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Microsoft Not Worried about FireFox
didde writes "It seems like our friends in Redmond are quite happy about IE. According to this article, they won't be updating it until Longhorn. My favorite quote would be [We have a very, very innovative set of capabilities that we're putting in the next version. And in the meantime it's an extensible platform, and there will be a set of extensions that Microsoft does as well as others.] Oh boy, are they actually working side by side with the virusmakers and phishers?" That just gives the MozBoys a year head start.
Microsoft said the same thing about Linux a while back. It took a while, but they finally admitted that it was infact, a big theat.
they are probably worried.
Having an IE monopoly is a lynchpin in their designs for server-side control. Unless I'm completely off-base.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
As could be read on Joel on Software, Webapps are becoming major competition to MS. That's why a better browser is the last thing MS wants. Worse browser = better browser.
"Now that IE is used on most of the world's computers, racing to match the features of competitors is less important than providing a stable, reliable product, Hachamovitch said."
a company doesn't survive on market share alone, it survives because it stays competitive.
A company won't go far with an attitude that reflects the quote above.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
What does MS really stand to lose if Firefox gains something like 50% of the browser share? MS isn't making any money off IE, are they? I realize that back in the mid 90's there was a big concern that the Netscape browser could somehow be used to usurp the Windows monopoly, but honestly, is anybody still thinking that an entire OS can be replaced by a web browser?
It's always better in the next version. Never mind that the next version won't be here for two years at least, but it will be better.
even if they did consider mozilla a threat, why should they care? even the mozilla users will still need to buy windows.
-- Night Goat, a proud Firefox/Safari user
"Now what would make him think that? Why would anyone assume that Microsoft was working with phishers or virusmakers?"
Because it's a cheap way to get attention on Slashdot. With all the MS hatred around here it'll be assumed as fact that they are doing that. "Well, I wouldn't put it past them even though it wouldn't make good business sense to give everybody a strong reason to use another browser!"
Slashdot Editors really should enforce a little more professionalism. It's hard to take anything this site says about MS seriously.
"Derp de derp."
T. Rex, 30-some odd million years ago: "Mammals? Ha! I'm the biggest predator in town! Why the hell should I worry, I rule this place!"
Roman generals, c. 200 a.d.: "Barbarians, you say? We've got nothing to worry about. We're the biggest army on the planet. What could possibly go wrong?"
A Confederate general, 1861: "Those Yankees ain't nothin' to worry 'bout! We'll run 'em back across th' Potomac in a month, then we'll go back to plantin' cotton."
Adolf Hitler, 1942: "We can fight a war on two fronts! The Russians can't stop us! We're invincible!"
The Iraqi information minister, 2003: "The Americans will never set foot in Baghdad."
And the Firefox developers aren't even trying to fix the bugs people want fixed. Like the bug about needing a "FAST BACK BUTTON" like in opera (has over 100 votes at bugzilla and they wont fix it) or even a rewind.
The Netcraft toolbar type addon which tells you which country a website is from is a good idea. Another idea would be to allow you to report malicious websites and report on history of commercial websites that steal your money.
Microsoft is Install-driven - they know that however bad the product is, if they can get it installed they will always win, later. Look at how easily they got rid of Netscape !
A product like Linux is much more dangerous to them, because it fights back at install time, eg. Linspire or Linux server platforms.
Edmund
This is not a signature.
"At the end of the day, every time one of you sticks FireFox on some clueless' machine, and tell them they're "safe", you're lying (or just ignorant)."
Duh. Anytime anybody tells you you're "safe", they're lying or ignorant. There is no such condition as "safe". Breathing contains an element of risk. Opening your eyes is risky. Scratching your ass is risky.
So "safe" doesn't exist. Firefox is certainly safER than IE.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
MS has conned web developers large and small, not to mention web users, that IE is the web. It practically gives away front page and other tools so that web sites can be developed cheaply, either by the site owner or by cheap labor.
I am running into an increasing number of site that require IE to function. Not because of rendering or ActiveX, but because some small detail in the code is unique to IE.
As we have said, most users do not see the web, they see IE. What is increasingly happening is the most developers do not see the HTML, the see the MS tools. When you talk to them about the HTML, they look blankly and saythey just say that they develop for IE and the user is responsible for downloading it. What I have said is that IE is a applicaiton front end, and the developers are creating applications, not web pages. As long as we think of everything as a web page, MS is going to dominate the market.
