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Microsoft and Mozilla To Collaborate for Vista
ukhackster writes "Relations between Microsoft and the open source community may be thawing. The Mozilla Foundation has just welcomed the offer of help to get Firefox working properly in Vista, and Microsoft has also insisted it will help non-IE browsers work with Windows Live. Is this the start of better collaboration, or just a sign the Microsoft has learned its lesson from the antitrust battles?"
Microsoft needs Firefox, etc. to run on Vista. Why? They don't want to delay Vista adoption the way Windows 2000 and Windows XP adoption was delayed in various companies, schools, etc. One way to do that is to make sure that popular applications run on it. Firefox is just one, and a somewhat minor one. Think about Autocad, SPSS, Photoshop, ArcGIS etc. These are applications that people and organizations really depend on. They want to remove barriers to adoption, make no mistake about it.
Having a Microsoft Support tech as a flatmate, and being involved in porting Perl to Vista, my bet is that they want to make sure Firefox works properly with all the new permissions and privilege escalation crap that's in Vista.
:)
I've so far had to disable it, since it's been buggy in the early betas, but with Vista installing things like Perl modules (in my case) or Firefox extensions or any other component-based installation process is going to be fiddly.
Micrsoft is taking this whole signed releases and security/permissions crap very seriously this time around.
Not to mention Firefox needs to integrate with OTHER installed programs (Flash et al).
And then throw in the aformentioned Windows Live compatibility work, and I'm not surprised at all that the two are going to be spending some lab time together.
And on the plus side, there's nothing I can think of that Firefox has to be worried about. I mean, it's not like they have to care that Microsoft might see their sekrit source code is it.
Probably around the time the lead Mozilla developer is standing over Steve Ballmer holding a copy of Ubuntu screaming, "The power of the penguin compels you! The power of the penguin compels you! ..."
:)
Good god that was funny. Bless You
As for "Is this the start of better collaboration, or just a sign the Microsoft has learned its lesson from the antitrust battles?" -> Why can't it be both? Because Microsoft's reason for existance is the same for all corporations. To generate income for the owners (shareholders). Not to be nice, or cooperate with marketplace compeditors, it's to push compeditors out of marketspace, and if your think they are going to "ship Mozilla *anything*" with Vista I got two words for ya.
Shareholder Lawsuit
Microsoft is doing this to avoid federal govt problems and put on a good show. Nothing more. Mozilla will still have to fight it out and gain marketshare the same way it has been. By being a better product.
Aw hell... Bless Mozilla too.
Troll? C'mon people, that was funny. Don't be so sensitive!
***Searching desk for mod points, only finds empty Rockstar can.
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
Sarcasm? If not, you've got a serious case of "shit in one hand and wish in the other then tell me which one fills up first".
"Bend Over, Clippy"
Just face it, they don't care about your browser.
As long as you use windows with that browser it does not matter if you use IE or Firefox. Better integration of Firefox into windows just means (in their eyes) that people should stil use windows.
Besides, it's not like Microsoft makes any money with IE.
Why not get Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft together in a giant browser conference? We know that both Microsoft and Mozilla have something to learn about web standards. I mean, opera is the only one to have successfully passed the ACID test. And as for microsofts intentions...who knows what they're up to? And to be honest, if it makes either one of their products better, then it benefits us to some extent.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
To rehash the old joke about banks and lending [1]:
If your application is a tiny niche application and the OS mutates, you have a problem.
If your application is used by many of the OS users and the OS mutates, they (the OS vendor) has a problem.
M$ have a problem with Firefox and Vista.
[1] If you owe the bank $10000 and can't pay it back, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $10000000 and can't pay it back, they have a problem.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
They want to keep people on their platform
As a business, they would be insane and/or suicidal if they didn't. Would you prefer they just said "We don't give a fuck if you use Windows. Go on. We don't care. Do it or not."
The IE mess is just today's EEE
No, it's not. If anything, it's Microsoft not developing IE at all to match current trends in, well anything. This happens when you've got around 95% market share; stagnation.
And Microsoft doesn't have to "embrace Firefox". They could easily just improve IE, which they seem to be at least making an effort at doing with IE7. And yet again you say how IIS factors into the equation, when it quite clearly doesn't (a web server is generally agnostic to the browser you use or the HTML put on it...the discussion is irrelevant, even more so to a home user).
And for christ's sake..."Microsoft will continue to develop IE"? What did you expect?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Give it another 2 years and it will be known as Microsoft Firefox. Everytime microsoft starts to "work" with other companies they end up buying them and using the tech to turn out a better product. Not saying this is a bad thing.. well could have went with NERO instead of ROXIO for the cd burning software. I think we all win in the end.
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
I think MS is trying to get all the browsers to support the new user security model in a consistent fashion... I believe that is the main drive for this and no it isn't easy.
What I would like to see is Opera support in ASP.NET's Atlas (MS Ajax library). Although I have to admit that IE, Firefox and Safari support is a great accomplishment by itself.
"We will add your technological uniqueness to our own."
With Microsoft as a friend, what could possibly go wrong?
IE8 now works better, and can be configured through
about:
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Just imagine; Vista, coded in Javascript and XUL.
Jesus Christ, the thought of that makes me cry.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
the big, fat, life-sentenced convict "helping" the scrawny new guy in jail find the soap that he just dropped.
You mean like they go ahead and put spyware in Windows when you install it? That is brilliant! It will save normal users two hours before their system is infected and it slows down to a halt. No wonder Vista requires so much ram!
ReactOS is such a good copy, it even BSODs correctly!
Oh, right, this is Slashdot. Where the only way to make it to the front page is to post stories that tear people apart and result in holy wars.
OUCH!!! The original articles tore my left toe off, now you've gone and linked to them further tearing off my RIGHT TOE! Thanks a lot buddy.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Mod parent up to +5 Insightful!
As someone who has followed Microsoft and Bill Gates intensively since before the release of Windows 3.0, I can tell you that's exactly what's going on. Microsoft is having a temporary truce with OSS while they fight Google....it's a tactical move that eases tension with the OSS community, while at the same time lulling them into a false sense of security.
MSFT knows that their tactical onslaught via the SCO trial is all but over and that the poor release timing of Vista is killing them on the desktop OS front. Not to worry. There's still Get the FUD on the server front.
Microsoft will sweet talk the Mozilla developers for now, but once they've either defeated or admitted defeat for themselves on the Google front, they'll be trying to bury Firefox. Perhaps Vista Service Pack 1 or 2 will break Firefox in nasty ways. Perhaps IIS 7.0 will detect that Firefox is running and start doing things to slow down the connection or break the page rendering. Who knows?
Remember: for Microsoft to win, everyone else has to lose. Especially Mozilla.org.
My blog
In terms of getting Firefox to run on Vista, I'm not sure what the big deal is, I've running FireFox (and Thunderbird) on Vista for the best of a year. Only that I've had real problems with is getting Macormedia flash to install and work (then again, I'm not sure I regard that as a problem :-)
The failure of non-free software development?
I'm currently running:
Windows XP
Opera
iTunes
AIM Triton
Visual Studio
Two of which work decently well for my needs, and three of which go beyond that, being simply excellent. I've never encountered an OSS equivalent that does better than any of those five pieces of software at their respective tasks.
