Slashdot Mirror
Browser Wars Declared Over?
Kelson writes to mention Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google took the stage this week at the Web 2.0 expo and in addition to discussing pressing issues have declared their intent to avoid another browser war. All the panelists agreed that security was the largest concern currently facing browser developers. "Brendan Eich, the chief technology officer at Mozilla, said that security was hard and always will be. 'I don't think we should take security lightly; it's an end-to-end problem and we have to step outside the current model to win on this front,' he said. For his part, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, said one of the scenarios that kept him awake at night was offline access to the browser and what that meant from a security perspective, particularly on the user-to-user front."
90 Lb Weakling: We all agree to stop kicking sand on each other.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Microsoft: "Guys? Hey guys! The browser wars are over! Can you hear me? The _war_ is _over_! Go ahead and lay down your weapons! Stop fighting! That's right, come out come out wherever you are! Put down the guns!"
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Then they stab you in the back.
It'll never be over, not as long as there is a drop of blood in our typing fingers!! How dare they try to take away a fundamental part of our fun!
We will fight them on the keyboards, we will fight them on the intertubes, we will fight them where and whenever an html statement is exectured!!
For his part, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, said one of the scenarios that kept him awake at night was offline access to the browser and what that meant from a security perspective, particularly on the user-to-user front.
It's statements like these that make me think he must be an absolute blast at parties.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
No need to read the article people...
Opera won!!!
Microsoft declares "Mission Accomplished."
Luke Spyglass: "You fought in the browser wars?"
NCSA Mosaic: "I was once a web browser the same as your father."
Luke Spyglass: "My father didn't browse the web. He was a finger server at the community college."
NCSA Mosaic: "That's what your Uncle told you. He didn't hold with your father's ideals. He thought he should stay home. Not gotten involved."
Luke Spyglass: "I wish I had known him."
NCSA Mosaic: "He was a cunning application, and the best downloaded in the galaxy. I understand you've become quite a good downloader yourself. And he was a good friend. For over a thousand days the W3C protected the web. Before the dark times. Before the Empire"
Luke Spyglass: "How did my father die?"
NCSA Mosaic: "A young web browser named Internet Explorer, who was a derivative of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Emporer hunt down and destroy the W3C standards. He betrayed and murdered your father. IE was seduced by the Dark Side of the internet."
Luke Spyglass: "The internet?"
NCSA Mosaic: "Yes, the internet is what gives a web browser his power. It's an energy field created by all connected computers. It surrounds us. Penetrates us. Binds the world together. Which reminds me. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your Uncle wouldn't allow. He thought you'd follow NCSA Mosaic on some idealistic crusade."
Luke Spyglass: "What is it?"
NCSA Mosaic: "It is open source browser source code. The weapon of a web browser. Not as random or clumsy as a closed source. An elegant idea for a more civilized age."
The Ass, the Fox, and the Lion
The Ass and the Fox, having entered into partnership together for their mutual protection, went out into the forest to hunt. They had not proceeded far when they met a Lion. The Fox, seeing imminent danger, approached the Lion and promised to contrive for him the capture of the Ass if the Lion would pledge his word not to harm the Fox. Then, upon assuring the Ass that he would not be injured, the Fox led him to a deep pit and arranged that he should fall into it. The Lion, seeing that the Ass was secured, immediately clutched the Fox, and attacked the Ass at his leisure.
MORAL: Never trust your enemy.
Appropriate parameter assignments for ass, fox, and lion are left as an exercise for the reader.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Microsoft wants to call a truce.
That's like Germany asking for status quo ante after Normandy.
and nobody came?
All we are saying, is give HTML 5.0 a chance!
With respects to John Lennon.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Good. Now that this distracting war is over, we can get back to the really important wars: vi versus emacs; LISP versus, well, anything else; and where to put those little curly brackets.
This historical irony moment provided by Neville Chamberlain.
"But we had a piece of paper!!!!"
As a web developer, my biggest concern (aside from the difficulties creating multi-column CSS layouts) involves differences in the way browsers render pages. It's incredibly frustrating to write perfectly valid HTML/XHTML and CSS and have the pages show up very differently depending on the browser. The biggest offender, of course, is Internet Explorer, and now that version 7 is out but many haven't switched to it, I have to test in both 6 and 7. And since I couldn't figure out a way to install both on one PC, my workstation now has a Mac and two PCs for IE6 and IE7 browser testing. I consider this Microsoft's contribution to global warming....
I estimate that at least 10% of my time is spent avoiding and tracking down browser display differences that really shouldn't exist in the first place. I get paid by the hour so maybe I shouldn't complain, but the inefficiency of the whole thing still bugs me.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
The objective never was to make firefox or opera the next king of the web, but to have competition in the browser market. By having serious and various competitors in various platforms, we need standards in order to make web pages equal independent of your preferred client.