The issue is not the broswer. Firefox is good. Netscape was never bad. And don't give the me the bullshit, I watched all the drama. I was running. The only major browser i have not run in Lynx. I even had my copy of Cyberdog. But firefox is simply a gimick to win the now irrelevent broswer wars.
What the open source community has missed, and what has not been commoditized, is the web page editor. Many of us on /. can code HTML in our sleep. We can write engines to code HTML. We can visualize what the markups will do. However, the people who make websites don't have the resources to code. They want to plug objects into the page and have stuff like search boxes, boiler plates, and images automagically work. MS has given them this power. Open source, to the best of my knowledge, has not. And until that happens, the pages will be written for IE only.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Don't forget, every Windows system running Firefox and Thunderbird instead of IE and some version of Outlook is... still a Windows system. They won't worry so much about the negative impact of the bazillion vulnerabilities that remain, if more people start using other browser and email software. Meanwhile, they're still collecting the Windows tax on most consumer PCs.
It might even be in MS's interests to sneak Mozilla a million bucks sometime to continue developing alternative browsers, because it would pay them back umpteen times in reduced support and bad press. I wouldn't expect them to do it openly, however.
I don't see how your argument holds any water.
Take Apache for example, just because it has a "critical mass installbase" doesn't make it any less secure then it was previous to that point.
Regardless, in my opinion anyone who thinks open source software is more secure than closed source is fooling themselves. In both cases human beings are writing the code. The big advantage open source has is that a fix can be released the instant it is completed. No formal QA teams to go through, no legal department to consult, no inefficient policies to follow, no press releases required to put a positive spin on a negative event need to be written, and no investors to consider, it is just done.
For me, thats where the "cozy feeling" comes from.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
> Today, Firefox's security advantage lies in one
> single factor: The very little attention it is
> getting from the people who write exploits.
People keep saying that, but you can't prove it until we get equal market share with IE. I'm looking forward to that.
In fact there are lots of other reasons why Firefox is more secure than IE. For example:
-- We use a string class library for almost all strings that flat-out prevents buffer overflows associated with those strings. My impression is that the IE code mostly does not.
-- IE is designed to be lax in its interpretation of the HTML, CSS, HTTP headers etc that it receives. Gecko is designed to be strict --- well, as strict as possible while making it possible to view 99% of the Web. IE's approach leads to confusion, which leads to security bugs. A great example is the raft of security bugs where different parts of IE guess the MIME type of incoming data and the guesses are inconsistent.
-- The IE-Windows integration means IE supports a lot of magic features such as special protocols that Gecko doesn't support or just blocks. So IE has more attack surface.
SP2 has improved things for IE a lot but they started from a bad position.
I agree that is a part of it, but certainly not the only place their advantage lies. Their advantage is primarily that they are under active developement and can react much quicker than Microsoft's IE. Basically MS won their browser war and forgot to maintain the product, let alone enhance it. Now they are scrambling to restart developement and like any good 800lbs gorilla, they are quite slow to do anything.
The whole "the only reason project X seems more secure than project Y is because project Y is more popular" is quite an annoying (and false) meme. By that logic Apache should be much less secure than IIS. Sometimes project Y is just poorly designed. In the case of IE that is certainly what happened. It does not matter how many highly paid devs MS has that understand security if the final project decisions are made by clueless execs who insist on senseless integration with the OS for purposes of beating a DOJ trial and other decisions that are simply bad for security. Those highly paid devs can only do so much good.
Finkployd
I agree with the parent of this post. It seems like poor business for MSFT to continue to run a project that does nothing but generate negative issues for the company. But this could explain why IE releases aren't being constantly delivered.
On the issue of dropping IE, I think to any geek, having a browser built into your OS is a nice feature. And one that shows to the end user that Microsoft is capable and willing to cover all bases. I think it remains more of a branding/marketing thing. Users feel comfortable when everything is from one place. Like when you buy a part for your car, you might feel better if that part was from the same company that maufactured your car, even if there was a cheaper competitor part that did the same job.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... I'm all for companies developing their own browsers or even different ways of doing the same thing but please please lets make sure they all follow some guidelines. As a web developer nothing is more time consuming or limiting then trying to make sure your web app performes consistiently across all browsers/platforms. Trust me, with the way things are today I think most web developers praise the idea of one browser squashing them all out, it would make life easier. (Let's just hope that browser is Firefox.)