Care to explain what the fuck you're talking about?
Le français vous intéresse?
Obviously it needed to be funnier, but I suffer from a lack of experience with Clippy. I use NeoOffice, which is kind of like OpenOffice for pretentious people. As far as I know, there is no NeoOffice open-source equivalent of Clippy.
I've seen Microsoft's Clippy, though. He popped up on my screen and I scrambled to stuff him back away again because of the aggressive way he diffused my dignity as a computer literate human being into a little puff of pink smoke.
Next time I will endeavour to make my comment either more clearly funny or more clearly a troll. Given the hair splitting, however, I think we should have two moderation options for the troll flag: negative troll (for bunk and games) and positive troll (for inspired mindfuckery).
These stories are free but worth money.
and is that not the POINT of open source? Just so long as you show everyone what you did...
The power of Beastie compels YOU!
See, now you've gone too far. It's one thing to suggest that Clippy might want to help us with common browser tasks like popping a bone, and it's another thing altogether to suggest that we might pop a bone for Clippy.
I'm sicing the DMCA on you for reverse-engineering my nausea.
These stories are free but worth money.
And then there's also the Linux user who has the sense to see this as a move to push their "Live" platform which ultimately aims to see microsoft lockin spread from desktop computers into everything from your game consoles and home theater to any and all portable devices you carry. While maybe convincing a few idiots that they're "being nice" or something.
No. Microsoft is running out of compelling reasons for companies to continue upgrading. Their entire existence lies in convincing you and I to upgrade even when we don't need to. A slow uptake will be agravated if big apps don't run nearly flawlessly from the get go. If your favorite applications aren't there, and the OS itself is really only a minor improvement of the last release, (Albeit with new eye candy) then why bother?
Microsoft is doing this to avoid federal govt problems and put on a good show. Nothing more.
Right. It couldn't have anything to do with wanting to have applications available for their fancy new OS?
Much as I (as a web developer) frequently curse Microsoft for the css-hack-hell that IE6's lack of support for CSS forces me into, the list of CSS fixes in the IE Blog (link in post above) is great news as it mends a lot of the common everyday problems. The fixing of the peekaboo bug alone makes my life easier.
And the news that the ":hover Pseudo-class can be applied to any element, not merely links" means that Suckerfish-style drop-down menus will work in IE7 with pure CSS and (X)HTML, without the javascript that was necessary to make them work in IE6.
the lazarus corporation
I blame Rozzin equipement
You must've been here a while, if you've only got one toe remaining on each foot...
Why must everything be a conspiracy theory? Firefox is a popular, widely-used web browser. If it has problems on Vista, that's bad for Vista. Microsoft is doing the responsible thing and working with developers of popular applications to make sure that they work well (btw, Microsoft does the exact same thing with many other non-OSS developers as well, but you don't hear about it because it's not news). This is not an attempt to merge the IE and Firefox codebases or anything silly like that. It's just Business As Usual(tm) for a company that provides a platform (OS).
As for your Windows Live conspiracy theory in the sibling comment, have you been paying attention at all? One of the main goals of Windows Live is to work on all "uplevel" browsers. For now, some sites only work on IE and some sites only work on IE and Firefox (live.com supposedly has support for Opera 9 beta releases as well), but these sites are also all beta at the moment (though unlike Google, Microsoft does plan to take them out of beta -- for example, both Expo and Windows Live Messenger have dropped the beta moniker). The Live.com team in particular has worked with Opera to make sure live.com works in their browser, and I assume part of this Firefox dialog is to work with the Live.com team to figure out how to allow a parent page to resize iframes when the content of the iframe changes (IE6 can do that, IE7 can do that but for a bug in beta 3, but Firefox can't. That's why you get ugly scroll bars on live.com in Firefox). However, I expect that discussion will be weighted more towards Firefox helping the Live.com guys rather than the Live.com guys dictating requirements to Firefox. The Live.com team has also hinted at trying to work with Apple to support Safari, but they might be barking up the wrong tree (should be talking to the Konqueror developers instead).
And finally, most "IE-only" pages are IE-only because the idiot developer used a browser check to limit what browsers and versions they support. Good web developers know you should never do this, instead using object detection to handle different browsers, but there's a distinct lack of good web developers out there.
to encourage adoption of Vista when it is released. Making game titles DX10-only (or limiting quality without the use of DX10), only supporting HD-DVD/Blu-Ray on 64-bit Vista, and ensuring software you use (Firefox) works. There are certain technical incentives (driver model, geometry shaders, extended memory protection) that coincide with the business incentive of encouraging Vista adoption with some of these so it isn't cut-and-dry, but Microsoft is eager to see as fast or faster adoption of Vista than it had with XP.
Xbox Live is going to be a pay service. So why if someone who uses Firefox can't access their system would they give microsoft money.
Easy answer? get Firefox to work with Xbox Live so everyone can give Microsoft money.
Hmm, why do I get the feeling that I have read this news before?
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Anybody have anything constructive to add to this?
Maybe they're planning on inviting them all out to Washington for a little hunting with Dick Cheney?
Because then they'd have to grow a mustache and drive a van and walk around in a robe all day.
To shreds you say...
With vista coming out soon, 2007 may be the year of desktop windows.
Badass Resumes
Where have i heard of MS doing this before??? oh yeah, when they told Steve Jobs from apple they wanted to collaborate with them against big brother (IBM) and ended up making windows 1.0
I think it's a sign that the developers in Microsoft are being more open. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing they've always wanted to be more open, but were prevented by upper management. But now they have blogs, videos (channel 9) and more (coding4fun). And I'm guessing it was the developers who pushed for the express editions to be free.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Well, that is a story about the government repression of science. Sounds like both "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters". I agree that summaries shouldn't add unneeded "tension" to act as "commentary", but you seem to be saying that Slashdot should only cover non-controvertial topics, like ponies or something.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
It's always nice to dream, but I predict hell will become a ski resort for flying pigs beforehand.
But what happened after Microsoft Won, was most developers just designed their pages to work with most people and reserved the Microsoft only crap to the intranet, for for the internet pages they used more compatible technology.
Out of curiousity, what are you basing that on?
Every web project I've worked on has had "Must render correctly in IE" as, by far, the biggest priority. Some of the clients also cared that it run correctly in Netscape/FF; most didn't. (None even knew what Opera was.) Most of those were non-intranet sites aimed directly at customers.
It's possible that the clients I worked for in that period were just bizarre anomalies, but I tend to doubt it. The general opinion of said clients has been that whatever IE does is the standard, and if FF doesn't render a page "correctly" that renders in IE "correctly", FF is broken. They either didn't know what standards groups had said, or just didn't give a damn. Market forces are their standards.
I'm guessing that as FF gains market share, most new projects care about correct rendering in FF -- but no serious commercial website development project is going to say "75% of our potential customers can't buy something on our site because it renders funky in IE? Well, screw them. They should change browsers."
Anakin be damned, there is no returning from the Dark Side.
I would just like to point out that Firefox works _right now_ with the Vista beta... it was one of the first things I installed (as is always the case)....
As for working with Live... isn't that Microsofts problem? Make them code to the standard like the rest of us are...
