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 The documentation available on XULplanet, mozilla.org, etc, although improving, is rather sparse and frequently out of date. Even some books on mozilla development are out of date already - RAD in Mozilla (published this year I believe) has some wrong details about XUL tree selections, for example.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.

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?

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...

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.