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IE The Great Microsoft Blunder?
JordanL writes "Hot on the heels of the beta rollouts of IE 7, comes an editorial from John Dvorak declaring IE the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made. From the article: 'All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised [...] If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column--billions.'"
I'm afraid that its not quite so simple. You see, Internet Explorer is actually a tiny program, some 40K and did not cost billions to develop.
However, the MSHTML (Rednering engine, like Gecko), WININET (network client protocol stack), and other associated components did. But they are not there in vain. They do make Windows a richer platform to program in.
Not that I'm a huge Microsoft supporter here, but being able to pop up rich text (via HTML, not RTF) without requiring the user install additional software is a great boon to software publishers.
I work on an embedded device that can interface with a Windows PC for a user interface. The Windows application provides rich error messages (important for this product) because of MSHTML. It uses WININET to fetch updates from the Internet.
These components make Windows a better platform to develop on. And the work that went into them was not just to further the browser program (IEXPLORE.EXE).
And the Linux community has their own form of this (libcurl).
IE7 has been removed from the explorer shell and actually functions like a normal application again. In otherwords it took 10 years to go back to the win 95 model.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
"Burglars couldn't get into your house if you had no doors or windows"
Technically, that's incorrect.
Current exterior wall construction for a large portion of the housing market consists of (from the outside-in)vinyl siding, Tyvek vapor barrier, a fibrous type sheathing (sometimes no more than 1/8" thick cardboard), glass fiber insulation, and gypsum wallboard. All of these material are easily cut with a $1.99 utility knife.
You can get into most houses these days with a knife and 5 minutes by going right through the wall.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
And believe it or not, Dvorak really did whine about System Idle Process hogging CPU time.
Here is my home page.
I'm a Microsoft employee, so maybe I can shed a little bit of light on IE. I didn't work here when IE was developed, that was all way before my time, but from a cultural/business perspective, Microsoft is big on the idea of Ownership. You Own a project. You Own the code you write (or you Own your non-code deliverables, if you're not a programmer). If it's screwed up, you're the one person someone can come to and ask "How did this happen?" because you Own that item.
:)
Yes, Microsoft could have perfectly well bundled Netscape with Windows (or even bought Netscape with pocket change) back in the 1990s and probably have done so for far less than the cost of developing IE. I think buying Netscape (in which case Netscape's web servers could have become IIS) would be the only way it would have been considered. Why we didn't go that way is an interesting question. I have no idea what the answer is.
You may have noticed that Microsoft isn't big on bundling others' software, and when they do, it's always fully branded and user-transparent. I think acquiring Netscape is the only way anyone would have considered bundling it as the official Windows browser. Who knows? Maybe we did approach Netscape about either a buyout or a branding deal and they told us to get stuffed? I've never heard anything like that, and it's not often that a company declines to be acquired by Microsoft, but I suppose it's not impossible.
Now, combine that lack of enthusiasm for bundling third-party products with the culture of Owning what you work on, and you get why (in my opinion) Microsoft would not have bundled Netscape unless it owned the company lock, stock, and barrel: you could technically lay any security problems at Netscape's feet, but our corporate culture wouldn't want to. Plus, even if we did, our customers wouldn't buy that. They'd say "You shipped it, it's your problem. Don't tell me to email Netscape for support." Anybody's customers would say that. If you sold it to them, you'd better be able to support it, even if it's a third-party product.
Finally, there's a lot of "not invented here" syndrome that runs around our company. It seems to me (I'm fairly new here, so if you've been around longer, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) if we don't have it, we're either going to buy someone who does have it or we're going to write it ourselves.
IE has certainly had its problems over the years, and has of late been feature-poor compared to other browsers. Heck, until IE 7 betas started coming out, I even used other browsers unless someone was watching, and I still most often do because I'm very used to Firefox now. However, IE 7 is honestly a good browser. Beta 1 was usable, beta 2 is slick, and both are extremely fast, render well, and have a good, minimal interface. And finally, they support tabs! That was the huge missing feature. The first time I ever used a tabbed browser was the last time I could stand to not use one. It's just that much better. IE 7 is going to be very good. Far fewer windows users will find themselves with a reason to install Firefox instead of IE7. I expect Firefox will rise to the challenge and also become better and faster and it will benefit the industry as a whole, but there's no question about it: IE 7 is raising the bar.
Overall, do I think IE was a mistake? No. It's true that I'm a n00b here, but as others have pointed out, IE was a good loss leader for our business that allows us to generate revenue in other areas, such as MSN. Was bundling it in the OS a mistake? Well, that's another issue . I hear there's a lot of decoupling of IE in Vista. You be the judge
Notes: I don't work on either IE or Windows, so my opinions are reasonably objective, but they do tend to support our products over the competition, naturally enough.
Microsoft would need to maintain it themselves. So what would that really get them? The web is written for IE, it would be a major amount of work to "downgrade" FireFox to emulate IE's bugs.
Additionally, a major downside is that it validates FireFox, a competitor.
Text links were underlined because content and presentation were not separate in the original HTML. Now, it is. There's no longer any reason for it to be so, especially since by using user style sheets, you can make them flash purple and blue and outline them with a dotted cyan line if you want to. Further, text was underlined for links because while emphasis for the sake of emphasis is disposable, designation of links is not, and underlines are available in more places than italics or bold. Pretty much every glass terminal has underlines, but not all of them have both bold and italic - plenty of them have one or the other but not both. Text isn't shown in two sizes in lynx for the same reason - xterms and vt100 can handle that kind of thing, but how many other terminals do that?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To echo the sibling comment; cleartype does much more than subpixel font rendering. It also affects spacing and kerning, among other things. On a sufficiently high-resolution display, cleartype looks better on a CRT than the normal font-smoothing algorithm, but to be fair it does make some colorful crap show up around the edges of text. However, that tendency can be reduced with the cleartype tuner.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That is what this is about. He who controls the browser market, determines how billions of people view a webpage. If your browser is the number one browser, you determine which technologies make it and in what form. You are also free to include things in that browser to track what people search for, what type of connection they have, and you can even do targeted ads toward that user.
Don't be so short sighted to think that Ia web browser is a trival thing. It is the means by which a company can control one of the greatest tools of commerce in the history of mankind.
I don't know if that was a joke or not - but in case it wasn't, there is no connection at all between the Dvorak keyboard and this 'enlightened' columnist.
it's a karma thing. you don't get karma for "funny" mod points. so if someone thinks something is funny enough to deserve karma, they give it an insightful or whatever.