-- Bored? Check out my Portfolio
Ok, most PCs come with Windows preinstalled. So Microsoft makes some money on the OEM license. Now, Windows ships with IE as the default (and only) browser, so most users will just use IE without even realising what a 'browser' is.
Because of this, lazy web developers, as well as Microsoft and their partners, will only develop their sites for IE - therefore lots of websites will only work with IE on Windows.
So people who want to use "the internets" will have no choice but to use IE on Windows. Which means more license fees for Microsoft...
They need a dominant browser to exist only on their own platforms to encourage platform lock-in. Why else do you think they developed it in the first place, why else do you think the various gov't agencies try to stop the bundling? Platform lock-in is anticompetitive but very profitable for Microsoft, and make no mistake they will defend IE marketshare to the death if it comes to that.
501 Not Implemented
Let me add to this.
:: Apps:WebSites) if you catch the drift.
In the open source world, DOCUMENTATION IS EVERYTHING.
Think of it this way... in order for an OSS project to be successful it either needs corporate funding OR good documentation in order for the non-academic types to use it and learn to hack it.
In this regard, I consider most of the official GNU projects, perl, and many others to be failures.
PHP has amazingly good documentation. I was able to easily learn PHP only having a basic knowledge of C++ beforehand using only the docs on php.net. They're easy to navigate, pleasant to look at, and readable by NORMAL HUMANS. Now, from what I understand, PHP didn't start out as being much of a superior language to perl, python, asp, and many others... The fact is that php got good because it got popular. Php gor popular because it was easy to use and the docs were top-notch.
Now move on to Gentoo (no. I'm not a gentoo fanboy and do not have any systems currently running it). By all means, the installation process for gentoo is ASTONISHINGLY complicated and difficult --- without proper documentation. The official installation documentation is excellent. It's no wordier than it needs to be, and should be understandable by anyone with a decent amount of experience with windows or mac os. Gentoo's large userbase can easily be credited to its excellent (centralized) documentation and community. In my experience, when I ran into a problem with gentoo, I could find a solution easier than I could with RedHat because the documentation was all in one place, easy to understand, and logically organized. By all means, if gentoo's docs sucked, the project wouldn't exist anymore. Everyone would be scared off. My only gripe was that when I installed it, they gave no warning that it would take about a week on my ancient celron-466. live and learn.
OS X got tons of little freeware/shareware/oss apps once apple got its act together and started offering decent documentation on cocoa. the number of small independent software companies developing for apple has exploded over the past few years thanks to this.
As annoying as it is, the M$ office assistant is actually a nice thing to have. It gives short, concise answers to everyday questions with word and excel. Great for people who don't have much computer knowledge. Although most people like them, I don't like microsoft's developer docs...
now all mozilla needs is decent XUL / devloper documentation. Last time i checked a few months ago, it was virtually non-existant which is a pity, because I think XUL could really take off as an entirely separate entity from mozilla. XUL + Javascript could finally fufill Sun's original dreams for Java to create applications which were small, lightweight, and portable. XUL is to HTML as Applications are to Web Pages (XUL:HTML
To get an idea of the power of XUL, check out the Mozilla Amazon Browser which is in all ways a faster and easier method for browsing amazon.
Also think of the bandwidth savings! Web applications would no longer have to serve entire pages for each request processed.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I don't think you should set maxrequests to 30. If everyone did this, 10 simultaneous users would mean 300 connections.
Microsoft wants Windows users to have plenty of reason to switch. They just want them to switch to Longhorn.
That's actually the biggest problem with Microsoft's current business model. With each new generation of their software they have to convince a substantial portion of their install base that to upgrade. If Microsoft releases Longhorn and customers decide that they would rather stick with Windows XP then Microsoft is just as screwed as if Linux had achieved Total World Domination. Microsoft's biggest competitor is old versions of its own software, and the competition gets harder to beat with each new iteration.
That's why Microsoft isn't interested in coming out with another version of IE for XP. Instead Microsoft would much rather bundle the new version with Longhorn in the hopes that it might persuade some XP users that now is the time to upgrade. After all, without WinFS, and with XAML being backported to XP there is going to be precious little that would persuade customers to upgrade. A new version of IE might very well be the biggest reason to upgrade to Longhorn from XP.
Same thing can be said about Apple's OS-X operating systems or linux distributions.
