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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?"
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?
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
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
>>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.
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?
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.