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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?"
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.
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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.
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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!"
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
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.
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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.
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>>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.
"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
Right, but they could always start elsewhere. Totally scrap IE and bundle some sort of rebadged firefox with Vista.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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?