/.ers and techheads to forget that while MS is probably (cough definitely cough) not ethical, they are an extremely successful business. With this in mind, it seems silly that they would simply let Firefox run over IE. This browser war will be interesting, because it's no longer a matter of out-funding a company, since they're now against an open source model which doesn't really need money. I'd guess the IE developers are starting clean slate with the browser instead of trying to patch swiss cheese in an effort to hit FF hard when Longhorn debuts. What I find highly unlikely is that MS hasn't learned its lesson and are well aware of what they need to do with IE to get it up to snuff.
...or if its because FF isn't popular enough to get the attention from crackers/exploiters.
The same thing IS said about OS X and Linux, and although parent poster's opinion may be totally wrong, it's assinine to simply dismiss it (which you didn't seem to do, I just hate the raw ignorance of that stance). It's quite logical; the kiddies want to do a lot of damage, so they're going to code for the most popular platform out there so they can do the most damage. The whole theory really hasn't been tested too hard because there aren't many products MS competes against where it doesn't have a much larger market share. Apache is an excellent example, though. Personally, I think the whole reason MS/IE gets hit so much harder than anyone else is a combination of the two ideas; firstly, that IE was designed insecurely and this has plagued it, and secondly (but more importantly, IMO) that the kids are targetting IE users since they represent the vast majority and are probably not going to be technically inclined.
so why not change the plans of the devs working on IE?
I would imagine it's a combination of the numerous hacks they have to keep up with due to the obviously flawed security on IE.
with the many years that M$ "could" of worked on IE after its competition with Netscape, one wonders if its M$ that just don't give a shit anymore
I think it's extremely easy for
That's probably the case. Also keep in mind that the majority of FF users are probably more technically proficient than IE users, so clearly the softer target, for now, is IE.
PS: Can we please stop doing the "M$" thing?
Spoken like a true engineer.
You just led me to another simlpe observation I haven't made before:
The second *big* difference in this respect between IE and FF is the goal of the project.
IE is written by a commercial entity. Their goal is to get maximal revenue for minimum investment.
This is not a bad thing, it's the underlying principle of what we call an economy and the presence of which differs us from Afghanistan.
If they recon adding certain features to a product will not gain them anything substancial ($$$), they will not allocate the resources to do so. Period. The way I see it, it's totally understandable. I perform the same decision with my money every day.
FF is written by a group of volunteer engineers. Their goal, at this stage at least, is their product. Making it stick out due to is superb engineering.
For me, as an engineer, this definitely makes FF preferrable.
The point however is, this advantage also drops off once a certain critical-mass has been reached - only this time it's MS who closes the gap by becoming better rather than FF by becoming less secure.
Once enough people leave IE due to it lacking whatever it is they want, MS will reprioritize adding said features and IE will catch up, or, if we look at what happened in the past and the fact that the open community has more creativity and less red tape than MS does, they will probbably wait for FF to set the new requirements, then implement them in a robust way everybody from poweruser to 'Joe Sixpack' can use, surpass FF by a couple of steps, and FF will fall back to being in the same 2nd place it is in now. Then they'll lay back, and FF or its future counterpart will redefine 'cutting-edge' again. Ad infinum.
In short, this second advantage of FF is just as circumstantial as the first.
-
At Microsoft, "innovations" are new ways to lock out competitors.
Look for patented IE-exclusive features in their next version.
--
Hey you forgot...
4) OS-Bundle-Technology - the browser needs to be locked into the OS permanently thru a billion registry keys. This way it will prevent competing no-good browsers to install.
1. Because you need to have a browser installed with a new OS, otherwise it would be like getting a new car without a radio.
2. With that many users, you can't simply back out of IE support; it would be terrible business.
3. It would be giving open source a foothold and showing an incredible amount of users what open source can do... sort of like how iPods are converting folks over to Macs.
4. They lose control over things like internet integration in their applications.
5. They lose control over a lot of potential APIs/protocols since they wouldn't have their browers' users to use as a user base.
6. It admits a crushing defeat to open source. Shareholders probably wouldn't be too cool with that.
What you said makes total sense, but you have to look at it from a business perspective... Ditching IE would only confuse users, point them towards open source, and lock Microsoft out of potential future revenues related to internet browsers.
It's also important to keep in mind that from a non-techy's perspective, IE is not bug-ridden filth and that any viruses or nastiness that are caught at this point are just functions of the internets and not Microsoft's fault. Microsoft knows this.
