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?"

Comments

Re:Nothing new.

[jb.hl.com]

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?

Re:What I'd like to see from this.

[lazarus corporation]

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.

Re:I don't get it...

[Osty]

My assumption is that it really wouldn't be all that difficult for them to change IE7 to be standards compliant, if that's really what they want to do. Perhaps they will allow Firefox the ability to run the non-standards compliant IE-geared pages without the need for IE. Or, perhaps Microsoft is looking to finally separate their web browser with their file browser.

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.

Developers taking more control?

[slapout]

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.

Re:Reducing effort in IE.

[Mongoose Disciple]

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."

Re:Run! It's a trap!

[ebyrob]

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)

Re:Run! It's a trap!

[turbidostato]

"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.

Simple: Big customers now require FIrefox

[Gary W. Longsine]

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.