Slashdot Mirror
Browser Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo
Tomas wrote to mention an article up on XYZ Computing discussing what is shaping up to be another round of the Browser Wars. From the article: "To anyone that has been following the Window's browser news lately, it is apparent that the stage is set for another browser war. Last experienced during the nineties, companies are fighting over which program consumers use to view the internet. For the average computer user this is a very good thing as it should drastically improve browser performance in a short period of time."
The battle is Firefox vs IE. The danger is of Microsoft winning again, but not because they have a better product.
At best, IE 7 will work only on certain versions of Windows.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Maybe it's just me, but I think browser performance isn't much of a problem any more these days. Standards compliance, on the other hand, is, and I hope that this is the area where a new browser "war" might actually help out.
We all know that IE's standards compliance leaves a lot to be desired, but the Mozilla crew's product leaves a number of things to be desired, too. The Acid2 test may be one example, but there's also other things like MNG support and CSS-generated content where Gecko is still lacking, so hopefully, the people in charge will realize that if they want to replace IE as the standard browser, they shouldn't repeat the same mistakes of not caring about the finer details of the standards.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Personalized Menus are a support nightmare, but lets not stop there. If you want to talk about an even worse default setting that has caused unbelievable trouble, what about hiding file extensions? This option was largely responsible for the success of email viruses that came as attachments named "big_boobs.jpg.exe". Despite little value to this setting and massive downside, Microsoft refused to change it for years.
Of course IE has had 90%+ market share.
You really expect people who don't even know how computers work to go out of their way to get a new browser when they have no clue why they would need it? Not only did IE come standard on all the Windows OSes, it also came on OS 9. If Firefox or some other alternative browser can standard, and people had to download IE in order to use it, that browser would have 90%+ market share.
Until Firefox starts coming on computers instead of/in addition to IE, there's no way it's going to have 90%+ market share.
I gotta agree. Enough already.
The joke is supposed to be making fun of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo but it stopped being funny sometime around 2002.
First of all, it really was only all that funny the first time it was done, when the creators of Mystery Science Theater used it as part of the name for their second (and last, as it turned out) annual fan convention.
Secondly, pretty much nobody actually remembers the movie Breakin' anyway, let alone the sequel which pretty much nobody went to. Adding "2: Electric Boogaloo" to anything the second time around is really just sponging off the laughs the MST3K guys got from it the first time. It shows about as much wit and inventiveness as repeating a Monty Python joke around a bunch of other nerds. You might get a laugh, but you really should feel like a complete tool afterwards.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Are we still talking about this? Seriously? Is there any new information here that hasn't been presented, seen, dissected and analysed yesterday, and the day before, and the one before that?
This reads like we are beating the same old dead horse over and over again.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
Last experienced during the nineties, companies are fighting over which program consumers use to view the internet. (Emphasis added)
I "view the internet" using ssh. Sometimes FTP. Maybe SCP. I do like to view the internet using POP3, too.
The more WE, as people in-the-know, screw up the terminology, the more the sheeple will too. How about we give them the impression that the "interweb" has more than just "that dot com thing"? Maybe, just maaaaaaaybe, if they understand that the INTERNET is a bunch of computers connected together that can talk to each other (and say MANY different things) then they'll also better understand security concerns, patching, etc. Isn't security one of the big factors of the "browser war"?
That's great for you, but you're not in the majority. The browser wars will ocne again be determined by populartiy, which is determined by prettiness, features, etc. Most people don't really care about security, and only developers (and other related uber-geeks) care about standards compliance.
I don't respond to AC's.
You seem to be overlooking one small point, IE actually deserved to win the last browser war because guess what, it was a better browser than Netscape. So with previous experience at seeing off a competitor and still having by far the lions share of the market what makes you so sure they will loose this time?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
How any time you actually have an honest choice of software in the consumer software world, it's such a strange and upsetting event we have to describe it by the word "wars".
Wouldn't it be nice if competition between multiple partners were the rule, rather than an exception so bizarre that when it occurs we widely describe it by a word normally associated with mass death and destruction?
Kind of a small thing, but y'know, just a thought...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
it should drastically improve browser performance in a short period of time
Bah. It's been how long since the first browser war? And IE is still a heaping pile of crap. And, what's worse, M$ doesn't seem to want to fix what they already have on the market. "Oh, we'll fix it with Longhorn." Yeah, so you'll have to spend more money on a whole new OS, just to fix these bugs that have been arond since at least version 5.
Granted, all browsers have their flaws. But at least most of these browsers have people working to patch whatever holes are found. M$ has been nothing more than lackluster with regards to their patch attempts, rarely releasing any fixes. And when they do release a fix, it sometimes breaks other stuff (a'la SP2).
