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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."
MS has to do this because of monopoly concerns... Apple certainly won't be doing it anytime soon, since they emphasize integration between programs so much. Linux? Sorry, Opera, but your software isn't open source.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
It will put the Opera name in front of millions of users who probably never heard of it
And the majority of users will simply ignore it and click on a name they've heard of. If Opera doesn't come up with some sort of educational advertising campaign, having this choice in Windows 7 won't make a damned bit of difference in the usage of their browser.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
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.
Windows Setup, Screen 25:
As per litigation by the European Union, please select your internet browser:
[ ] (large IE logo here) MICROSOFT(tm) INTERNET EXPLORER(tm) 8(tm) — The NEWEST, most FASTEST web browser from MICROSOFT(tm)! See all your favorite web pages load up to fourteen hojillion percent faster than ever before with brand new MICROSOFT(tm) SUPERFAST WEB(tm) technology! Browse in the utmost of safety with the latest and bestest of MICROSOFT(tm) security! Witness the splendor of MICROSOFT(tm) STANDARDS(tm) in webpages worldwide! All available as soon as your MICROSOFT(tm) WINDOWS(tm) 7(tm) computer is set up!
[ ] Other — You will be prompted for a URL to download an executable installer for your browser.
Ubuntu already has one. Its called "Add/Remove..."
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Forget individual standards and other pointlessness, Microsoft should just give up on the browser wars and fork Firefox. They get a browser (largely for free) that's arguably better than there own efforts, even though they've been trying to do better. This nets them numerous benefits:
1) They can spend a lot less money developing their own competing product that's slowly hemorrhaging market-share regardless of what they do. There's not much money in the browser market anyway and they can make a few modifications to point the default search at Bing instead of Google.
2) They get all of the wonderful extensions that Firefox already has. In fact, they could have a few of the really nice ones enabled by default and claim that their browser offers more protection out of the box.
3) They can use it as an excuse to get the EU off of their back. It's not longer so much their browser as it is a rebranding of some other popular browser. Hell they could even include a version of Opera that defaults its searches to Bing.
4) If there's some horrible exploit released it will hit both Firefox and IE users so it can't be said that one is more secure than the other. This even gives Microsoft the added benefit of railing against the problems of Open Source software and claiming that their own closed source solution would be better, even though that's probably not true.
5) They can stop worrying about the browser market and actually focus on something that actually matters. If all browsers are standards compliant and have similar performance, does it really matter which browser a person actually uses? Microsoft hasn't been able to leverage any of its encoding formats through their browser. MP3 and AAC have completely outstripped WMA and I'm not aware of any major player utilizing WMV on the video side. That battle has been lost for Microsoft and to carry it on any further is futile and counter-productive.
6) They get to talk about how they're embracing open standards and open source so that they can appear like good guys when in reality the move would give them plenty of angles to play in the future and several ways to deride open source software.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't see a reason for Microsoft not to make this transition. Formats are going to slowly slip through their fingers and they'll only end up loosing market share to superior browsers. If they would fork Firefox and toss their own interface on it so that it looks more like IE, then there's no real reason to use Firefox instead of IE. Neither is more or less secure and both would offer the exact same opportunities for customization and extension. Hell, a move like this could really hurt Mozilla which makes most of its money through their partnership with Google. Any exploits would also affect Firefox and someone is likely to have a decent patch available long before Microsoft would generally make one available. They would have to do a minimal amount of work and stay completely caught up with the Joneses.
Well, if the EU is smart, they will impose some basic rules on the ballot screen:
1) No default selection
2) Random order of displayed browser choices
3) No MS propaganda on the screen.
That should do it.
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.
Forcing a company to ship its competitors with its own product is ridiculous and anti-capitalism. Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use Internet Explorer. People are free to download Opera on their own, and if Opera's CTO wants more people to know about Opera, they should do what a business is supposed to do and get the word out about their product, not plead to the government for assistance. If that still doesn't get more people using Opera, then that's just life.
Some people have adopted this crazy idea that there is supposed to be balanced competition at all times, enforceable by the government. The point of competition is that someone is going to end up on top, and the others have to fight to compete. The government should only be stepping in when the competitor on top is illegally affecting the market in some way, but that's not the case here. You can download Opera the moment you start up your Windows PC for the first time.
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.
Main Entry:
preen
Function:
verb
Etymology:
Middle English prenen, alteration of proynen, prunen, from Anglo-French puroindre, proindre, from pur- thoroughly + uindre, oindre to anoint, rub, from Latin unguere -- more at purchase, ointment
Date:
14th century
transitive verb
...
3: to pride or congratulate (oneself) for achievement
Signed,
Merriam-Webster
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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!
I know I might be forced as an employee at DumbCorp to use IE because they rely on ActiveX elements. But that's not Microsoft forcing me, that's DumbCorp forcing me by not hiring coders to re-write the things.
I know I might be forced by StupidBleedingCustomersBank to use IE because -they- rely on ActiveX elements. But, again, not Microsoft. Dumbass bank and most likely I'd tell them the reason I'm leaving them for another bank.
But, please, do go ahead and post a list. I'm genuinely curious.
Just to note - please prune any and all arguments regarding the -engine- (Trident etc.) being used by, say, help files or in-app browser screens. That's -not- IE the browser (and on top of that, the help file / app authors -could- have chosen to use a different format (PDF) or even html rendering engine. Just 'cos they found the one readily available on Windows easy to implement doesn't make it that Microsoft is forcing them to use it, or -me- to be subjected to it.
Thank you.
[Canvas] is already supported on Firefox and Webkit-based browsers. This is the most practical advantage it has -- availability in the field.
Except SVG is already supported on Opera, Firefox and Webkit, too, and even in IE via plugins.
The killer app for SVG would be if someone developed an artist-centric development tool like Flash.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
That's funny, because I actually had to deploy some SVG-based webapp last week. Specifically, it was outputting scatter plots with some few thousand data points. I tested SVG performance in Opera, Safari, Chrome Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer with Adobe SVG Viewer 3.03, 6 (alpha? pre-alpha? No one knows...), and the RENESIS plugin for IE.
Here are the results:
Opera - Easily the slowest of the bunch. Took about 15 seconds to render the graph.
Safari - Got confused about the app's filetype and kept trying to save it.
Chrome - Pretty fast, took about 2 seconds to render the graph but strangely starts rendering the datapoints in small chunks after (it'd draw the first half of one series, the the next half, then the next series, etc).
Firefox - Not much faster than Opera.
Adobe SVG 3.03 - About as fast as Chrome but was missing some features, like changing the cursor display when you hover over interactivity points.
Adobe SVG 6 - The snappiest of the lot, and supports the cursor changing feature, but likes to draw erroneous datapoints. Too bad Adobe dropped development on this.
RENESIS - A little faster than Chrome but not as fast as SVG Viewer 6. No errors and wasn't missing any features as far as I could tell. This is what I ended up going with.
So, why is Opera "gloating" over IE when they themselves has a LOT of work to do on their own SVG support, to say the least, while there are free plugins for IE that pretty much trounce the competition? Does IE really need built-in SVG support when this is the case? Maybe it needs built-in flash support too?
To me, this just looks like another case of unwarranted smugness over "omg IE doesn't conform to standards!!1".
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
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.