Friedmud
Why does the the make of any OS need to work with the fairly normal client applications to make them work on the OS? Shouldn't there be a documented API which the developers can follow? Isn't that part of the definition of being an operating system?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Ehh, I don't know about that.
What has Microsoft really gained by crushing Netscape and forcing users to use their free in-house solution? Nothing really. If anything IE has been a money pit for MS.
I imagine MS once viewed IE has a gateway to Windows specific web content. I've worked in a few environments where we needed Windows to access business related web sites that relied upon stupid MS JScript idiosyncrasies. Yet, those sites had content developed by MS, and MS could've very well secured a Windows platform requirement another way.
MS has seemingly given up their browser crusade. IE has been a horrible product for MS. It's sucks up development resources and has no sticker price. Moreover, it's constantly the cause of litigation, bad PR, and security problems. What is sooo valuable that it's capable of offsetting all of those problems? It looks as if MS realizes this now.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
And just what does this say to you?
What it says to me is that Vista is very different from 95/98/ME/2K/XP, and a whole lot of other existing applications may not work on it as expected. FF problems should hardly be news, however, given how long Vista betas have been out. There's nothing in the beta tester agreement prohibiting using FF on Vista, is there?
Now if they want to get Windows Update working through FF, then it might become interesting.
Unless MS is trying to avoid a(nother) lawsuit that might claim they intentionally broke their largest browser competitor. This has been rumored to have happened before with other apps.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Microsoft is doing this to avoid federal govt problems and put on a good show"
No they're not. They're doing it because they think that if they do, they'll get access to the code, idiots.
"Because Microsoft's reason for existance is the same for all corporations"
To sit in their big corporation buildings with all their money, and be all corporationy... and um... err... global warming!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Definitely not. IE means they get to put the word Microsoft in the *application titlebar* of every web app running on it (quite a few, believe me), and every website people look at using it. The words "Microsoft Internet" being drilled subconsciously into the minds of everyone using it. That's a huge advantage they're not gonna wanna get rid of.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
My biggest fan tells me:
Microsoft doesn't have to "embrace Firefox". They could easily just improve IE, which they seem to be at least making an effort at doing with IE7.
jb, I hope you use IE7 on Vista and sleep on this. The rest of us will go on living in comfort.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Dude there's only one toe on each foot, it's supported by pinkies and piggies.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Firefox 1.5.0.6 crashes on Windows XP. It crashes on Linux. It crashes everywhere.
(Yes, it crashed when I tried to reply to your comment...)
If you have a few spare days, compile Firefox with debug warnings enabled. Then run it from the commandline... then count the fatal errors that pile up before a window even shows up on screen. From what I understand, Vista is less tolerant of bad programming, buffer overflows, etc. Fixinf FF to work with Vista probably means fixing those problems they've been ignoring.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
MS is making a token move towards web standards (yes, they have an impressive list of fixes, but there are still another magnitude of quirks still around) to say just that 'we care about web standards, don't leave yet', in hopes that their floundering will keep people from jumping ship.
Don't expect anything near real standards support until IE8.
Heck, I wouldn't mind HTML4 support, which is still lacking in quite a few areas. And no, I'm not talking about data urls.
it will help non-IE browsers work with Windows Live
Uhm, if they focus on writing to the spec and making their browser work to the spec, this should not be an issue. Kinda like offering a plumbing company help getting their standard threaded pipes to *work* with your new custom thread that you gave away to everyone for free when they bought a sink. The order implies the non-IE browsers have the problem, but I have a feeling it is the other way around....
it will help Windows Live work with non-IE browsers
They use IE/trident as the foundations for more than just the standard web browser. They've incorporated it into other multiple products as a foundation.
Use IE? Fuck no. Firefox for me, ta. I'm just pointing out that, for the first time in as many years, MS seems to have realised that IE is a POS and is working towards fixing that.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
First, let me be clear that I was not trying to suggest anything of a conspiracy between Microsoft and Mozilla. I don't really know where you got that from. My question falls out of previous posters who noted that Firefox installs fine on the Vista Betas and that Microsoft does a lot of non-standard things in their browser. The non-standard issue can make pages targeted at IE incompatable with Firefox and the like.
The windows live question is along the same lines as the first with the added suggestion that this might help microsoft cya against lawsuits.
If the "IE only" pages were the sole result of poor programing and testing on the developers part, then why would microsoft care about backwards compatability. I'm not suggesting that developers shouldn't be more responisble in creating pages that can be accessed by everybody that should be able to access them, but that a part of the responsability does fall onto microsoft for not adhearing to the standards strictly enough.
Another quality post from twitter!
Microsoft will certainly get money for Vista from new computers; however, those copies of Windows are likely to have lower margins, and whats more, a copy of Vista probably won't cost that much more than a copy of XP today, so they aren't going to make a huge killing out of that. They'd certainly want a lot more people to simply shell out $100 for an OS upgrade to the average (Home-equivalent) Vista version. If they don't have developers on their side who are willing to make use of cool Vista features, those upgrades may not happen. This may also be a nudge from Microsoft to try and ensure that new software is "best" run on Vista (hopefully with OSS it won't REQUIRE Vista to run) so that people with old versions of the OS upgrade. We've seen this a lot with Apple, they make sure they release a lot of new APIs with a new OS so that developers start using those right away. Leopard's preview didn't go down very well with users, but all the developers are gaga over it - because of Core Animation, Time Machine APIs and the like. All that translates to a lot of upgrade money (which is the ONLY way that Apple actually makes direct cash off its OS), because one year down the line a lot of cool apps will require Leopard to run at their best.
I don't want to read
Really think microsoft doesn't want to support IE any longer, its costs them tens of millions of dollars and makes them 0 cash. Look at their products like frontpage and asp.net, recent versions are more compatible with non ie browsers. I think ms finally realized they can't lock in the browser market and now just want to dump the ie money sink.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
The "Extend" in this sequence is extending the Microsoft product to be incompatible with the ones following the standard that they claim to have "embraced". I don't see what you are suggesting here, a Microsoft FF fork? You must be thinking of the "announce partnership, steal ideas, end partnership" gameplan, which won't work either, unless Microsoft need help downloading a source tarball.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
I have done, they gave me free copies of everything I need. But don't check, because they'll deny it because they don't want to do that for everyone. Oh, and I lost the bit of paper that said I could have it all for free. And I don't have the CDs because they just said I could download the iso's off the internet and it wouldn't be a problem.
Really!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Oh great, now we have to close some doors, because every time God opens a Windows...
The code! they need the code! Maibe they could just download it, as its Free... but no, its easier to make it look like a plot to reb firefox.
Dont talk to me about life!
Vista. Coded in Lisp. Embeded in Emacs, which is running as a Firefox extension.
Ladies and gentleman, that sound you heard was jb's head exploding.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...like the minds of 80% of slashdot, reading the posts on here... be careful, you'll get shot saying things like that around here (as I'm about to with 'flamebait' and 'troll')
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Sorry, I must've projected all of the other conspiracy theory posts onto yours. As I understand it, and I've not used Vista yet so I may be wrong, the current Firefox 2 betas don't work on Vista, and the Firefox 1.5.x branch may end up with some appcompat tweaking behind the scenes by Vista. I assume the former will be the meat of the talks, figuring out why Firefox 2 doesn't work. The latter may be a smaller part, getting 1.5.x updated so that it won't need to go through a round of appcompat on first run.
