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.

Comments

Head Start?

[__Maad__]

That just gives the MozBoys a year head start.

They'll need that head start.. Has anyone here actually tried developing for the Mozilla platform? It isn't a walk in the park. The documentation available on XULplanet, mozilla.org, etc, although improving, is rather sparse and frequently out of date. Even some books on mozilla development are out of date already - RAD in Mozilla (published this year I believe) has some wrong details about XUL tree selections, for example. One thing that the mozilla development community needs badly right now is a php.net, wiki-style website to encourage anyone and everyone to frequently update documentation easily and in small pieces. This is a tremendous amount of work, but I for one would be more than willing to contribute bits and pieces as I come across them. This basic documentation step needs to be done to encourage people to develop sites and applications for the Mozilla platform -- and to a greater extent, more modern w3c standards (DOM2/3,CSS2/3,etc).

I think that what the Firefox devs have done is an absolutely amazing feat of marketing and UI-cleanup, however, there is a huge amount of legacy code in web applications and scripts and pages in general dedicated to MSIE's own proprietary DOM, ActiveX, and rendering quirks. We need to bring those people to the standards-compliant world and, to a lesser extent, to the Mozilla platform.

I just don't see that critical mass in the application side of things yet, and that will be part of winning the battle. If XAML and so-forth start to make inroads, we are in trouble.

Re:Head Start?

[N7DR]

They'll need that head start.. Has anyone here actually tried developing for the Mozilla platform? It isn't a walk in the park. The documentation available on XULplanet, mozilla.org, etc, although improving, is rather sparse and frequently out of date. Even some books on mozilla development are out of date already - RAD in Mozilla (published this year I believe) has some wrong details about XUL tree selections, for example. One thing that the mozilla development community needs badly right now is a php.net, wiki-style website to encourage anyone and everyone to frequently update documentation easily and in small pieces. ... This basic documentation step needs to be done to encourage people to develop sites and applications for the Mozilla platform....

I couldn't agree with this more (and I wish that I hadn't already posted elsewhere in this article, so I could mod this up :-( ).

I have on three separate occasions started to attempt some some-scale Moz-based Web Service development stuff, armed with books and the lastest available info off the mozdev site. On all three occasions the result was the same: after about eight hours of massaging examples with increasing frustration, I finally admitted defeat and decided to wait until someone else has done something sufficiently similar so I could look at it and figure out how this stuff really works.

Now, I readily admit that I was doing this simply for fun to try to understand how things like SOAP are supposed to work in Moz -- so I wasn't in the usual panicy desperation mode that absolutely forces one to figure things out at any cost, but even so I found it disheartening that I couldn't simply read an article and example or two and make stuff work.

I'm not worried either.

[robyannetta]

For once in my life, I RTFA all the way through. Gimme a prize.

Microsoft seems to have fogotten that competition benefits everyone, including their own bottom line.

I for one, choose to use Firefox. Not because it's open source, but because it works for me.

Mozilla, Viruses and Exploits

[MikShapi]

A common line of thought seems to be that Mozilla/Firefox is more secure than IE, virus/exploit-wise.

This is probbably true, at this point in time.

A common misconception (which happens to be one of my pet peeves) is that this is because microsoft write bad code, microsoft devs are not security minded or are incompetent, open source code is better code just because it is open source, or Microsoft are in league with virusmakers, and various other manner of of BS.

Here's the news people: Microsoft can afford as good a development team as anyone else. They can afford to hire extra devs for their QA teams as well as their dev teams, QA devs that read code, something many software houses just hire techs that know mercury products for. They can afford to have two (probbably more) devs per line of code - one to stick back and fix bugs, another to run ahead with the next generation of code. Not many software houses can do that (thus affording a larger dev attention span to bugs) either.

And Open Source is as prone to bad methodology, bad coding, non-security-minded coding, bugs and what-have-you as any other code. OS devs make mistakes too.

The advantage MS has in many highly-paid devs is offset by open source being exposed to immense scrutiny levels by being open, but, having seen quite a bit of OS, this doesn't always guarantee someone will volunteer to fix it.

I don't think either has a check-mate advantage over the other in this respect.

Today, Firefox's security advantage lies in one single factor: The very little attention it is getting from the people who write exploits.

Once it makes more sense for them to assume mostly FF browsers will be running their malware, they *will* write malware for FF, open source or no open source. They *will* find ways to exploit FF, or any number of its (sometimes very-widely-installed) extensions, which do not undergo the same code scrutiny of the core FF team. They *will* find ways to exploit plugins, which are often not Open Source at all and are as exploitable as IE in this sense.

All it takes is a critical mass installbase for FF, and that cozy misleading feeling of security will fly right out the window.

My 2 cents.

Why do Microsoft need a browser?

[Andy_R]

I know this sounds outlandish, but given that Microsoft don't make any money from IE, and it's vulnerabilities are giving them a lot of bad publicity, is there any sound business reason for them not to scrap it (and the staff that write it), save themselves a fortune by recommending Firefox? This would also solve their legal problems with the EU over bundling.

