Will Internet Explorer 7 Have Any Impact?

John Seyton asks: "A recent posting regarding Internet Explorer 7 has me pondering what impact this next release will have on the web market. Firefox has fought hard to make a small dent in Internet Explorer's armor, to the point that we can browse most of the web with no loss of functionality, yet if Internet Explorer 7 recaptures a sizable chunk of that market share, web authors might once again create offensive 'please upgrade to Internet Explorer' web pages. Based upon the known features, what does the Slashdot community think the impact of Internet Explorer 7 will be on the web in general? Will we be forced to live a two-browser life once again?"

Comments

not this time

[yagu]

I think by definition since IE7 comes from Microsoft IE7 must have an impact. But I think it will have less impact than Microsoft's original reaction to get back into the internet race.

"Last" time Microsoft managed two things at one time by bringing their browser to the internet: they managed to cut off the air supply (never liked that group anyway) to Netscape long enough to make Netscape irrelevant competition, and they actually created a less buggy browser (Netscape 4, anybody?). I hated them for it, but it was the perfect storm that killed Netscape and made IE king.

The net scape today is too different for Microsoft to pull this off again. Like before they're mostly playing catch up... seemingly lulled by their victory, virtually ALL other browsers surpassed IE in features, and even in reliability when you factor in the security issues.

And, ahh yes, the security issues -- features Microsoft included in IE combined with their Windows platform to enhance the web and browsing experience were also their undoing. While Microsoft always had and will have their cadre of softies following and coding to all of the Microsoft whistles and bells, I think this time many middle-roaders feel stung by the crap that was IE and are more inclined to steer clear of gee-whiz stuff and cater more to globally accepted standards.

I can hardly wait to see what IE7 brings in enhanced functionality, but I can hardly believe there's anything they can do to convince the world they're for real this time. (Though, I never cease to marvel at Lucy's ability to convince Charlie Brown to kick the football one more time.)

So, yes there'll be impact, but I don't see IE7 as the bombshell that was IE classic (or am I just whistling past the CSS yard?).

Re:not this time

[buddyglass]

I can see IE7 having a more substantial effect than you suggest. You're right in that MS is playing catchup, adding features to IE7 that have been in FireFox for a while, but that's precisely why I think it may be impactful. Except for the anti-MS zealots and users of nonWindows OSs, why does anyone switch to FireFox? Basically it's tabbed browsing and a decreased vulnerability to malware and similar exploits. What does IE7 offer? Tabbed browsing and decreased vulnerability to malware and similar exploits.

Assuming IE7 actually lives up to those promises, what's my motivation for taking the time to download FireFox? Standards compliance? Nobody cares but web geeks. For that matter, it's often "easier" for the end-user to conform to the "Microsoft" standard than to actual W3C standards. Speed? FireFox's advantage is slight at best, and definitely not significant enough to motivate the "average user" to switch.

One thing working in FireFox's favor is that it can play in the alternate-OS space, which is theoretically on the rise. To whatever extent Windows the OS loses share to Linux/OSX/etc., IE7 loses share to the browsers that operate on those platforms.

Re:not this time

[Korgan]

You're going to have to download IE7 to use it before you get your hands on Vista. So I turn the question around on you.

Whats the motivation to download IE7 for features I already have with Firefox? Why would my mother or my mothers friends want to use IE7 when they already have the features of IE7 and then some (such as extensions) simply by sticking with Firefox?

IE7 is only going to get a massive user base if MS force it upon us through WindowsUpdate as a "critical update". Otherwise, I don't think we'll see many people bothering to install it. As a result, I would say that the adoption of IE7 won't truly start until the adoption of Vista begins.

So even if IE7 stays on target and gets released this year, most people are going to completely ignore it till next year anyway I suggest.

Not much

[jandrese]

IE didn't capture massive market share because it was way better than Netscape (although it was better for quite some time), it captured the market share because it was the default browser of Windows. The kind of people who actually download and upgrade browsers are the kind of people who run Firefox for the most part. I don't think IE7 is going to put a major dent in the usage patterns of your typical website, and most of its gains will be from the IE6/5 crowd as they buy new computers that have IE7 preinstalled instead of IE5.