I should clarify. Most "IE-only" pages are that way for one of two reasons: either they explicitly check UA strings and block non-IE (bad developer!), or they use IE-specific bits and pieces like ActiveX controls without an equivalent plugin for Firefox (bad developer, but usually not quite as bad since this kind of thing tends to happen only on intranets). "Compatibility" usually revolves around layout and rendering issues. IE6 obviously had some major problems with layout (understatement!), and the IE7 team is trying to strike a balance between not horribly breaking sites that try to work around IE6 shortcomings (some misalignment and such is okay, but missing or unusable UI elements are not) and doing things better in IE7. An example would be alpha transparency on PNGs. IE6 could do it through a filter hack. IE7 can do it natively. IE7 will still support the filter hack, though. However, if a website is doing a browser check and blocks non-IE, there's nothing IE7 can do about that.
I believe most of the Windows Live sites are still doing a browser check (bad!), but they're actively supporting Firefox. Most of this comes through the use of the Atlas framework, which does target Firefox as well as IE (and should also work on Opera and possibly Safari/Konq).
To who?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
While I agree that political stuff is mostly time-wasting and posturing and calling the other guy names - the outcomes of judicial rulings, lawsuits, military actions, and administration positions are things that matter.
/. take? Not as much.
They affect us every single day, and the lively (if sometimes one-sided) discussions about them help us all understand the issues of the day. And even if I only get to read one side of the trollbait debate, it still helps me to coalesce my own positions on matters.
Can I read about them on fark or digg? Yes. Do I enjoy their take on it vs the
Many of the political stories have a direct effect on our technology and the movement of society around science. See : stem cells, wiretapping fiber optics, electronic voting machines, media manipulation of photographs & video - both pro & anti Western stance, global warming, fossil fuel efficiency, and the list goes on.
Flame wars, ignorance, and just plain shouting are a PITA no matter what site posts it, and this one is no exception.
If Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are the Hiroshi Yamauchi of Microsoft, I'd love to see the Satoru Iwata of Microsoft come forward and start running the company -- someone who's all about innovation, friendliness, working with third-parties of every country, and all about perfection.
Userfriendly is years ahead of you :) http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990404
"Maibe they could just download it, as its Free
shh, this is funnier to watch
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Except Apple and Google. Those two companies only do good things. Especially Google, they have a 'do no evil' mantra. That is how you know they are serious about it!
it's in the embrace stage.
"Piter, too, is dead."
MS is making a token move towards web standards (yes, they have an impressive list of fixes, but there are still another magnitude of quirks still around) to say just that 'we care about web standards, don't leave yet', in hopes that their floundering will keep people from jumping ship.
Wow! We have mindreaders here on Slashdot! It's good to know that at least some of the posters here have the ESP necessary to divine the motives behind other people's actions.
The Big News Page
>>Is this the start of better collaboration, or just a sign the Microsoft has learned its lesson from the antitrust battles?
>And why can't it be both?
I won't go so far as to say "can't," but... I've yet to hear of any Microsoft "collaboration" in which MS hasn't had a knife ready for the collaborator's back--vide Stac, Go Corporation, etc.--and, while David Hume did argue against induction (in the non-mathematical sense), to some extent it has, you should pardon the expression, worked so far. Or, as that great philosopher Ring Lardner put it, "The race may not always be to the swift, nor victory to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
In brief: because past experience has shown that it will be neither.
http://www.reactos.org/?
Oh, right, this is Slashdot. Where the only way to make it to the front page is to post stories that tear people apart and result in holy wars MS FANBOY SUXXORS!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Or maby simply Micro$oft is like the borg they will add Mozzilla to their collective. Or better yet Micro$oft recognizes their competition and wants to show good pr.
Fry: It's all lies, every word of it! Microsoft hasn't learned a lesson, there wasn't a antitrust "battle", this isn't a sign and since when have they been a the?
How about the Mozilla crew show MS how make a standards compliant fucking browser.
Sorry for the expletive, but shit, man, how hard can it possibly be to not use some fucked up proprietary tags and actually render standards-based code correctly?!?!
You're spot on.
Microsoft plays nice like a python.
When mice are introduced to the snake the snake doesn't do anything to them.
It's later, when the snake becomes hungry and the mice complacent, that one-by-one the mice are ingested.
Humans might be smarter than mice, but groups of humans and their tasty ideas/artful works are corporately edible.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
I don't doubt that one bit, but it's good to know that web standards are now seen as important enough to make MS make some effort to move in that direction, whether that move is token or otherwise.
We now know that pressure works, and while I'll probably never use IE as my personal browser of choice, MS's move towards eradicating these common CSS bugs and implementing (some) CSS standards makes my job a hell of a lot easier.
the lazarus corporation
If Firefox does collaborate, what will they do to avoid setting themselves up for an IP lawsuit?
Um... There's this browser called IE, I'll assume you're familiar with its history.
Microsoft can obviously support a standard, extend that standard, and then refuse to fully support future versions of the standard in favor of their proprietary extensions. If they hadn't dropped the security ball and stopped development for a while around IE 6, they'd probably have a monopoly on web-browsers *and* operating systems right now. (Some would argue they do anyways, but the browser war appears to be coming back into full swing.)
Heck, the whole push for a "standard" is a huge win for Microsoft in that they've fought that battle before (and quite often won, Java being the only exception that springs to mind).
What makes you think the ODF standard is any different than all the others. From what I see it looks a lot like w3c stuff like HTML, and not nearly as controlled as Java was. (Sun's clenched fist is what beat Microsoft down on that front and I don't see equivalent protections in ODF.)
Word being able to load/save ODF format is not the same as Word fully supporting ODF with every fancy new MS-fanboy collaborative feature enabled. (Or even every fancy new ODF-fanboy feature enabled)
who modded parent as funny, in my opinion microsoft really can not be trusted ever!
i think it really is a trap! microsoft should be ignored and avoided like some troll or school yard bully...
There is absolutely no evidence that MS has changed its intentions, but it will likely have learnt to appear to be open and consultative.
Almost all statements of the form "Surely MS could stoop so low..." have been proven wrong.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Is this the start of better collaboration, or just a sign the Microsoft has learned its lesson from the antitrust battles?"
Corporations are not persons.
That's a metaphor.
There is no difference between "start of better" behavior and "just a sign that" MS has learned from it's battles.
It's good to remember that Corporations are really groups of people, they have no moral body or cognitive center which is the "real" way they think as opposed to how they behave. They are their behavior.
-pyrrho
Good to see Microsoft is working with somebody. Maybe they are starting to see there are other fish out in the pond. http://www.adbloggers.com/
I think that's it - unless Firefox works properly on Vista then the x% of W2K/XP users who use Firefox are unlikely to buy Vista, which will reduce sales for Microsoft.
Microsoft don't lose any money if a Windows user decides to use Firefox - but if the Firefox user decides not to upgrade from XP to Vista because they won't be able to use their favourite browser, then it hits MS in the wallet. Hell, the user might even decide to switch to a different OS and leave the Microsoft upgrade (income) path completely.
the lazarus corporation
embrace and extend.
Mozilla you will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
It already exists, it's called ReactOS.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Right, but they could always start elsewhere. Totally scrap IE and bundle some sort of rebadged firefox with Vista.