That's it in a nutshell. Despite all the other endeavors Microsoft engages in, without the monopoly rents they receive from Windows and Office, Microsoft is dead in the water. They know this, and are doing everything possible to extend the Windows monopoly to the Internet. Once the majority of their customers realize that the OS has become of secondary importance, they're screwed.
For them it's about leveraging their browser dominance until the browser is fully integrated into the OS with Longhorn. They're relying on the ol' FUD train to keep things going in the interim. All declarations of confidence aside, they know that there is more pressure on them than ever before. With a year or more before Longhorn's arrival, I expect to see Microsoft talking more and more about how wonderful the browsing experience will be in Longhorn, while painting Firefox et. al. as relics of a bygone era.
Before long I expect to hear Ballmer say something like, "People just don't understand that the rich browsing experience built into Longhorn is going to make the tired old standalone browsers look pathetic!"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I hope your comment makes large on-line retailers nervous about optimizing their site for only IE. Microsoft could crush the whole on-line industry with one Windows Update. Funny, that.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
What you say? Mod me down as a troll, but even if people jump ship en masse to Firefox, that is not a problem for Microsoft. There are several reasons for this - times today are very different from the good ol' days of their browser war with Netscape.
.NET apps.
.NET web applications, from MSFT's perspective it is fine if people use Firefox 90% of the time and use IE for the 10% of .NET mission critical apps. As long as those apps exist, people are still tied into their platform.
During the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape, Microsoft's primary worry was not people using Netscape Navigator as much as the Windows platform losing importance. Remember Andressen's quote saying that when Netscape was done, Windows would be reduced to a set of poorly debugged device drivers? Its easy to say that was foolery in retrospect, but Microsoft was sincerely worried about that. As far as Microsoft knew at the time, Windows could have lost importance in the same way that minicomputers declined after the rise of the personal computer.
Fast forward to the twenty first century. Microsoft is having a crapload of problems with spyware and this product called Firefox is getting rave reviews. But the worries of the mid nineties are gone. The reason that Microsoft stopped IE development is because they do not want to see web apps get more powerful; they hope that when Longhorn comes around, people will write distributed
Firefox does nothing to stop this future. While Firefox is a nice app and IMHO better than IE, it is not pushing the frontiers of web application capabilities, the way that Netscape did in the nineties. As nice as it is to not worry about slimeware, Firefox is just enabling the same ol' web.
As nice as Firefox is, it is not enabling people to switch away from Microsoft technologies other than IE itself. People are not switching to Linux because of Firefox. When Longhorn comes out and Microsoft starts hyping
Perhaps at some level, Microsoft risks losing mindshare from Firefox. But even if this is the case, they risk to lose much more mindshare by acknowledging Firefox as an issue so their response is expected.
Because as scary as it may be, Avalon is IE7. All programs, including pre-Longhorn applications will run in an IE Window. Media player 7+ already does this. Avalon is the code name for the new graphics and layout API in Longhorn. All DirectX, GDI+ and normal GDI routines will be processed through Avalon. IE for the first time will be inseperable from Windows because it is the graphics rendering system. You can't run a program with out it.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...a lot of conflicting requests around: 'Hey, give me tabs right now' versus 'I want stability, I want a platform that won't break...
So, they can't innovate or add new features without unstabilizing the whole thing....
That's like recognizing that your product isn't that versatile or manageable...
You need to hear the whole reason for IE being produced in the first place.
Back when the web was new and exciting, Netscape was making waves with its browser. They predicted that web based apps would be the future, and all apps would therefore be client system agnostic. The head dude of Netscape said something along the lines of 'In 10 years, windows will be reduced to nothing but a buggy set of device drivers'. This pissed Microsoft off.
So they pumped huge amounts of money into IE to try and make it a better browser. Of course the idea of something being system agnostic really scares Microsoft. So to stop customers being able to just switch away from using IE and more importantly windows (the thing you give them money for) on the clients, they added a bunch of crazy features that would make webapp code that used said features not work with other browsers. Bingo. Clients have to stay running win/IE. One of these features was ActiveX which was touted as improving application interactivity.
So you see, this is/was not really about the web at all, but webapps.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
MS makes most of it's money from Windows and Office. If they lose Windows and Office they can shut down shop. So they must do whatever they can to protect the income from those 2 areas, and specifically Office because Windows is nothing without Office for the average user.
Now the problem with the web is that browser-based apps (think gmail) threatens Office and by extention Windows. We live in a time where bandwith is cheap and fast enough to run a high-quality spreadsheet or word processor as a web application. The ONLY thing stopping this from happening is the pitiful state of IE. If they made IE as good as it can be, they'll be opening the floodgates for web-apps that can replace Office.