Re:Not much

[drsmithy]

IE didn't capture massive market share because it was way better than Netscape (although it was better for quite some time), it captured the market share because it was the default browser of Windows.

This argument is common, but it doesn't hold water when you consider the largest growth in IE's marketshare was the period of time between IE4's first public beta until 6 - 12 months after Windows 98 was released.

During this time, the vast bulk of end users were only able to get IE4 from either an internet download, or magazine cover CDs and the like.

IE4 most certainly *did* "captured massive market share" because it was better. People sure as hell weren't manually installing it because it was worse.

Re:You will always live a two-browser life

[AuMatar]

Two browser life? I've been to a site that didn't work in Mozilla once in the past year. No 2 browser life for me, I just didn't buy the product at that one site.

Re:CSS...

[TeraCo]

The average consumer market doesn't know what a CSS is, and wouldn't care if they did. All they care about is whether the site looks ok, and if it does, they'll keep using whatever they're using right now. (Be it FF, IE5, lynx.. )

What will keep IE out of devs love

[secondsun]

Will IE 7 keep Microsofts brain damaged event model?
Will IE 7 implement standard HTML dom methods?
Will IE 7 implement standard HTML dom methods to the spec?

The answer to this is a loud no from the IE team. They have already said that they know their scripting engine is woefully out of date and have no intention of fixing it in this release cycle. Something to look foward to in IE 9 then (since IE 8 will probably be a fix release like 2 was for 1 and 5 was for 4).

Asking Slashdot what they think of IE is like....

[JustASlashDotGuy]

Heh.. Asking Slashdot users what they think of IE is like asking the Chinese
government what they think of free speech.

Re:Web Development Issue

[Gord]

> though of course you can't have both IE7 and IE6 on the same system at the same time

Yes you can.

Firefox has already served its larger purpose

[Nice2Cats]

Maybe IE 7 will win back some market share for Microsoft, maybe not. The important thing in the larger scheme is that Firefox has broken through their "mental" monopoly: Even the most clueless of my Windows-using friends has now at least heard of it and knows that there is a viable alternative to the Internet Explorer. They know that there is something called "Open Source" and that free software can be at least as good as what Microsoft is offering, if not better. Use any metaphor you want -- the wall of ignorance is breached, the dictator's iron grip broken -- it comes down to the fact that Firefox has made it just that more likely that people will even look at OpenOffice.org, VLC or Linux. Firefox could lose all of its marketshare and this would still be the case. From Microsoft's point of view, the damage is done, and IE 7 is just an attempt to limit its spread -- too little, too late.

Which seems to be Microsoft's company motto these days...

The days of 95% share are gone (for now).

[jmd!]

There is no IE7 for Windows 98, ME, 2000, NT or anything but Windows XP.

There is no IE7 for Linux or UNIX.

And perhaps most significantly, there is no IE7 for Mac. Microsoft has totally abandoned the platform. Apple having the balls the ship their OS with a non-MS browser, at the risk of damaging their sacred user experience, is responsible for the impossibility of another Microsoft lock on the web in the medium-term. (Though Apple owes a debt of gratitude to the groundbreaking Mozilla evangelism work which began the conversion of the web away from IE-only).

Every Mac that moves off the shelves of your local, brightly colored Apple store is not just a blow to Windows, but it's a win for the accessible web, the open, standardized office suite file format, etc.

In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.

Switch! And more importantly, keep OS X in mind during your UNIX development. (Props to the Firefox team; anti-props to the OpenOffice team).

Re:The days of 95% share are gone (for now).

[NutscrapeSucks]

wow a random apple advertisment moderated to 5 what insight

Apple marketshare has dropped for six years in a row. Since *you* positioned this as a pure percentage game (see subject), you must acknowldege that Apple's market is increasing less important to the big picture. Especially compared the heydays of IE5/Mac. Now, mod me down like good zealots.

Re:CSS...

[Toby_Tyke]

Microsoft's refusal to come closer to a reasonable attempt at compliance with the latest accepted CSS standard will always create issues. What's astonishing to me is that they don't seem to realize that if they did, they could walk all over FF in the average consumer market (more than they are already, that is...).