Yeah, OS/2 is everyone's definition of a success story.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
It'd be perfectly fine if the Mozilla project were to be eliminated by Microsoft. Mozilla is a convenience, not a necessity. We do, after all, have a number of alternatives available to us.
The first is Konqueror. With the upcoming release of KDE 4, it will likely offer native support for Windows and Mac OS X. On UNIXy systems, Konqueror is already a main competitor to Firefox and Seamonkey. In some areas, such as advanced CSS support, it is clearly ahead.
Mac OS X users have Safari.
Of course, there is also Opera, which seems to run just about everywhere.
If the outcome of this collaboration were legal battles for the Mozilla team, for instance, that'd be okay. They'd be getting due justice for dealing with a company that has a well-known history of fucking over competitors and collaborators. And for the rest of us, it'd give us an excuse to move to a far superior web browser (Konqueror, Opera, Safari, etc.) than Firefox or Seamonkey. It would also serve as an excellent reminder not to ever deal with Microsoft.
IIRC there is some law that makes chairity work tax-deducable...
FF is a microsoft windows product, that happens to get ported to some other operating systems. It is primarily a WINDOWS product, even though it has "mozilla" as a low level behind the scenes aspect. Ff has given MS three years now to play catch up with their own browser, something that is quite literally worth billions to them.
If mofo was serious about being an open source product development corporation/foundation, they wouldn't be a stalking horse for closed source MS, they would have developed for open source operating systems only. You can't have it both ways, you can't claim to be "for" open source and devote the bulk of your activities for developing for a closed source platform that is clearly an abusive corporation.
If anyone wants to dispute that, and wants to fall back on that lame "gateway drug" argument, show us the numbers, where's the beef? Show us where open source operating systems on the desktop are making huge inroads that parallel the "adoption" of FF on windows. Let's see some stats. All I see is linux is still like 1% of desktops, same as it was years ago. FF is NOT helping to bring about any big switch to open source, all it is doing is saving MS time and money. Speaking of which, follow the economic food chains around a little, see what you find.
People can see SCO as a stalking horse for MS, but for some reason other apparent examples get dismissed out of hand, despite the obvious financial benefits to MS for keeping people on their platform-no matter who does it. FF and OO.org for MS windows are enabling crutches to stay on closed source, and as such they are working against open source as a philosphy and goal.
i remember, there was this innovative browser called Netscape... which was happy to share their code with Redmond to "help them out"... who later got crushed through unscrupulous business practices, sabotaged web code, altered standards (that Netscape helped create and distribute)...
please don't let firefox die this way.
The 80s called. They want their pop psychology back.
Great, Hell just froze over and no one thought to tell me:(
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Is it time we switch a 'z' for a '$'? Are we gonna have to refer to Mozilla as 'Mo$illa'? Tinfoil hats anyone?
Just a matter of time. Vista will flop. XP is crap. 2000 was kinda ok for a sucky closed OS, but soon no longer supported. M$ is the one who will have to adapt. No reason to work with them, they're soon a non-entity.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
You're looking at it all wrong. They want IE to be a horrible broken web browser. If the majority of browsers in the world today followed web standards properly, it would have to potential to make a significant blow to windows stranglehold on the desktop. A standards compliant web has the potential to become a powerful application distribution platform, and Microsoft hates that. The entore point of IE is to suck just barely as much as possible without end users migrating away from it en masse. Think about it. Five years will have passed between the releases of IE 6 and IE 7. In all that time, what do we get? A half-assed tab implementation and a fix for bugs that web developers have documented forever. Do you really think MS couldn't have done a better job than that if they really had their heart in it? They will pour money into IE until judgement day as long as they can use it to hold back web standards by 5 years or so by making them inaccessible to 80-90% of the web browsing world.
Ok, that's a total crackpot tinfoil hat theory. I admit it. But you have to wonder. What have they been doing all that time? I know they stopped development on IE for a long time, but it's not like they didn't know about the glaring problems in IE 6 when they dropped it...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I'd pay money to watch that.
(of course it'd probably be on YouTube anyway...)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
"I believe it is a sign that Microsoft doesn't want to continue supporting and developing IE. "
I don't think so. Here is what I do believe:
I believe Microsoft knows how short in developers is the Firefox project "core" team.
*Even if only one of them refocus to this "subproject" a significative work force is "out of the game" making it easier for next IE version to fill the gap.
*And then, "making friends" on the Windows camp *may* mean some Firefox developing lines that could be "too unixy" would be avoided, now Microsoft is so lovely to insure Windows will be the best plaform for Firefox to be run on ("hey, Firefox runs better on Linux than in Windows" currently harms Microsoft more than Linux or Firefox itself).
*And then, the close contact between Firefox developers and Microsoft engineers *may* make one of the formers to "fall in love" with Microsoft enough to accept a juicy contract from the company thus making future Firefox development more aligned to whatever their interest are (if only because point one above).
*And then, some people *may* really believe that somehow Microsoft has abode to be a "good boy" after all, so good PR for them.
Yes, they are too many "may", but it's cheap cash for Microsoft that could provide quite good benefits for them.
"If I were Microsoft, I'd have to look at IE like a rathole that is having money poured into it."
I bet Microsoft really knows what has made it the utterly successful company it is today (in no particular order):
*An ashtounding legal system that makes IP-based bussiness the most profitable ever designed by humankind... by huge margin
*Their early start advantage
*Their backwards binary compatibility
*Dumbed users/sysadmins
*Their development tools
*Their office suite
*Their ability to abuse their monopolistic positions
*Marketing focused on high management and beancounters instead of technical positions/users
They could only be morons if they'd go against those principles and since I don't think they are morons, I always think that anything Microsoft does or plans is in accordance to them.
This is good news for everyone.
That depends on what Microsoft's real motivations are, doesn't it?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Try setting up, say, an ATI All in Wonder card in ReactOS sometime. It's not just like Windows, it's certainly not as good as Windows. Installing device drivers in ReactOS is NOT fun. The last time I worked with it (over a year ago) the procedure was:
.reg file, import in ReactOS
- install Windows on another box
- dump registry
- install driver suite
- dump registry, diff with previous export
- put diff in
- copy files over manually - oh, and potentially violate the Windows license by copying over DLLs
Now, if it has improved since then, and one can just install drivers as one would on Windows, I'd be extremely impressed and I'll dump Windows 98 on one of my home machines (I >>>HAVE to run Windows 9x for support for the tuner card which will never, ever be supported by Linux, and no, I'm not going to throw away perfectly good hardware; that PC exists only to serve as a second television and a very low-end PVR).
As far as _application_ compatibility on ReactOS is concerned, I'm very impressed at how it matured so quickly, but the driver installation procedure is FAR too time consuming to be worth the effort, unless one is building a disk image to deploy to multiple computers.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I think it was a critique on the post because Clippy would never say that. Clippy would be more like this:
! It looks like you are searching for pr0n. Would you like to view:
( ) Soft core hetero porn (e.g., your SO might see what you're viewing)
( ) Three guys Gang banging slutty brunette
( ) Gay men stroking each other
( ) Hot lesbian porn
( ) Young naked children
You have selected: (*) Young naked children (you perverted fuck!); Your IP address has been reported to the FBI and the local police. As a precautionary measure, your Microsoft Money data file has also been stored by the FBI and by Microsoft. There is no hiding, so you may as well remain where you are, you will be arrested and molested shortly. Thank you for choosing Microsoft Firefox as your web browser.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"And yet again you say how IIS factors into the equation, when it quite clearly doesn't (a web server is generally agnostic to the browser you use or the HTML put on it...the discussion is irrelevant, even more so to a home user)."