If IE matures enough for this to happen, all applications can be web-based and run off ANY COMPATIBLE BROWSER on ANY PLATFORM. Thus I can move my grandma to Linux with Firefox 3.0 and she won't even know that something has changed, because she was already accessing all her apps via a browser. This can also happen if Firefox becomes the de-facto standard browser, and they start implementing all these new and great standards that's waiting to unleash the power of the web-app.
So that's why IE has changed almost nothing since the monopoly. MS realises that improving it is digging their own grave.
My company develops software for a specific vertical market. All web-based. It's great for our clients because they can access their data from anywhere, any time. It's great for us because we can upgrade and improve the system whenever we feel like it without sending out upgrade disks. 90% of all support calls we take right now is because of IE (spyware / 'special' toolbars). Lately we've been installing Firefox for all clients when training them, and that's helped a lot.
So all we can hope for right now is for Firefox to improve their browser as much as possible to try to become the standard (60% of the market would do it I think) before Longhorn. I don't know what MS plans for a browser in Longhorn, but I know it will be bad for all other browsers.
Saying "My web page is perfect because the validator said so" is like saying "My application is perfect because I didn't get any compile-time warnings."
Valid XHTML+CSS doesn't necessarily look pretty, and pretty XHTML+CSS doesn't necessarily validate. Likewise, it's not hard to make pages that look great in Firefox but not in IE (or, for that matter, KHTML-based browsers like Safari).
Lastly, the W3C doesn't have any "standards." It has recommendations. To test all the W3C recommendation support, you would have to test your web pages with a screen reader, a printer terminal, graphical and non-graphical browsers, and so on. Validators don't do that. They also don't test style, like setting appropriate alternate text for images and so on.
For more information, click here.
But the real question* is:
Are more standards suppoted? Does it fare well with xhtml sent as xml+xhtml? Does it support (more) CSS2 and CSS3 ?
*As far as my webdesigner mind goes... As it doesn't matter to me _which_ browser is dominant, as long as it supports standards fully.
... to make such announcements regardless of the real outcome.
I.E. when they hear of a competitor working on something they suddenly have an announcement that they are doing something similiar but better.
Even if they never come out with it the threat from MS competition can cause additional pressure..
In honesty, it is best to ignore all anouncements comming from MS, unless it is regarding current product that you can actually touch.
For the site you mention:
www.titantv.com is NOT valid HTML 4
www.titantv.com is NOT valid CSS
Validation of both shows about 50 errors - some of them very serious and obviously wrong.
FireFox isn't broken, some web sites are. You should be clicking the "contact us" links on sites that render badly, and ask them to clean their act (and code) up.
Don't ditch FireFox dude... more sites will work with it as time passes.
I would say *not* to set the maxrequests to a number like 30. 3-6 should be good enough. You don't want to hammer a site with 30 simultaneous requests.
Vote for global prefs bug
I was hoping someone would point this out. I agree IE has done things that are not correct. But the fact is a high, very high, extremely high majority of people use IE. Therefore sites are coded for it. I would therefore expect anyone who wants to make the better browser would take this into account. I'm not expect FireFox to continue with non-standard coding, but they should at least be able to dectect IE code and therefore handle it properly. I would never attempt to replace something without at least handling everything it can do.
As for broken sh*t, I'm just getting fed up with a lot of things. My PVR for my cable box (Motorola) should beconsidered an "alpha" version because it has so many problems (lock ups, choppy display, MPG like quality afer a few minutes of viewing). All of these problems are fixed by watching a time delayed version (i.e., just hit pause and then play as fast as you can). It was obviously programmed to prioritize the recording - which is the better of two choices. I just think it is unacceptable. My remote for my receiver crashed the other day and I had to remove the batteries. The first Sony VPL-hs20 projector randomly switched inputs. Had to replace it. It seems like companies rather just get a product out than get it working right. I should know, I'm in the semiconductor company and fight this all the time. Cars have recalls for things like air bags not timed right. C'mon - if you tested it you should have found that. It isn't like a recall where a bolt can break if x,y,z, 1,2,3 happen on a full moon. My Dell Axiom x50v displays lines in full screen mode during video playback. It does it for all videos. Therefore, it is unacceptable for them to say they didn't see it.