Right now I can't remember the last time I saw a "best viewed in IE X.0" warning, and that should be an indicator that people know there's a diversity of clients in the market, and making you site exclusive to a particular browser, instead of compiling with standards everyone can implement, means greatly limiting your customer base.
This is good news for Firefox. So long as Microsoft thinks it has "won" the browser war, the steady erosion of IE's market share will happen by hook or by crook. That is, viral petri dishes like Active X will be slowly become phased out, and it will be increasingly difficult for MS to differentiate their browser from other free ones.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Click here to read more about a new flaw uncovered in Internet Explorer 7 that opens users up to phishing attacks.
File Deletion is Murder.
So, while I'm glad the developers see security as being a high priority, I hope all of the browser developers do not forget about standards compliance.
What was Google doing there?!?! Do they have a browser that I don't know about?
what the fuck is that ?
in the middle of it i stopped laughing and started reading it stupefied.
this one of the best creative shit i saw in my life.
Read radical news here
Why was Google there? They don't make browsers? It makes about as much sense as Yahoo being there.
According to one Microsoft spokesperson, the company reiterated its support for having a common, industry-standard web platform to embrace and extend.
Over?!?! It's not over 'til we say it's over. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor??....Hell no!.............
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
I've got two words for you, my friend. Virtual Machines.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Competition drives innovation, so if the browser wars are really over it's us that has lost. Besides, there's no way that MS is just going to sit on their hands while other browsers gain on them in market share.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
This, was their finest hour !!!
Read radical news here
that it's the content the derives profit, not the framework that displays it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When it was Netscape vs. IE, there was a competition to increase the functionality and effectiveness of the browsers. They could work to improve general security but a lack of wars like this stifle innovation and will result in all the major browsers staying the same for several years. Wars always bring innovation, years of experience have shown us that. If one browser fights to gain control of the market by drastically improving security then it will force the competitors to follow suit and also stops a single monopoly forming where virtually everyone uses a single browser (increasing the amount of people affected by an exploit for it).
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
The war may be over.
All the major players realize they all have issues. As Moz/FF/Opera gain in user base, it has become apparent that they share as many flaws, if not the same flaws, as IE that only become apparent with people targeting a browser based upon popularity.
Hell, each of them have some very nasty long term bugs that have been largely ignored by the fixers.
(Yes, I realized, a few of you may have knee jerked so hard with this, that you are now calling your dentist for an emergency fix.)
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Alan C. Kay, OOPSLA 1997: "There is a set of browser wars going on, which are 100 % irrelevant. They're basically an attempt, either at demonstrating a non-understanding on how to build complex systems, or an even cruder attempt at gathering territory. I guess MicroSoft is in the latter camp here. You don't need a browser if you followed what this staff sergeant in the Air Foce knew how to do in 1961. (...)"
3 0059754521&q=oopsla+alan+kay
Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-29509497
@~23:25
They NEED to take that show passwords option out and make it an add on. Having it in there by default is irresponsible. It is so easy to look at someones password with that option, I really have no idea what they were thinking! I recently had to stop deploying firefox because my director saw how easy it is for someone to walk up to the computer and show password.
"Firefox surges with 25% browser share. Figures show Mozilla gaining from Microsoft" April 17, 2007
Reduce, reuse, cycle
That is one of the biggest problems. Especially from the point of view of a web developer. I spend countless hours trying to work out differences between web developers. However, the biggest problem isn't the differences, it's the inability to debug the problem. The Web developer tools in FireFox, including Edit HTML and Edit CSS, make fixing these problems a breeze. Doing the same thing in any browser is a nightmare. Although some tools are available in other browsers, they aren't as good and complete as what's available in Firefox. I think that more companies, MS Especially, because of their large market share should look at their web browsers from an application platform standpoint, ant try to do what they can to improve the usability for those designing the web sites, instead of focusing on the person browsing the web.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I am reminded of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin meeting at Yalta in 1945 as they start to pre-emptively divide up their mutual enemy, while declaring that they'll all cooperate in the future.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
As long as there are fan-boys, followers, and those who treat their browser as a religious icon there will be Browser Wars!
ANOTHER browser war? I didn't know the first one was over!
Wars are good, they bring competition, which drives innovation. (*)
(*) Exception: political parties
-Tony
FIFM.
Ignore this signature. By order.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone ...by using this I am running IE7 on WinXP SP1 (while IE7 requires SP2). And IE7 seems to do OK (for the things that I use) from a CSS point of view: I have just tested fixed backgrounds on boxes, I don't see the a guilotine effect, can hover on boxes, the PNG transparency works nearly perfect (some people say it doesn't, but my mileage may vary).
