Slashdot Mirror
Opera CTO Thinks IE Will Be Forced To Support SVG
Julie188 writes "Opera Software is, as expected, preening over the forthcoming browser ballot box feature in Windows 7. It will put the Opera name in front of millions of users who probably never heard of it. But that's not the only reason Opera is gloating. CTO Håkon Wium Lie feels that today's decision will force Microsoft to make Internet Explorer do a better job of supporting standards, particularly the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Lie would also like to see Apple and Linux makers follow suit with browser ballot boxes of their own."
but now Dell can legally add Firefox, Opera, or Chrome right to the desktop and Microsoft can't sanction them for it! That's the REAL winner, because you are correct, people tend to use what's working and OEMS are basically banned from including anything pre-installed and on the desktop except IE.
For example my Acer Aspire One shipped with the full dock of Google apps preinstalled... Desktop, Gadgets, Earth, Picassa but under Microsoft's current iron fist they can't include Chrome without backlash. In another example IBM seems to like Opera for many of it's Linux/workstation machines as it's cross-architecture/platform embedded reader... again, they could "encourage" Leneovo to add that to thinkpads for their in-house teams. HP has pretty good ties with Apple still, they could ship PCs with iTunes/Safari ready to go and connect to their home servers for backup, etc, etc.
the real problem with SVG is that it's a "kitchen sink" Committee made spec. When Adobe didn't own Flash, they wanted a spec that was a "flash killer" so threw all sorts of garbage in SVG that doesn't belong there. We're in the situation where most browsers support "most" SVG, but they're all at different stages of unique implementations and don't do the SAME things right in the SAME way. I like how another poster mentioned SVG tiny and that's probably what should have been done first to make the tool usable on as many platforms as possible and to make pages compatible between browsers.
Even with HTML5 the big companies like Apple and Google are pushing how THEY want things done and have them already done, versus the guys like Opera and Firefox that want clean specs first, then implementation.
The sooner we get all the other parties supporting things is when web developers can just start ignoring IE, especially at non-work sites where people should be accessing pages from home. When people start using HTML5 at home.. then it will push into workplaces.
What does capitalism have to do with the free market?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
It's weird, but unless they add some kind of description along with the browser name (that is displayed by default, not after a click or mouse-over), the layperson will think it's a multiple choice test to pick the browser from the list, not which browser to use.
Because from these names (and only the names), which of these would 'seem' to be a browser:
Internet Explorer
Safari
Opera
FireFox
Chrome
From these names, the only one that people would read and link with the internet/web would be Internet Explorer.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
True, but Apple takes a different approach. It's never going to be truly dominant because its business model, or maybe I should say "company culture", is that of a fashion company. They're selling a brand that people buy and identify with, not unlike clothing brands (I'd cite a few, but I go around in shorts and flip-flops). They don't allow anything into their walled garden that they haven't personally approved -- see iPhone/iPod software/hardware. I'd go so far as to say that they're not *interested* in replacing Microsoft, nor getting into large corporations. Fundamentally, they're (and this will get me modded "troll") elitists. They like to have a large crowd of people to look down upon with scorn. They don't *want* to go mainstream, not in the "Windows XP" sense of mainstream.
Now go ahead, flame me to bits.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
It's not a crazy idea it's the logical extension to capitalism. If we're supposed to rely upon market forces to ensure us the best deal, then it follows that there needs to be somebody making sure that it's a balanced playing field.
Just because there's a lot of Libertarians and free market junkies that don't understand the system they're opining about does not mean that the assumptions work. A market run in that fashion will never serve the customers well because quite frankly it's not in the best interest of a company to serve its customers well. It's always more profitable to monopolize the market space and deliver the sheer minimum quality necessary to maintain. Theoretical arguments to the contrary just don't bear out in any sort of consistent or reliable fashion.
In this case, they're not being required to ship a competitors product, they're being forced to provide a fair playing field between the different web browsers. Having dealt with the consequences of MS' incompetent browser business for some time, I think that it's naive to say the least to suggest that it's been in the interest of really anybody else. As long as there are serious constraints to switching based upon the tying of IE into the OS, there's going to be a legitimate reason to demand that MS knock it off and level the playing field.
Thank you. I am so happy to see you write this, and to see Slashdot moderators recognize it as an important point.
Obviously there is significant tension between capital and the market: capitalists always want to circumvent or break the market in order to stave off competitions' downward pressure on profits. But until reading Fernand Braudel's fascinating Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (I haven't yet finished), I was unaware how far back this antagonism went. Illegal international monopolies on vital goods were a problem in the 17th century just as they are today. In fact, opposition to the market was baked right in to the birth of capitalism.
Capitalism arose where there was a need for capital and a potential for large profits. Originally, this was in long-distance trade, where large outlays of money (for ships and goods) and long turn-around times meant both significant risk and huge profits (hundreds of percent in many cases). Capitalists were traders. They simply weren't interested in other areas: for a long time they did not expand significantly beyond a few specialized activities making up a small part of the overall economy.
The market, on the other hand, actually existed in physical marketplaces. This was where producers of goods (e.g. peasants from the countryside) came to sell them. Then traders started to interfere. These traders would go out of the city and buy up the goods directly from producers. These they would bring them into the city, where they could charge a higher price because they had consolidated the supply and thus were less vulnerable to market competition. This practice was actually illegal: governments banned it in order to protect consumers. (In those days spending over half your income on food - and still starving - was not unusual, so one can imagine why even pre-democratic monarchies would want to make sure people could afford bread.)
So yeah, capitalism is one thing. The market is another. And there is great tension between them.
The pinnacle of capitalism then, as now, was finance. As soon as they could, these early capitalists got out of trade. It was too risky, and it was socially looked down upon. They insisted on a distinction between ordinary merchants, who actually did the work, and more prestigious deal-makers who only provided money. The moment they could, they placed themselves in the second group where they could make tremendous low-risk profits in finance, and pretend that neither they nor their ancestors had ever been merchants at all.