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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
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.
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