problems caused by spyware in particular.

This also falls into a timeframe when the browser alternatives have been getting much better (Mozilla, Firefox). We are currently planning to move everyone to Firefox as their default browser once it has been released as 1.0 or better.

Re:Huh?

[devphaeton]

When were they gone?

I believe that was declared with the PMSNBC.com article that trumpeted "BROWSER WARS OVAR!!" and thus went on to claim IE the victor....

By what standard, i don't know...

Currently, i view MS as a hibernating giant- with Longhorn getting pushed back again and again, and IE just barely adding some bolted-on features of late (but yet not really fixing any of the severe issues with it)... and so forth...

If we, Apple, or anyone is going to put a sizeable dent into the Windows Entrenchment, *NOW* is the time...

Not Until IE is Unbundled

[dekemoose]

It's foolish to think that alternative browsers will ever have more than a few percentage points as long as users have what appears to them be a perfectly good browser sitting on their computer when they unpack it from Dell/Gateway/Whatever. We're talking about people who for the most part don't have the competence to download security fixes, let alone downloading a new browser. Just as Windows is synonymous with computers for most people, IE is synonymous for the Internet. I'll believe the browser wars are back when Dell (oor similar) bundles Firefox with their machines.

Re:Protecting the Monopoly

[hype7]

maybe the reason MS have stopped caring is that there is no longer any reason to care.

they offered IE for free in the hope that they could "embrace and extend" the internet - stopping all other browsers, and thereby stopping all other platforms - but it didn't work. so why should they bother any more? there's nothing to be gained by owning the users browser.

on the other hand, owning where they buy all their music from... now that might be a lucrative business to get into...

-- james

Re:Protecting the Monopoly

[Coryoth]

they offered IE for free in the hope that they could "embrace and extend" the internet - stopping all other browsers, and thereby stopping all other platforms - but it didn't work. so why should they bother any more? there's nothing to be gained by owning the users browser.

There is still a lot ot be gained from owning the users browser, because at long last real rich GUI apps are starting to be available over the web. We were promised web applications a long time ago, but all we got were forms and web pages that, while providing an interface were quite slow, and had a very bare bones interface.

Microsofts big new technology advancement for Longhorn is XAML and Avalon which, in theory, brings real fast rich web applications to the world. In the meantime firefox/mozilla is busy with XUL and related technologies (if you want to see what XUL can do, take a look at this site).

Web applications are going to happen. They aren't going to replace locally installed apps entirely, but they will fill niches with, for instance, powerful webmail interfaces (that look and behave like a local GUI), tax calculation apps, calendaring services, and all those simple database frontends etc. The question then, is who is going to provide the architecture for Web Apps? MS desperately wants to be the one to do it - because web applications are potentially completely platform agnostic. If Web applications are all XAML, then you need Windows to use them, and MS strengthens their monopoly. If XUL gets a decent foothold, then any platform that has Mozilla, Firefox, or in fact any XUL implementation (XUL is open source and LGPL, so whoever wants to can implement it), is a viable platform for those web apps.

What MS fears most is a world where a decent chunk of applications are completely platform agnostic, because then people simply won't care about Windows. Lose the monopoly stranglehold, and MS will be in severe trouble.

To keep that monopoly stranglehold MS has to, if not win this latest browser war, at least keep the fight going long and hard enough that Longhorn has significant market share (that's well past the release date), and hence XAML is the most widely available architecture via which to deliver web apps, before Mozilla/Firefox gets any really significant market share.

This war is surprisingly important.

Jedidiah.

Re:opera

[TheRealMindChild]

I don't think so champ. Indulge me, ever so quickly...

Make 3 pages, called main.html, topframe.html, and bottomframe.html. And dont worry. I took a whole 3 minutes putting this together. No need to thank me.

Begin main.html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Main</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<frameset rows="50%,50%">
<frame name="mytop" src="topframe.html" scrolling="no" frameborder=0 noresize>
<frame name="mybottom" src="bottomframe.html" scrolling="no" frameborder=0 noresize>
</frameset>
</html>

End main.html

Begin topframe.html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Top</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
function printframe()
{
window.parent.mybottom.window.focus();
window.parent.mybottom.window.print();
}
</script>
This page should never print<br>
<form name="PrintTest" method="get" action="">
<input type="button" name="printme" value="Print other frame" OnClick="printframe(); return false;">
</form>
</body>
</html>

End topframe.html

Begin bottomframe.html

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Bottom</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<b>Only this page should print!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!</b>
</body>
</html>

End bottomframe.html

Now I even made sure they pass the w3c validator so as to not get blame from having invalid pages. Anyway, that code works perfect in the top browsers... all except Opera. Opera, even the most current version (This has been a bug for as long as I have known in Opera), will print every frame, where as all other browsers will properly print their specific target. I used this perticular example because it is the most recent one I have had the priviledge of dealing with. Believe me, there are hundereds more. Ive got a notebook dedicated specifically to Opera bugs I should watch out for