Until M$ gets its head out of its ass, makes IE stand-alone (as in not intergrated into Windows), and gets with the program with regards to patching security risks in a timely manner, I'll stick with the competition. Firefox and Konqueror work just fine for me...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Absolutely Microsoft in my opinion has done more damage to the interest of seamless computing with that single "transparency" than maybe all other gaffes combined (probably thought they were creating something seamless!)! I've seen more hacks, more lost files, more corrupt files, and more hijacked files with the hidden extension "feature". Jumping from the 8.3 restriction in DOS (another thing Microsoft could've/should've fixed long ago with their bully pulpit but didn't) into Windows and GUI's and high powered computing rather than expunging extensions as a requirement to "make things work", Microsoft hid them! And so something that is ostensibly necessary in the Microsoft paradigm and probably should be opaque so people can be aware, ask questions, and learn what extensions are, how they're used, and why they exist.... Microsoft opts to make transparent!
You're right on about the filename.jpg.exe hacks.... but equally annoying are the piggybacking superfluous extensions, e.g., mypicture.jpg.JPG. Sheeesh!
"browser wars 2"??? Please, spare me I could hardly stomach the "first" one...
In the end, does it really matter so much what browser you choose to use? If the obviously superior features of FF are not enough to convince to try/use it over IE, then by all means use IE.
Why does everything in our society seem to have to break down to a coke v. pepsi scenario?
Either you can't draw a good analogy to save your life, or this is a badly-disguised troll. Hint: Mozilla didn't steal code from anybody.
(The article was pretty lame, too.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This is what caused the almost immediate switch from Netscape to Internet Explorer. It had nothing to do with the features of either browser. As long as these three things are true, IE will NEVER go below 80% of the web browser market.
You seem to be overlooking one small point, IE actually deserved to win the last browser war because guess what, it was a better browser than Netscape.
That may be true, but you're overlooking another small point. The reason IE won had nothing to do with it being better. Simply putting it on the desktop of every windows computer, and therefore every computer you buy from any major manufacturer, is what made it win. As long as this is true, there will never be another war. Even if IE had a timer to crash every 30 minutes, it would still have 80% market share.
When you click on an upper row tab, the upper row of TABS becomes the bottom row?!?
Do you think before you post? If the default behaviour was for the upper row to stay the upper row when clicked, it would cover up the bottom row of tabs.
"Well, OK, I also want standards compliance which maybe counts as functionality. "
You'll need unambiguous standards before that happens. Even today, no two browsers are alike.
"Derp de derp."
The last major browser war led to divergent implementations of HTML & JS which drove web developers crazy. The rush to more features led to frequent but poorly tested releases that were (a) unstable; (b) not secure. It is true, however, that it eventually led to a new generation of browsers and much benefit to the end users. One way to avoid the instability may be to somehow enforce and demand adherence to standards, but this is easier said than done.
This needs to be stressed. The biggest threat to computer security is not insecurity in the underlying operating system. It's users not knowing what they're doing.
In this sense, having operating systems hide operation details from you is a Very Bad Thing.
Also, it's naïve to think that the pure virtue of Linux and Mac OS X running everything as an unpriviledged user as standard is going to stop virus writers. You don't need to take over a computer completely to screw with it. You can install nice little keyloggers or remove user data just fine without having to become root.
Which misses one key point: I used Netscape up until version 4.2 or so - at which point, IE made leaps and bounds ahead of Netscape, was better, so I used that instead.
Explain that one.
You're probably part of the other 20% that would actually change browsers if you liked one better.
But also I'd like to make this point. When was the first time you heard of, saw, or used IE? The first time I ever used it was when I got a new computer with Windows 95 and I used it to download Netscape. How else was I going to get Netscape? I was forced to use it.
You have to admit having it on the desktop of every computer is a HUGE advantage. At that point it doesnt matter what anyone else does, its going to take over the masses.
MDI is evil. Get over it.
I like the Mozilla/Firefox tabs, and so far I prefer them over anything else I've seen lately. If Microsoft actually does have a genuine problem, though, I think it's likely to be that the tabs Firefox uses work inconsistently with most similar-looking tabs in nearly any other application.
In Windows, tabs are nearly always static. The user can always see what tabs are visible, new tabs never appear and old tabs don't disappear. This is a factor in usability because it means the user can expect that they're aware of all available configuration options.
In Windows, the concept of creating a tab or destroying a tab don't exist. If Microsoft could argue something rationally about this, it would be that the concept of creating and destroying tabs might confuse a user, if not in IE than in nearly every other Windows application they use after it. It puts the user into a frame of mind where they're being asked to do something that's normally done by a developer.
I still think it's a silly argument, though, if only because static tabs need have nothing to do with it. The fact is that Microsoft does provide dynamic tabs in their applications -- they simply look slightly different. Specifically, take a look at how MS Excel manages multiple worksheets (within a spreadsheet), and you'll notice that it uses differents types of tabs, where they're spaced along the bottom of the window instead of the top. This type of tab mimics exactly the type of dynamic behaviour that Internet Explorer would be using.
If Microsoft wants to be consistent with their other applications, they need only utilise the same system that Excel uses, and they might even find that people more quickly understand Excel as a result.
I think the unix method of "no extensions" is even more dangerous ... I get an e-mail with an executable file attached that's named "harhar.jpg" and I double-click on it in KDE and it executes because the file manager has detected it to be executable.
I have not used KDE but the scenario described has no relation to any "UNIX method" of handling filetypes. Downloaded files should not have an executable bit set unless the user has chosen to set it.