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."

Comments

what do you mean MS doesn't do tabs?

[yagu]

From the fine article:

The feature which everyone is talking about lately is the addition of tabbed browsing to IE. While all other popular browsers have gone the tabbed route IE has resisted, ostensibly because other Microsoft programs do not use this. The change will be made though it is less important that in the past because Windows XP's taskbar is capable of grouping similar buttons, which effectively tabs a number of IE windows.

First, Windows products do seem to use TABS.... Right-click on "My Computer" (if you've actually left it named that!), select PROPERTIES. Not only does Microsoft use TABS to manage some of the most important aspects of computers, they've done it poorly! What the....???? When you click on an upper row tab, the upper row of TABS becomes the bottom row?!? Wow! Yes, Microsoft products not only support and/or use TABS, they were the first to make me hate tabbed interfaces.

Fortunately Mozilla and Firefox came along and convinced me tabbed interfaces could be done nicely and ergonomicly. I'm back in the tabbed fold... sigh.

Second, the claim that adding tabbed browsing to IE is less important because the Taskbar can group similar activities, therefor it already is like tabbed browsing may illustrate more than I'm able how Microsoft doesn't get it. The "like apps" Taskbar browsing has been the source of more headaches for me... I've tried using it, found it obtuse and annoying -- that's okay, just my preference and opinion. But, once again, it's been frustrating in a support role because you (rhetorically) end up trouble-shooting for users an interface poorly thought out and confusing to users. I find Microsoft's "easy to use" ideas sometimes baffling.... (how many times have you over the phone tried to walk someone through a WORD problem only to stumble when they can't find the menu option, and it's because Microsoft has unilaterally decided "hiding" little-used features under menu chevrons).

Other than that, back to the main topic, hopefully more energetic competition in the browser world will mean better and higher quality browsers, but if history serves, it will be a minor spurt in advancement until Microsoft has re-landed their stranglehold on that segment of the market.... and I'm guessing that won't take very long.

Re:what do you mean MS doesn't do tabs?

[th0mas.sixbit.org]

I agree 100% with parent, but just wanted to add reason 3 why the article is silly to suggest "Windows XP's taskbar is capable of grouping similar buttons, which effectively tabs a number of IE windows." When it groups similiar buttons, they're (at least) 2 clicks away (plus if you're like me, if you're stuck in windows, your start menu is autohidden, so it's 2 clicks & a split second wait). Plus, when experiencing ram-withdrawal lag, switching IE windows often becomes a 5-second hard-drive lagathon. Certainly a better PC fixes this but the point is on the same machine firefox's tabbed browsing switches sites on the fly without the lag. Any author of an article suggesting that the taskbar effectively emulates tabbed browsing has either never used a tabbed browser, or is a microsoft lackey in disguise.

Re:what do you mean MS doesn't do tabs?

[diegocgteleline.es]

but if history serves, it will be a minor spurt in advancement until Microsoft has re-landed their stranglehold on that segment of the market.... and I'm guessing that won't take very long.

Actually, the reason why IE has 90% of market share is not that Microsoft put it by default in windows. It helped, indeed, but there're proofs that netscape pretty much fucked it up. Basically, Netscape let them win without opposing resistance

Here's an interview from Arstechnica to Scott Collins, a programmer who was working at netscape back in the netscape 4.0 days:


Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?

There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a

Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.

Performance schmerformance, I want security

[3770]

I don't care if browsers compete with performance. I don't even much care if they compete with functionality.

I just want security.

Well, OK, I also want standards compliance which maybe counts as functionality. But no crazy "innovative" feature that they believe will woo the public.

extensions

[roman_mir]

it looks like all browsers will have to implement each other's functionalities. For example I wouldn't think for a second going to MSIE unless it was CSS2 compatible and it fully supported XPI extensions. I am biased of-course, since I am working on my own extensions (russkey, leetkey) so why would I want to use a browser that does not provide the same functionality? The only way to force someone like me to use IE is to make sure that the places I work at are only IE compliant and do not work in other browsers, because voluntarely, I would not use websites that are locked into IE only.

Re:extensions

[R.Mo_Robert]

Why would IE support XPI extensions? To support all of them, they'd probably have to re-write IE in XUL, and to accurately support all existing Fx XPI's unmodified, they'd have make it the exact same as Firefox. Does Mozilla support IE's Browser "Helper" Objects? Of course not.

But I do agree that I will never use or recommend IE until its CSS compliance improves.

P.S. - The links to russkey and leetkey are are broken (for those who need help viewing them: remove "slashdot.org/" from them and they will work).

What about Opera?

[Will2k_is_here]

I don't even like Opera but I'm very surprised Opera 8 never got mentioned in the article. NS8 over Opera?! Sub-par... sub-par...

Why should either side care?

[superdude72]

Why should either side care about winning Browser Wars II?

In Browser Wars I, Netscape leveraged its popular browser to gain members for its portal service, which was supposed to be the profit center. It also sold an enhanced version of the browser (or was it actually enhanced, or just licensed for corporate use? I can't remember. I never paid for it.)

Microsoft, similarly, leveraged the popularity of its browser to gain subscribers for MSN portal / ISP.

This doesn't seem to be such an important goal anymore. (Portals are *so* 1995.) So they'd be going to "war" to provide a product that hasn't proved to be particularly profitable. What's the point?

Re:Browser wars spilling into mail

[TerranFury]

I wish Firefox didn't get associated with the FTP protocol in Windows. When it asks me "Do you want Firefox to be your default browser?" I say "Yes," but I only mean "I want to use Firefox as my default http client."

It's a great web browser. It sucks for FTP.

When I type an FTP URL into the "Run" dialog, I'd rather have a proper FTP browser (like WinSCP, or yes, even Explorer!) than Firefox. I found the registry keys that change this, and have some .reg files that I keep around to change my settings, but they keep getting changed back. It's an annoyance.

Re:There will never be another browser war on wind

[interstellar_donkey]

Actually, your post made me wonder.

A few weeks ago a neighbor of mine called me up saying she was having all sorts of trouble whenever she accessed the Internet. I went over there, saying I could give her a few minutes. Her computer was riddled with spyware. IE had four different spyware related "search bars" running at the top (which is a record in my experience).

Rather then spend hours cleaning things up, I just downloaded firefox and installed some of the more popular plugins (flash etc.) and deleted the big blue E from the desktop and the start menu. I talked to her the other day and she told me "wow, my computer is still running great".

It makes me wonder now if IE might be losing ground not because firefox is better, but because there seems to be less junk out there that messes with firefox? (don't get me wrong, I still think Firefox is better).

Will lack of IE7 on Win2k help or hurt?

[Yankovic]

Caught this on the IE7 blog:

It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000. One reason is where we are in the Windows 2000 lifecycle. Another is that some of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.

Will the hurt (more Firefox on older machines) or help (IE7 only available on more secure platforms)?