Oh, you're so, so wrong. I used to work for a major provider of online training courses. We made everything from accountancy to basic literacy courses, all delivered online through a web based interface. With such a huge varity of courses, I think it's safe to say that the users of our stuff made up a decent cross section of the "average consumer market".

Now, our main web page was not, in any way, standards compliant, and rendered like an absolute dog in firefox. (I left 18 months ago, since when the site has been redesigned, but I just checked it still renders wrong in FF) All of our stuff was only tested, and only ran, in IE. And do you know how often someone complained to us that they couldn't access their course using firefox? Never. Not once. You know why? none of them used it. Firefox is used by only the more advanced and tech savy web surfers, and maybe a few Average Joes who have a techy friend that installed it for them. (My dad and my brother fall into the second group)

So whats the moral of that story? Am I saying standards compliance is irrelevant? Not exactly. What I'm saying, and this will be a vastly unpopular notion on Slashdot, is that IE IS the standard. It's what 80+ / 90+ (depending who you ask) of web surfers use. Our site looked awful in FF. No one cared. Of our clientel, most had never even heard of FF. If we had rebuilt it from the ground up, made it fully standards complient, and IE had been unable to render it, we would have been swamped with tech support calls telling us our site was broken.

IE7 will be the defacto standard in 2 or 3 years time, and we had all best learn to live with it.

Don't chug the Apple koolaid too fast ...

[lasindi]

And perhaps most significantly, there is no IE7 for Mac. Microsoft has totally abandoned the platform. Apple having the balls the ship their OS with a non-MS browser, at the risk of damaging their sacred user experience, is responsible for the impossibility of another Microsoft lock on the web in the medium-term.

Um, sorry, but this is not because Apple has "the balls" to do this; they had no choice. Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around, so Apple can't do anything other than push their own browser.

Every Mac that moves off the shelves of your local, brightly colored Apple store is not just a blow to Windows, but it's a win for the accessible web, the open, standardized office suite file format, etc.

Really? Take a look at the office suit that Apple is promoting. Is it open or standardized? Yeah right. It's the same, closed Microsoft Office as Windows users are using (yeah I know there are differences between the Windows and Mac versions, but the point is that neither contribute to "accessibility" or "openness"). Look at the accessibility and openness Apple is pushing with their DRMed music format for iPods and so forth. Every Mac that moves off the shelf is a blow to Microsoft, but it's still a blow to openness (or at least irrelevant if it's a former MS customer).

In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.

Riiiight ... First of all, why do you suggest we "chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly" only to set up a monopoly around Apple? Apple tries to restrict the user as much as Microsoft; I will point again to their music format. Don't kid yourself; Steve Jobs would love to be in Microsoft's position every bit as much as Bill Gates does. The difference would be that instead of only controlling the software, Apple would also control the hardware, since they build a lot more than just the OS.

You are completely ignoring why nerds like Linux and BSD. They can have complete control of their systems. They can tinker with it all they like without trouble a Mac user would have trying to do the same thing (the Mac user lacks a lot of the source code to a lot of his software (I know about Darwin, but there's a lot more to MacOS than Darwin)). You can say, "Don't tinker with it! It's perfect the way it is." But the reason nerds tinker with computers is that they aren't perfect, they never will be, and nerds enjoy opening the hood and seeing what's inside.

At the same time, you are also ignoring why Linux distros are "not ready yet for the masses." I have helped friends install Linux on their machines. What are the most common problems? They need still want to play Windows games, or need to run some Windows program. A Mac will have exactly the same problem. They want to use proprietary codecs for playing videos and such. Thanks to EasyUbuntu and similar scripts, this is largely solved now, but no free OS will ever be able to ship with these codecs. Apple solves this problem -- by charging you money!

And then there are hardware support issues, especially wireless drivers. Linux has a tough time with this because wifi card manufacturers rarely make Linux drivers. But they also almost never write MacOS drivers. So how does Apple solve this problem? They don't! They just decide what hardware you can and can't run, make drivers for their small amount of hardware, and tada! you have no more hardware support problems, because you can't even *try* to support generic hardware. What's the problem here? You pay a huge amount for Apple's hand-picked hardware. If Apple simply sold OS X and you tried to use it on generic hardware, you'd have exactly the same problems (in fact, they'd probably have worse problems,