Do you really think so? After all, it seems quite reasonable, doesn't it?
But now, please, follow me!
-In order for a web page to display properly disregarding IE cludges, where do you have to develop it? On Windows.
-If you are kind of el-cheapo about your web developments (quite a huge percentage) what's the most probable platform for a "first stage" development server? The same as the developer's platform, since most of the time is one of the developers the one in charge of part-time sysadmining it.
-And then, as everybody knows, "nobody will be fired by choosing IB^H^HMicrosoft"; since Microsoft's development tools are quite decent (at least for someone that can stand working on Windows) there's a nice chance for Ms (whatever) Studio to be choiced.
-And then, if you develop it on Microsoft Windows and the "first devel" server is Windows too, what do you think it is the first candidate for the production server? Bet for Windows. But then, since Ms (whatever) Studio has quite a lot of nifty wizards and assitants in order to "...integrate the development process thus achiving highest rates of productivity" (at least that's what said a brigthly coloured brochure some PHB read some time ago) you won't use Apache on Windows (Apache, those redskin communist hippies that want to destroy corporate america giving away labour for free -the PHB knows it quite well, since he read a non-biased study about it on a serious economic magazine), you of course will use IIS.
QED.
Now, you might think I'm being too fantasious, that it can never happen that way, but my story is scaringly true. Add it a bit of dumb techs/managers and that's what made Microsoft/IIS/Exchange, a system never designed to be exposed in the wild, to get an unthinkable 40-60% Internet share. It *already* happened.
"The "Extend" in this sequence is extending the Microsoft product to be incompatible with the ones following the standard that they claim to have "embraced". I don't see what you are suggesting here"
There's about five people on "full time" mode on Firefox, but let's imagine there're 100.
Now you carefully choose 20% of them (just one on the lower situation, no more than 20 on the higher) and manage to convince them about the magic virtues of the Microsoft platform; now those 20% are expending more and more time "fine tuning" Firefox for Windows instead of working on other tasks; maybe you manage to introduce some "so much worthing you can avoid them" features on Firefox due to your relationship with those developers... unluckly those nifty features only work on Windows (maybe Ms Office related, for instance), not in unix-like platforms so, unluckily again "the OSS Firefox camp" divides itself: those that think the Microsoft-only features are terribly valuable and those that think OSS and OS independency is the way to go. A significative percentage of the later decide, for instance, move to Konqueror and abandon the Firefox project. At the same time Microsoft discovers that some of the "Microsoft side" Firefox developers are sooo valuable they decide to hire them to maximize their abilities (to be read: in two months you will have abandoned completly your work on Firefox).
That's just one scenario out of a bunch I can come with (and surely the think-tank on Redmond can add up some more); anyway in one/two years where you had a promising project you will have an stagnating one that can't compete with the new and revitalised IE7.x that happens to support those Ms-only nifty features... only better than Firefox and in the meantime you have managed to retain within Microsoft (200x/XP->Vista) those that might have though about a migration path 200x/XP->some linux.
They killed netscape because they thought it could become the new platform.
They killed desktop java because they thought it could become the new platform.
They will pump money into killing any number of products if they think it endangers their windows/office monopoly.
If they haven't killed firefox it's because they don't think firefox is currently a threat to their windows platform - not because they lack the technical skills to clone firefox features in IE.
You know what? It's really annoying - I'm fixing a web app written by someone...doing all my dev. work on an iBook with Firefox 1.5. I worked on it in my spare time for ages...looked great. Finally it dawned on me, "the majority of users will be using IE, I suppose I really ought to check." It looked /horrible/, and I'd be reworking a bunch of stuff with nice clean HTML + CSS. I had to spend quite a bit of time hunting down IE bugs and putting in CSS hacks to fix simple code that absolutely should have worked.
"They should change browsers" is not an acceptable answer. "M$ needs to fix their browser" is.
Use IE? Fuck no. Firefox for me, ta. ... IE is a POS
Would you move to Vista if all it had was the POS? If not, how can you argue that M$ is not forced to embrace and use FF?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are now a sizeable chunk of Firefox users on windows. Some of them are government agencies or corporations, who won't upgrade to Vista until Firefox is running. Firefox is now a big customer, important to Microsoft.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Other way around... OS/2 helped Microsoft get NT out the door. Microsoft dropped the ball and mysteriously never finished their portion of the OS/2 upgrade (they were only supposed to do the GUI, IBM did the back end).
So... since the ATM version uses no GUI that Microsoft did not finish, and NT does have OS/2 in some of it's help files I am rather skeptical of this as example of someone benefiting from partnering with Microsoft.
I reckon M$ would be happy to continue to pour money down the IE hole if it meant people were using Frontpage. IMHO, the browser wars were never about making IE profitable, they were about controlling web standards so that they could sell their development tools.
.DOC files and MS Word). That hasn't happened. The WWW is now more of an application delivery system with complicated web-sites written by professionals. The document publishing side of the WWW has been changed so that non-techy people use blogs, wikis and so forth to publish documents - for free.
Perhaps they initially thought that the web was going to be a document delivery system and that everyone would be publishing web pages using a package like Frontpage (cf.
M$ has recently announced the "Expression" web designer, so we'll have to see how that shakes things up.
beltzner's reply covers this nicely:
- new "Default Program" infrastructure
- effects of running in the new application security mode
- interacting/integrating with InfoCard
- integration with the common RSS data store and services
- integration with the Vista calendar and address book
nostrils
Step One: Embrace
check
...and call it Microsoft Internet ExploreFox.
/hides
There are a lot of browser-based tools in the workplace that need ActiveX. And everytime someone has a tool like that, they're stuck on Windows until the replace the tool. When you add up the cost to re-code a lot of your intraweb-based tools, and your customized Access databases (going to whatever OO.o uses and basic Perl/PHP/Javascript/etc), it quickly becomes cheaper to stick to Windows
Most of the users in here won't say anything if their point has already been made
I disagree. Many discussions feature top-level posts whose main points have already been stated earlier, so instead of reading the comments and replying to the first post which has a similar point, some people just hit the big reply button without reading stuff at all.
and so on the money. I think many are getting sick of the fanatical religious like MS hate thing, Its not rebellious anymore its stupid.
... Firefox ...
... Firefox ...
... FireFox ...
... FireFox ...
... firefox ...
... Firefox ...
... FireFox ...
For all your talk of standardization, you may want to read a certain standard on capitalization of proper nouns...
DYWYPI?
I'm not a Microsoft basher, but haven't they gotten involved in open source in the past as a way to slow down or hinder development of different projects? It's too late for me to hunt down a links, but if I'm right, reader probably knows what I'm talking about.
Just a thought. I'd hate to see a project like FireFox get fouled up, or watch Microsoft use FireFox to corrupt standards.
"They should change browsers" is not an acceptable answer. "M$ needs to fix their browser" is.