RECURSIVE DECLARATION ERROR! THREAD HALTED.
It was never a war, it was a 'conflict'.... just like Vietnam.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
You can install both at the same computer if you run Linux. Take a look at WineTools.
Rethinking email
Remove client-side scripting. All of it. ActiveScript, JavaScript, etc. None of it is critical to the operation of the web, and it's the primary route of attack on the client side of the browser.
Plugins? Embedded objects? I'd say kill them too. If not, browsers should find a way to sandbox each embedded object so that if there is malicious code in it, it can't get outside of the box it's in.
Unfortunately none of these options would ever be taken seriously. Too much work has been done in these areas to throw away. And more and more websites are growing dependent on these features such that disabling them on the client-side on your own will kill your access to those sites.
The Genii is out of the bottle.
And while a movement to simplify websites that targets developers would be some means to make headway in this futile fight, most are too busy tripping over themselves with the latest and greatest "Web 2.0" to care.
...this is the outcome.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
How often does a certificate problem cause a recurring popup in firefox that can only be solved by clicking "ok, connect to this site." (particularily when searching on Google)
Why can't browsers have secure defaults, and just provide a "notification" somewhere that it has not loaded the script on a page, or redirected you away from a fishing site. Most of the time thats what you want. The odd time you do want to look at that malicious site, you can (actively) click on that notification and tell the browser to go back and do the unsecure thing.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Microsoft and Opera declaring that they want the war to end is kind of like the White House declaring that everything is fine in Iraq.
...
The reality is, as in Iraq, that the insurgents, in this case Firefox, are winning and gaining ground in a way that is unstoppable.
Even the Microsoft monopoly on OS is threatened, worldwide.
Resistance is futile
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
NCSA Mosaic: IE was a good friend.
NCSA Mosaic: When I first knew him, your father was already a great application. But I was amazed how strongly the Internet was with him. I took it upon myself to train him as a browser. I thought that I could instruct him just as well as Lynx. I was wrong.
Luke Spyglass: There IS still standards compliance in him. I've felt it.
NCSA Mosaic: He more Microsoft's interpretation of W3C standards now than compliant; twisted and evil.
Luke Spyglass: I can't do it, Mosaic.
NCSA Mosaic: You cannot escape your destiny. You must face Internet Explorer again.
Luke Spyglass: I can't kill my own father.
NCSA Mosaic: Then Microsoft has already won. You were our only hope.
Luke Spyglass: Lynx spoke of another.
NCSA Mosaic: The other he spoke of is your twin sister.
Luke Spyglass: But I HAVE no sister.
NCSA Mosaic: Hmm. To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did, if IE were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him. That is the reason why your sister remains safely anonymous.
Luke Spyglass: Opera! Opera's my sister.
NCSA Mosaic: Your codebase serves you well. Bury your threads deep down, Luke. They do you credit, but they could be made to serve the Emperor.
that the browser wars have ended. And Microsoft will be decoupling IE from their monopoly OS when?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I so hope Brendan Eich didn't actually say that. I had been under the impression that he generally knows what he's talking about.
Actually, what they wanted to announce was that the major combat operations have ended...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The next thing you know dell, H.P., and Gateway will get together and declare the market dominance wars over.
IF you can't be famous be infamous. But for GODS sake be something
I just got an image in my head of Bill Gates in a server room with a huge "Mission Accomplished" sign behind him...
I, for one, would not want the browser wars to be over - as someone else pointed out, the fact that there's a "war" going on is a good thing, since that means that web developers, frameworks and companies all have to think of the other browsers, instead of only IE, as they did ca. 5 years ago. This, in turn, means that they will try to stick to the official standards (as much as they can), which in turn means that if I'd want to develop a new browser from scratch, it would be a lot easier for me to code it, and for users to use it, as long as it sticks to the standards, which means that competition is open for all. Even though I try to enlighten all IE users I meet, and try to get them to switch to a superior browser, the fact that IE users are out there is fine with me, as long as their mass doesn't squash any alternatives. So, now that the browser wars are waging again, we only have to start the 'war' on Office-like-products (by getting OpenDocument accepted, or at the very least all important standards opened), in order to give alternative software suites a fair fighting chance to compete on functional grounds, instead of the same old "oh, but everybody else is using MS Office, so I can't switch even if I wanted to". After that is accomplished, getting people to switch, or at least try alternative operating systems would be a breeze.
take that one computer running MS IE6 and replace Windows with Linux and then install IEs4linux( http://www.tatanka.com.br/ ). That'll get you MS IE5, 5.5, and 6 on one machine. And really, it
would have been cheaper to purchase more system memory and run a few virtual machines for testing.
