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Internet Explorer Not Dead Yet
turnitover writes "The future's not all Firefox, Deer Park and Camino, insists Microsoft. At its Mix '06 conference in Las Vegas, reports Microsoft Watch, company execs insisted that there's a bright future for IE. They not only distributed a 'layout-complete' build of IE 7.0, but offered hints about what the new version of the browser geeks love to disdain (yes, it will include ActiveX) will include. Also shown: tools to test IE compatibility. But with what? Standards or IE 6?"
Honda claims next year's Hondas will be the best cars ever, Magnavox claims to produce the greatest ever stereo system, and Goya state that their upcoming batch of red kidney beans are going to be the absolute mind-blowingly best batch of red kidney beans ever set upon by human sensory organs.
Why is it news when a company advertises its own products?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I don't know about a bright future, but it's not going away any time soon. I'm not sure how massive a screw-up it would take for IE to lose its largest customer base - the people who can't be bothered to look for anything else or don't know anything else exists.
As long as the Gecko crowd and Opera manage to hold on to enough marketshare to force web developers to use REAL standards instead of Microsoft's so that my browser of choice works, I'll be content.
Isn't IE still 90% of the market share? where did this subject line come from?
/. was completely non biased and objective
Sure I wish it was dead just like everyone else, but last I checked my grandmother wasn't going to download firefox so she can receive RSS feeds and use tabbed browsing...
what a bias misleading subject...
i thought
muahahahahahahaha
Sure IE isn't dead yet but by not working with standards, by being overly invasive, by being integrated into the OS and several other mistakes that they REFUSE to correct, they are doing their best to kill it. It's like they are doing there best to ignore the public outcry while cramming something else down there throats.
Sure Joe Average user doesn't care about these things (at least not directly) but he does care about the indirect problems that these things incur. All he knows is that with Firefox, he doesn't get POPUPS, it lets him modify it to what he wants it to look and act like and it's simple easy and fun to use. Most users completely forget about IE until another applications forces them to open it and asks if they want it to be their default browser.
Now even universities, schools and businesses are installing Firefox and doing their best to remove all pointers to IE due to security risks. And once the end user becomes familiar with the brwser at work or school, they will be more likely to download it and install it at home.
There is a reason why some sites show Firefox usage as high as 30%; hell even internally at Microsoft, 8-11% of people use a Mozilla based browser (based on stats from exclusive third party vendors to Microsoft).
In this case, Microsoft is their own worst enemy and needs to modify their business strategy or else continue to lose market share in the browser.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
My wife is already sold on a MacBook (she's waiting for the design to mature a little, we've been burned before buying the first generation of a product). I'm happily running Windows 2000 and Ubuntu and they suit my needs just fine. In fact Windows 2000 suits all my needs right now, however I am trying to get used to Ubuntu just for fun.
But conformance with W3C specifications guarantees passing Acid2 test.
Acid2 is not the ultimate goal, but it's a pretty and easy to understand by non-techies indicator of progress in HTML/CSS support.