It's not, though. Not to a paying client who wants the page/app to "just work right" for a majority of their users.
Cross-browser development will probably always suck. God knows, I've done it, and I feel your pain there. That being said, there will always be someone who's willing to do it for less money than it costs a company to alienate the majority of their online business, whether it's you, me, or someone else.
You probably should be happy that random business owners don't have the power to force a browser maker to make the browser work the way they want -- it's not IE they'd be demanding changes in, at least not as long as it manages to remain the mass majority browser.
"Right, but they could always start elsewhere. Totally scrap IE and bundle some sort of rebadged firefox with Vista."
You're underestimating Microsoft. IE7 is already better than Firefox.
But wait... wait... what the HELL am I talking about? Flame me to death.
It doesn't support XUL, XHTML, and doesn't handle CSS as well as Firefox.
But also improves on security with phishing sites 'detection', better architecture and supports limited privileges mode (vista only), fixes all major CSS/rendering bugs from IE6, adds all of the most requested CSS support and rendering features inside (PNG transparency, CSS2 selectors, hover on all, fixed positioning on all etc etc). And it has the damn tabs you made so much fun of. And RSS support.
What does a user want? Do you think a user really gives a flying f*** about Acid 2? Even most developers are not dying for Acid2 in their day-to-day webdev activies.
Furthermore: it's a lot faster to start (save me the stuff about "but it's preloaded" since I have a Firefox preloader here and it helps with nothing) and a lot faster to render.
As a matter of fact, Opera / Safari / IE6/7 have pretty comparable rendering speeds and they are all in the "acceptable to fast" range. Firefox is slow to start and hella slow to render, esp. with some bigger and more complicated pages.
I use it every day, it's my default browser and I know.
So take it for what it is: Microsoft wants to look good and make sure Windows software runs in Vista. No way they'll give up on the better (at that point) IE7 for it.
Har har har. Good God you're a fucking nerd.
Can't figure out who it's making more fun of: Al Gore, Firefox or Microsoft.
r ises-due-to-firefox
http://www.steelxsteel.com/2006/08/24/death-toll-
...if the Vista API was properly documented in the first place. The ideal solution would be for MS to post the Vista API on their website and let the Firefox developers work from that. Remember the European fiasco? "Sorry, we don't have documentation, but you can look at the source code". Of course, that would open up the Firefox effort to lawsuits later on if any code they wrote ended up even accidentally similar to MS code.
A small, underfinanced SCOX has managed to string out multi-billion dollar IBM for years on end with a bogus lawsuit where all the contracts are in IBM's favour. My nightmare is an "IP lawsuit", where...
- it's multi-billion dollar Microsoft as the plaintiff
- small non-profit Mozilla org as the defendant
- no raft of contracts giving Mozilla org a free pass
The only non-conspiracy theory I can come up with is that the "MS Live" group has gained the upper hand in internal power struggles. And they would much rather that 100% of all browsers worked with MS Live, rather than 85% (and falling) of all browsers worked with MS Live.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
This has nothing to do with the feds, anti trust settlements or better colaboration. It has everything to do with trade offs. First Mozilla gets help in making sure they have a product to compete with when Vista ships. Microsoft gets mozilla to stop supporting windows 98. There is the trade.
Why is this important? Well mozilla needs microsoft to allow access to certain features and services normaly reserved for microsofts own browser. They need some help getting the new api bugs out of the way. Microsoft needs it because when vista ships, there probably won't be too much demand for it. They probably won't be doing security updates for 98 any more(they killed support for it but still do some security updates). If mozilla supports 98, then some people on the fence might still not upgrade. As for security goes, some still (and rightly so) think a virus scanner, firfox, thunderbird, and a hardware router firewall is sufficient to keep 98 safe for quite some time. And lets face it, there is no functional reasons to buy a new computer when 98 or ME on a p4 1.6 gig 256ram is doing everything they want it to do with speed.
These people will need a reason to upgrade and mozilla gave it to them with the discontinuing of support for 98/ME. 98-ME is one of the easy-est operating systems to pirate and functional enough for alot of people holding out on getting new computers. This could slow microsofts vista adoption while people with XP machines will likley have enough speed and functionality to keep them for a while. Microsoft could really use the 98/ME holdouts to keep the investors happy.
Note- mozilla claimed it is dropping support because it is going to concentrate development on some interface only availible in Vista and XP. I'm thinking there might be some microsoft specific features in distant releases. I'm not sure if it will effect other OS support or not.
I really don't understand why Microsoft is continuing IE, I just don't see what purpose it holds any more.
People might cry "it's for lock-in", but that doesn't really make sense...
1. Other browsers are now just as capable as IE for 99% of sites that Joe Public uses, the other 1% could be fixed, and for the sites that can't be, well there still is IE5 to 6 for those, they're mostly going to be intranet closed systems anyway. If other browsers can do the job, there is no lock-in left anyway.
2. IE could buy Opera for example, or at least licence them, I'm sure thier pockets are deep enough for either of those. And with that, they could extend the already GOOD browser with thier own "lock-in" features if it came to that. I, as a developer, wouldn't mind in the slightest, just because they add lock-in features doesn't mean we have to use them, we can code for the lowest common denominator, without IE in the picture, that's a pretty good level to code at, with IE it's a nightmare.
People might also say it's because IE is core to Windows, but I don't see that being a problem either...
1. So, leave IE 6 in there as a deprecated interface for a while, you could limit it to local URL's if security is a concern.
2. Make a compatability API to make transitioning applications easier.
People might say it's because of branding...
1. As I already pointed out they could buy or licence a closed source system, and call it thiers.
2. They could go with an open source engine (gecko/khtml) and still stick thier name on it (however they probably would need to release thier modified source, not a problem if they don't put anything proprietry in there). Hell they can call it "Internet Explorer 8", doesn't matter what it is under the hood, the masses won't know.
Call me stupid, but I just don't see why Microsoft is clinging so strongly onto IE, it seems to me that it's become a mess of iterative development and either should be started from scratch, or replaced with a better engine.
I say Microsoft should just cut thier losses, write a check with a large number of 0's, and send it to Opera, or even Mozilla. And come out with a more secure, standards compliant, and actually GOOD engine for Internet Explorer, and Windows.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
Highly doubtful but not impossible. If they wanted to do that, at any point in IE's history they could have implemented, without adding their own proprietary tags, the W3C standards, and they didn't need Mozilla's blessing to do that first.
Help us build a better map!
Let's not forget that Vista have a reputation for bugs, and Microsoft wants to fix that.
In that case, Microsoft Windows has been open all along.
I'm glad MS are improving CSS support in IE7, and by the sounds of it it's a hell of a lot better than IE6 (which was worse than IE5.5, how'd they manage that?). However, I don't think it's enough to just say MS are adding the most requested features and they can fix the rest in a future version - they've had six years to get this right.
The problem seems to be that every time they release a new browser, it breaks everything that used to work in their other browsers - IE6 broke stuff for IE5.5, IE7 will break stuff for both of them, and no it seems IE8 will be doing the same to IE7. That is the reason why they need to get this stuff right. We shouldn't have to re-code the entire interweb every time MS releases something new.
