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

Protecting the Monopoly

[PonyHome]

Yeah, Microsoft might take some REALLY extreme tactic to protect their monopoly -- like giving their browser away for free, bundled with the operating system! Oh, wait....

Re:Protecting the Monopoly

[Mattintosh]

That'll be a good tactic against Safari... ...

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry. :)

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

[salvorHardin]

Against safari? They'll probably just employ the same kind of dirty tricks they did against Opera, where they detect the user agent string, and send back broken CSS files.

Re:Protecting the Monopoly

[typhoonius]

Or they could make it impossible to uninstall, make it the file manager, require it for security updates, and make the help system dependent upon it.

OH, WAIT. The only way could integrate IE more into my Windows "experience" is if they soldered a big metal "e" onto my ass.

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.

Oh goody.

[psbrogna]

Well it's about time- we were damn close to having actual web standards. Glad we dodged that bullet.

Re:Oh goody.

[rootofevil]

standardizing on IE? as a web designer, id rather shoot myself in the face than be saddled with IEs "enhancements" and "features" thankyouverymuch.

whats so hard about loading a transparent PNG anyway?

Re:opera

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, ok.

Three Words

[cryptochrome]

Opera's Not Free

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:opera

[hype7]

Firefox, Safari? What about Opera! I'm sick of
being left out of the browser wars. I like my
mouse gesture enabled browser thak you very much.

there's nothing opera-specific about mouse enabled gestures.

here it is for OS X, supporting all major browsers and many other apps:
http://www.bitart.com/CocoaGestures.html

Cocoa Gestures adds mouse gestures to any Cocoa program such as Mail, Address Book, iCal, TextEdit, Safari, Chimera, OmniWeb, Path Finder, Stone Design's great suite of applications like Create, and many others.

-- james

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...

Re:opera

[Jens_UK]

Well, they are not enabled by default, but gestures can be added to Firefox: http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php? category=Mouse%20Gestures

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.

*sigh* "Best Viewed"?

[Anonymous Coward]

When my company started putting "Best Viewed in Firefox/Mozilla"...

Why do people continue to insist on stupid "Best viewed with X" labels. Your website should be developed to display properly on any standards-compliant browser, and not be restricted to a particular platform or application.

Why not put up one of those "Try Firefox" icons instead of implying that other standards-compliant browsers (namely Opera) might have trouble with your poorly-designed site?

Re:Huh?

[falcon5768]

For a long time you wouldnt be caught dead with Netscape on your computer... nothing worked with it because the web standards all used microsoft standards, not the properly selected ones.

But with Netscape turning into Mozilla and then being spunoff into Firefox, and Safari along with Opera and Omni giving even MORE choices, there now are more browsers that dont support microsoft standards than do.

Now you couple the fact that a large number of in the know people have now said to NOT use IE because of numerous widely publisised security breaches, and the once barely existant browser war has regained steam.

The best analogy would be the World Wars. It might be considered one long war, but there was a long break where hostilities stoped.

Alternative browsers? Who knew?

[The I Shing]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I still find myself having to explain what a web browser is to 90% of the people I know that use the internet. Many of these people think that their web browser is called "MSN" or "Yahoo." They pull up a portal site as their home page and actually enter URLs into the search window and wait for the portal site to give them the link. I try to tell them about the wonders of Firefox, and they stare at me blankly and say, "But I'm perfectly happy with Yahoo."

Re:Too late , too little

[Mattygfunk1]

When my company started putting "Best Viewed in Firefox/Mozilla" on the intranet . I knew that the browser wars are over .

When you said your company started putting "Best Viewed in Firefox/Mozilla" on your intranet, I knew that your developers missed the point of web standards and the browser wars entirely.

Re:opera

[betelgeuse-4]

Opera was around during the original browser wars but was never a serious contender (in terms of market share). What makes you think it is a serious contender now? Firefox has mouse gesture extensions (some people don't like them anyway), has managed to gain a reputation as more secure than IE and, as others have pointed out, is free.

Browsers for specific purposes:

[miscellaneous_havoc]

I have a purpose for just about every browser out there:

Firefox - Everyday browsing (Duh!)
IE - College webmail reading (ActiveX)
Netscape - When I feel like being punished
Opera - Searching for pr0n! (Those one-handed guestures. ;)

Just seems to me you can appreciate them all!
Make Love not [Browser] War.

Re:Three more (more accurate) words...

[ydnar]

It may be gratis, but it's not libre.

Re:Three more (more accurate) words...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a Google ads-supported free version of Opera and a paid for ad-free version. Either way, you've got a damn good browser

I wouldn't call something with an annoying, distracting animation in the corner of my eye all the time to be a damn good browser.

(And I have a legitimate license for Opera).

About the only website that the current version Opera has a problem with is Gmail, because of all its weird code, and even then there are simple workarounds for that.

It was my understanding that it was because Opera lacked the XMLHTTPRequest object, which isn't "weird" and can't be worked around.

So, to recap, Opera is a smaller, faster, more feature-packed browser that's on the cutting edge.

Smaller and faster? Not in my experience. More feature-packed? You haven't actually listed any features it has that its competitors do not. You've focussed on trying to rebut criticisms against it instead of talking about what it can actually do that other browsers can't.

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