Re:We're heard this line before

[Juanvaldes]

once the average grandmother is using a different browser (because the big media told her that a virus would make her computer explode if she didn't) it's putting the thought into everyone's head that maybe there's an alternative to MS, that they don't define computing.

As I read this it occurred to me, has MS EVER lost a market once they came to dominate it? Obviously not OS or Office markets. They never owned the server market. Sure they have had some amazing failures and other offerings that any other company would have had to give up on long ago. But has MS ever lost a market like this before?

The default homepage

[KalvinB]

Currently the default page for IE is www.msn.com

If some other browser gets the marketshare then MSN loses exposure which costs MS ad revenue.

FireFox doesn't offer anything that MS can't offer in IE. It's also far easier to recreate than to innovate. This is why they aren't too worried. It's simply an issue of economic viability as to whether or not MS will implement those features and push the updates out the door.

Re:I am worried about Firefox. Still needs work.

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

And the Firefox developers aren't even trying to fix the bugs people want fixed.

I've watched Mozilla development for a few years now, and I can tell you that this is actually a good thing... By listening to everyone you end up with (among a million other things) a kitchen sink. The developers must follow their own vision, otherwise there is no vision. If that vision turns out to be wrong, someone should fork and prove it.

Now, I'm not saying your pet enhancement-bug isn't important, just that the devs have decided it's not worth the amount of work at the moment. Remember that there are over 5000 open non-enhancement bugs on the firefox product only...

Also, the enhancement you're talking about is going to be very, very difficult to implement without breaking stuff. I'm 99% sure that it's not even possible to do it without breaking some valid web-pages with onload and onunload javascript (and no, Opera hasn't succeeded in this, see this for an example). Unless you have a solution for those problems, I suggest you choose a different tone for your critique...

Hope it's better than the current Longhorn Alpha

[GFLPraxis]

Microsoft had BETTER improve IE7. I have it in the latest build of Longhorn (it's still in Alpha so there is a lot of improvement room).

It's a peice of crap. It's got a few minor improvements over IE6 (popup blocking, more security stuff), but adds:
1) The buttons are different sizes and placed in strange places to make it look more 'modern', but all it does is confuse the person using it.
2) On the File-Edit-View-etc bar, the background is light gray and the text is white. Very hard to see.
3) Back and forward buttons above the File-Edit-View bar, everything else below, and very small.
4) No major improvements over IE6 SP2.
5) Slow page load times.
6) Bloat- FireFox loads twice as fast.

In short, the current IE7 builds look bleak. Hopefully they'll improve for MS's sake, but otherwise, they're really not doing much other than ripping off Safari's look and rearranging the buttons to make it harder to figure out.

Re:We're heard this line before

[killjoe]

They only dominate in OS and Office software. Obviously monopolies of that magnitude are not going to go away overnight.

That's not the really important thing though. The really important thing is that they have been unable to leverage those monopolies to gain monopolies in other fields despite trying desparately to do so.

They have suffered one severe setback another whether it's MSN, MS-TV (whatever the hell that was), set top boxes, MS at work, SQL server, IIS, NT server, Active directory, .NET, sidewalk, xbox, etc.

Some of those products are successful but none of them have achieved a monopoly which is the only goal for MS that counts.

As long as MS fails to leverage their monopolies to achieve other the world is a better place.

In time their current monopolies will erode and wither, all empires fall eventually but the big ones take a while.

Wikis don't work for technical documentation.

[KevinDumpsCore]

One thing that the mozilla development community needs badly right now is a php.net, wiki-style website to encourage anyone and everyone to frequently update documentation easily and in small pieces.

Wikis don't work for technical documentation! In order for technical documentation to be usable, it has to be clear, complete, correct, and current. That is the bare minimum. In order for it to be good, it also has to be consistent.

Wikis don't guarantee any of the above criteria. Wiki advocates have even argued against completeness because it discourages participation. They've also decided against correctness in favor of a neutral point-of-view. Many under-edited contributions from different people also guarantee duplication, contradiction, and inconsistency. If anyone tries to straighten out the mess, then revert wars are the result.

So take it from a documentation volunteer, the best results are produced by a central maintainer. The maintainer coordinates contributions and edits them with the reader in mind. The maintainer can either be a person or a team, depending on the size of the task.

Re:We're heard this line before

[Wiseleo]

So try this approach, I use it.

Setup an X server with a pretty desktop.

Tell the users "We'd like to enable you to work faster. From this point forward, just doubleclick this. We installed a new version of Office and Internet explorer, they are called OpenOffice and Firefox. If you don't like this, feel free to use your Windows98 system."

I had zero Win98 users within a month, and zero Windows XP users within 3 months. That's a 400+ user environment.

They still think it's new Windows. The management thinks that not paying for 400 terminal services licenses is priceless.

Firefox is in trouble.

[yakofdeath]

Firefox will do fine for the next year or so, but when MS releases Longhorn and its new browser, Firefox is going to have to have something that the new MS browser doesn't. MS isn't stupid, they realize what advantages Firefox has over IE, and they're going to improve their browser. Once Longhorn comes out, the average user is no longer going to make the effort to switch. The only reason Firefox is doing so well now is that IE is really terrible. The new MS browser will be better, and Firefox will have to get better also.