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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?"
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. --
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.
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. --
ReactOS is such a good copy, it even BSODs correctly!
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
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.
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?
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
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."
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
Dude there's only one toe on each foot, it's supported by pinkies and piggies.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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
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
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.
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.
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)
"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.
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 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
"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.
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.
"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.