I'm a test engineer for a living and my job is to verify things work. I cannot get away with the junk quality I receive in my house. I think consumers should hold OEMs as responsible as they hold their suppliers. nVidia is pissed at us because we had 2 bad units in about 10million sold to them. I own 3 nVidia cards - all have broken fans. My brother has a new 6600XT - vibrating fan already. Completely unacceptable. There comes a point in time when Walmart quality is not allowed at any price.
Therefore, I apologize to the FireFox fans, but I am just disappointed in the product. I have high expectations and I hope everyone starts to as well. Version 1 should be the only one unless there are new features. We have to set a mandate that Version 1.1 is not acceptable. Companies should only be allowed to use it in rare circumstances. Nowadays, who cares about the firmware. "We can always have them patch it later on". Not if I gave the MP3 player to my Mother who barely can use a mouse....
Although I doubt they will follow it, I was very impressed with Tom's Hardware when they said the would not test cards until they are the final version. Companies only look at the bottom line. If we do not but their crap, they will find out the hard way. I for one will not by a hard drive without a 3 year warranty. If you can't give me that, then why should I even remotely trust your drive? I may even fork over a few extra bucks for the quality if it was offered...
Well, I AM a programmer (specifically a web developer). And I can tell you that if a website does not format correctly in Firefox, it's because the WEBSITE is broken, NOT because Firefox is broken. And, yes, I'm sick of broken sh*t (like IE-only websites) being released to consumers.
a) its not a fact
(because first you'd need to define superior in such a way that it was possible to objectively evaluate.. and we're talking about complex peices of software)
b) The things that keep people using MS IE are more/different than you mention.
For instance - I use IE because i rely on trusted activeX controls and seamless NTLM authentication as part of my job. I expect HTML to ALWAYS render correctly and I am not interested in changing my web browser version, or screwing with it's settings, or what have you.
At home, FIrefox is a refreshing change from IE - for many sites, firefox just does what i want - it lets me go to a web site without asking me lots of questions or doing things i dont want my browser doing. I'll concede that at this point, Firefox seems to have the home-web-surfer problem space pretty well under control (although the occasionaly rendering glitch is annoying)
OTOH, If MS could get away with turning off ActiveX and the other things in IE that the firefox nazi's always harp on, don't you think they would ? ActiveX is still a big part of IE because people use it. You might not, but you clearly aren't the entire software market.
There are not 12 editions of IE, each with a different feature set for different target markets. There is 1 browser (although you might consider IESE in W2k3 a separate "experience"). If business users rely on Active X, security zones, functional javascript, etc, MS can't very well take all that stuff out of the product because some home users can get away without it.
I don't mean to suggest that i think IE is optimal - there are plenty of things it could do better. There are lots of firefox (and other browser) users internally at MS, and the right people at MS are listening to what people don't like about IE. I don't have any more details than that.
Finally, I use IE primarily on every machine i own. I have neither popups or viruses. It's not like IE automatically means your machine is screwed. No software can be as functional and as feature rich as somebody wants while keeping stupid people from getting themselves in trouble. Firefox solves this by doing less than IE and by being a less attractive target for attack.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Version 1 should be the only one unless there are new features. We have to set a mandate that Version 1.1 is not acceptable.
BTW, that sounds like the Debian release cycle. You do realize just how long it will take between releases, right? Even if all found bugs have been fixed, the developers would need to wait many more months to make sure that no further bugs are found. This would definitely create unrest among many users. Would you be willing to wait a year or two for the next version? So much for the headstart that Microsoft would be giving Firefox.
And even if the Firefox team decided to wait months and months to ensure no further bugs, there will undoubtedly be bugs when the product is finally released. It is impossible for a product to be perfect. It can come close, but there will always be something wrong. Should not these bugs be fixed ASAP? Shouldn't a new version be released ASAP addressing these bugs? But wait, you don't want a 1.1 version. Ok, then under your logic everyone must wait another year or two for the next release. That doesn't seem quite right to me.
It's not like the Firefox developers decided to release a half-ass product for the hell of it. Why would they? They didn't have a corporation on their backs forcing a deadline. Of course they did the best they could for the 1.0 release, they weren't sitting around thinking "hey this can be fixed later in 1.1." They're certainly not lazy, after all many of these people are devoted enough to work on the Mozilla project in their free time. Its just that bugs are the reality in software development. We unfortunately don't live in the ideal world.
As a test engineer, have you always been perfect in your testing? Have you managed to catch every single problem?