If they can't manage to get this working, I'm sure it would be a million times easier to acquire a working browser from elsewhere, add their security to that and rebadge it MS rather than trying to fix IE as it exists now.
In fact, Microsoft will publish a list of IE quirks so that other browser can implement them.
Someone should tell them that if they want Windows Live to work, they have to adapt Windows Live, not the other way.
All MS are doing is helping the Firefox guys to get the browser running and stable under the new Vista OS. That won't make one iota of difference to the "IE required" websites. The reason websites require users to have IE is either because the sites use proprietary technology or they rely on the browser's (poor) implementation of CSS which breaks in other browsers. This co-operation won't fix either of those problems.
Absolutely, an astute observation, the need to further remove these legacy systems from the crosshairs of userland developers and from use in the low system requirements usership is a very real motivation. I think there are benefits in retrospective business reparations and in future development for MS through this collaboration. Obviously they will benefit from further discontinuation of 98/ME systems freeing up resources used to continue patching etc of the systems. Also, as mentioned, the fact that mozilla family products will now support live platforms means that ms is back in the game for web standards, .NET re-inforcement and MS defined client side functionality gaining ubiquitous support across platforms, it's a keen manouver for further influencial power in the www technology market.
my final words, active-x on linux? ongaurd AV systems!
Continuting in the path they were on with IE would get them sued, and people hated the security flaws that path introduced anyway. The people who Microsoft cared about listening to in the abscense of that idea were appathetic. There was more money in making enterprise enhancements. A clear objective, with a more or less clear advantage and result.
At the end of the day, Microsoft was disenchanted with and saw themselves potentially injoined from returning "wealth" to the end users. The web developers niether having been a significant segment of their customer base nor having had much in the way of choice. With (picking a name out of a hat) Google's vision now taking hold, it's a different story. Enterprise people want that kind of ability, and some want the choice of firefox. Everyone wants it to be reliable. And so, quite predictable, Microsoft bends (perhaps slowly, and awkwardly) to their master without complaint.
Here's how I'm seeing it.
Getting all those non-IE browsers to work with Windows Live also means that for every non-IE browser user that uses Windows Live, that's that much less usage for Google. Even if those non-IE browsers currently default to use Google as the default search, it's not that hard to change the default search to Windows Live once it works for those non-IE browsers.
So, it appears that since Microsoft has already de-facto won browser popularity, they now appear to be getting ready to win search popularity as well.
They'd probably want to steal a laptop from one of the mozilla developers to get their source code.
It's entirely a political/image game in which Microsoft has forced Mozilla's hand.
MS plays off the antitrust people by offering to collaborate with Mozilla et al. A small fraction of Microsoft's development resources are spent on this collaboration.
If Mozilla refuses, MS can say that it tried, but nobody wanted to collaborate. This would give MS free rein to continue along their path of antitrust behaviour. Therefore Mozilla *must* collaborate.
The benefits and detriments to each side is a non-issue. MS could be a real jerk about implementing the collaboration, either explicitly, or through red tape. Mozilla may have to spend more resources than planned on Vista development, and Mozilla developers may get lured into moving over to MS.
The important thing is both sides *look like* they're doing what they're supposed to do.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I don't think that all these matter at all. I think this talking is happening because all you people just want to talk about how wrong or how cool Microsoft is. I say I don't care about all these. I am a happy Firefox user now and I want to be as happy when Vista will be my new OS. So since Microsoft is doing something that will help, it's just fine with me. But what I know, I am a stupid user right?
This is all it is.
1. MS scopes the part^H^H^H^opposition
2. sees the best programmers
3. invites them to Redmond on the interoperability pretext
4. hires them
5. they help to hire their buddies from the old days later
6. part^H^H^Hopposition dies
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Great "fixes" from MS:
Internet Explorer and the Expanding Box Problem
It's an unfortunate fact that Internet Explorer will always incorrectly expand any dimensionally restricted block element so that oversize content is unable to overflow, as the specs require that content to do. I will be comparing IE/win's way with the correct behavior as seen in Firefox. The W3C says a rigidly sized block box should allow oversize content to protrude or overflow beyond the edges of the sized box. There is no real "fix" for IE/win's incorrect behavior, except to work around or avoid it. Several possible workarounds will be detailed as I discuss the issue.
Twinstiq, game news
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Well, I guess we have nothing better to do but watch the flame war begin.
It is a friday after all. Who wants to do any work when the weekend is so close.
I bet 90% of working slashdotters are just twiddling with shit trying not to start anything that might make them leave the office 5 minutes late (I know I am).
And for those of you out there who are still working hard - Your lieing to yourself, reading this is not work.
Have a good weekend everyone.
I dont read
Them and every other company in the world.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't get it. I'm running Vista Beta 2 at home right now, and Firefox works just fine on it. People here are acting like Firefox doesn't CURRENTLY run on Vista, but it does just fine on my system. What am I missing?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
M$ finally realized that they were not generating any revenue (profit or otherwise) from IE and that it was in fact a burden on them to maintain. Hence, why not leverage the OSS solution instead? Especially if it provides a platform that allows them to sell Office Live and reap profits.
What has Microsoft really gained by crushing Netscape and forcing users to use their free in-house solution? Nothing really.
The question isn't what they have gained - it's what have they avoided losing?
I have to admit, if I were a Mozilla developer invited to Redmond, I would not drink the kool aid.
Considering how familiar Microsoft is with Firefox, after ripping it apart to copy it as closely as possible for IE7, I would think they need to justify the techhours somehow.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Well, ever since world war two it is well known that you can't win a 2 front war...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-front_war
No sig for the moment.
if firefox doesn't work well on vista, vista may not be well recived by the tech community and come off as buggy
Microsoft used IE as damage control against Netscape.
Just a couple of days ago it was found to yet again, trying to work the legal system on their favour and they were, yet again, fined.
You are frankly asking too much when you ask reasonable people to talk about MS in an unimpasionated way.
MS is happy to bend every rule in the book, it has broken the law all around the globe, it is fined, it does not eat humble pie. We know they will do it again.
You are asking us to talk evenheadeadly about a group of people that so far have shown complete contempt for the normal rules of engagement of acpitalistic competition.
Sorry, but you won't have it from me. You'll not get a kind word for MS from me until the day that they issue a public apology and do something to compensate all the people they have screwed up.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
actually, I do believe they have a kind of sentience, but we cannot judge them that way, we don't have access to punishing that sentience, for example, in law. On OUR SCALE, I think it resolves to groups of individuals. You cannot assume a corporation has "learned" something, or trust it's learned a lesson in particular because of this reason, and the contant turnover.
The sentience you DO see is one that comes from what MBAs are taught, they go to executive MBA school and play a particular game, and that game is not to learn, but to constantly press luck and push advantages, petty or otherwise.
But actually, I do think groups can be sentient and usually are on some level, though we don't have the definitions in our language to really see them as individuals anyway.
-pyrrho
Not really an exception, since Java isn't a standard — it's a proprietary, trademarked specification. There's actually nothing to prevent creating an incompatible version of Java, as long as you don't call it Java.
You could almost say that's what Microsoft ended up doing after Sun successfully enforced its trademark. True, .NET is a lot different from Java, but the basic idea is the same (except for "Write Once Run Anywhere", which was never more than a lame marketing slogan), and was implemented by the same people who did MS's version of Java.