Good to hear a Microsoft based developer concerned about wasting time.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Then you need to practice your penis-fencing.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
We can't grow when browsers are killing eachother and commiting crimes with one another.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Actually, I like some cross-browser display differences. It keeps overzealous web designers from treating the web too much like print, making things far worse. What I don't like is when those differences are simply bugs (like IE's png handling).
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Diplomacy is saying "nice doggie" until you find a rock.
-- Hentry Kissinger
I think that applies in this case. Make all nice on stage, savage each other
otherwise.
This should help...
n d-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-a
That's probably a conflict of interest for MS. If you were really that concerned about being a webmaster, they probably want you to purchase visual studio.
or were the browser wars as interesting as the whole y2k deal was..
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
I did purchase Visual Studio (or at least my employer did). It doesn't in any way help me figure out rendering inconsistencies in Internet Explorer.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Actually, what compounds the problem is that IE7's CSS/HTML support is still very far from the standards. This makes you have to test against the standards, IE6, AND IE7 since they each do wildly different things depending on what you're doing.
Microsoft doesn't think it has won the browser war, it knows it lost and gave up years ago.
For Microsoft, winning the war meant ensuring that the most viewed and essential web sites only worked in Windows, or worked significantly better in Windows than other operating systems. In other words, it mean crippling the web for non-Windows platforms. And for a brief period in the late 90s and early 00s this was exactly the case.
Prior to, say, 2002 or 2003, there was a real penalty for not using IE in Windows. But that hasn't been the case for years. In fact, many web sites now work better in Firefox than in IE.
Interoperability won, and Microsoft lost. What's odd is that (apparently) so many people still don't recognize that fact.
The goal of IE development in 1997 was to become the web web browser that mattered. The goal of IE in 2007 is to make sure the built-in Windows web browser doesn't suck.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Actually, I don't think that's the case. Seriously, I can actually picture Visual Studio's development team at Microsoft glaring evilly at the Internet Explorer team. Have you seen what Visual Studio thinks of IE hacks in your CSS? Let's just say that if it looks right in VS, it'll look right in Firefox. But the demons help you if you want it to look right in Internet Explorer. "filter? What the fuck kind of CSS attribute is filter? FIX YOUR CSS2.1, BITCH!" "-moz-opacity? Nuh uh! I don't see THAT in the spec!" And my personal favourite "Wherre's your demon damned doctype? INSERT A BLOODY DOCTYPE!" Yeah. That's Visual Studio's take on "IE CSS Extensions" or "Firefox CSS extensions". Oh, and VS does the Box Model like Firefox, not IE.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
>differences in the way browsers render pages
The bitch is that, noncompliant or not, IE is the defacto standard because it's so bloody widespread. (footers, anyone?)
The situation is improving.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
"They may take our tags, but they'll never take.. OUR STYLESHEETS!"
- Braveheart (no, not the Care Bear.)
Virtual PC 2007 + Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image = Ability to test IE6 and IE7 on your dev machine.
I'd say that is a twofold problem. Bugs are always being worked on (at least in Opera and FireFox). And Opera has taken a page from Firefox, and started expanding their developer tools. But the other part of the problem is of course expecting pixel perfect rendering on ANY browser. If you want page perfect exact rendering, HTML + CSS isn't the medium for that. Try PS or PDF (which is mostly specialized PS).
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
MS, Google, Mozilla, Opera...pick the odd one out of this list of browser creators.
The Browser Wars are over when Microsoft bundles Firefox with Windows. (They will of course also have the latest IE, maybe opera too, possibly a Konquerer spin-off.)
Until then, it's all just wishful thinking.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Yes. The definition of 'Browser Wars' is just plain mistaken. It's 'Browser Crusades'!
I think, therefore you are.
Having concerns about CSS implementation and rendering does not mean one expects "pixel-perfect" layout. I didn't see anything about that in the GP post.
Try PS or PDF (which is mostly specialized PS).That's fine for print, but not so great for screen displays on varying screens, or for browsing linked information on the web.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The CSS specification describes (or at least, it should describe) exactly one correct visual rendering of any given input on a given output device. With everything else equal (including canvas size, available fonts, configured default text sizes, etc), any two fully-compliant screen-media CSS implementations should produce identical output, with some allowance for different antialiasing algorithms and so forth. Certainly the box model is very clear on the resulting sizes for any configuration of its associated properties.
A good design will of course allow for the fact that different users have different-sized rendering canvases, different fonts available and so on. However, developers can still reasonably expect that the behavior in all conditions will be predictable and consistent with what the specification requires.
Seriously, I think it's easy to say "Oh, the problems of the Mushroom Kingdom don't affect those of us living in the USA" but this news makes me really happy. For the Toads, for the Goombahs, even for the Koopas themselves.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand