Microsoft Wins Browser War, Abandons 'Innovation'

rocketjam writes "Web developers are expressing frustration with Microsoft's apparent abandonment of its 'operating-system-integrated' Internet Explorer web browser. An article on C-Net points up the efforts of the Web Standards Project as well as Adobe Systems to prompt Microsoft to fix long-standing Cascading Style Sheet bugs in IE as well as continuing to add other improvements which have virtually ceased since Microsoft won the browser war. While alternatives such as the Mozilla Project and the Opera browser still exist, their marketshare is miniscule." In a related story, an anonymous reader points out that the bugs aren't just in rendering, they're security holes as well: "iDefense and eEye have basically said that Internet Explorer is full of holes and just surfing the Web using it is "unsafe". There's 31 un-patched holes in IE, but MS won't talk about it... It took them nearly a month to roll out a new patch after this one was found to be more or less useless."

the big mo

[sstory]

I switched to Mozilla a few months ago. Not out of zeal, but because Mozilla's better software. And it's hard to beat that native pop-up blocking. Using Mozilla, I forget that the web is infested with pop-up ads. When I have to use IE for some reason, I'm quickly reminded.

Stupid IE tricks

[kurosawdust]

my personal favorite is when you send a form request via a submit button that uses a specified image (instead of the ubiquitous grey button), IE for some reason will totally ignore the "submit" POST request. I have long since stopped trying to understand why, and thus chalk it up to a master plan that will not be fulfilled until my pants are running Windows CE.

(PS - you can still get your page to work with IE if that situatioin applies to you, you just have to get the submit button title from the x and y click coordinates titles [which IE is so thoughtful not to ignore])

For partial improvements:

[mblase]

Try Avant Browser [avantbrowser.com] if you must use IE. It adds a shell around the browser for tab integration, popup blocking, and all those other goodies you like best about Opera and Mozilla.

Sadly, it can't do anything for IE's HTML or CSS support....

Re:This is nothing new

[stratjakt]

Word Processors: What else can they add? Word integrates with every thing else in the Office suite, has about every feature I can imagine..

Programming tools: the Vis Studio IDE, frankly, rocks. I can dynamically recompile code, make changes in a C project as I'm stepping through it. Dyn-o-mite! Again, I can't think of anything I would want it to do that it doesnt.

If anything, these have too many features that I never use.

While we're on the topic: IE and PNG

[pheph]

Wehile we're on the topic of IE and web-standards, I thought i'd express my frustration with IE and its inability to handle PNG transparency at ALL! Not one bit. PNG not only offers transparency, but partial transparency [w3.org], which can really improve the look and ease of development of many modern web sites... But we're forced to use the unremarkable GIF which only offers binary transparency...

Oh IE, why can you not support an open standard [w3.org] correctly?

Their last set of changes sucked!

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use IE 5.0. My upgrade to 6.0 lasted about a week. It's unstable as hell! Regardless of the fact that it's a piece of swiss cheese, it doesn't run well!

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of innovation, from the story posting:
There's 31 un-patched holes in IE, but MS won't talk about it...

How far have we come in forgetting how to use English? "There is thirty one un-patched holes"!?

- Disgruntled Coward

No motivation

[matchlight]

Clearly Microsoft has no motivation to continue upgrading their browser, as stated already, since they have no sizeable competition.
This is one of the reasons why they've had so much legal troubles. Giving away IE in hopes of quashing Netscape worked well even if it is anti-competitive.

More importantly is MS's general failure with a security model (or lack of one). The operating system has a poorly and retrofitted set of security features. Add on top of that "features" that all but wipe out security like:

active content executed from the browser without some type of sandbox

e-mail clients that do the same

the complete misunderstanding of administrator vs. user

an open-by-default mentality to installations
Add on top the total lack of revenue that directly comes from IE and this is what comes of it.
The sad thing is that if they had only spent more "quality time" on design and implementation, like any software development project, they would be spending less and making more now. What makes them different than most software makers is that they can buy and sell most other companies a few times over and still have this problem.

Innovation and Online banking

[lkratz]

I use Mozilla for the day to day browsing but I still have to use IE to access my online banking application.

galeon is better

[Ender Ryan]

If you think Safari is so hot, try Galeon 1.3.9 on Linux. It is by far the greatest browsing experience ever, period. It is 200% more stable and has more features than safari, and the moz rendering engine is far more complete and robust.

Unfortuneatley, Camino development seems to be very slow, otherwise it would be the best browser available for OS X.

Not that I'm knocking Safari, it's an excellent browser, in fact, it's better than vanilla Mozilla.

Windows needs a feature complete browser based on moz, but one that has a *better interface than mozilla.

Firebird is looking really good, but isn't quite there yet.

* better being defined as something people would like more, although I think it's better than most windows UIs...

I like mozilla :)

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be die hard Internet Explorer fan (due to frequent crashes in Netscape) but I have to say that I am now a converted Mozilla user - much more stable and seems faster. Its worth it alone for the tabbed browsing.

On thing that does really irritate me is when a website does not support Mozilla by using MS only features - most of the time I just don't go to those.

Re:Safari

[tangent3]

Safari is based on the KHTML engine, so the closest I've see to getting Safari ported to Win32 is the khtml-win32 [sourceforge.net] project. Another possibility is kde-cygwin [sourceforge.net] for the whole kde package...

Re:While we're on the topic: IE and PNG

[Bishop923]

Actually you can use a IE only CSS Kludge [alistapart.com] to get Full Alpha-Transparency Support. I agree though it should be completely integrated.

Something else about PNGs that I have found rather odd is that IE will render the colors a shade or two darker than Photoshop and even other browsers. I can make a PNG with a color like #3366CC and IE will render it closer to #0066CC. Very subtle difference but noticeable.

What did we learn from this?

[Yaa 101]

1. do not give bug reports to MS as they are not woth it, let them pay for our service, they make us pay too for all the crap they make.
2. break your pages for IE and tell the people why this is the case and blame MS for it while offering Mozilla Firebird, these are exactly the same tactics that MS played at first.
Most people i got turned over to Firebird are extremely satisfied, more so as it does not need a installer and thus give people in restricted company environments a second chance to browse beyond their crippled IE.
3. wait with directing people to Opera, it's a nice fast browser with a MAJOR problem, A totaly crippled DOM, the things you need to do to make Dynamic HTML posible is to cry of.

If I may say...

[devphaeton]

A lot of people (even die-hard WindowsXP users that are either afraid of or hate GNU/Linux or *BSD) i have shown Firebird to have jumped right on it. Others use Netscape or Opera.

Microsoft keeps touting this "We've won the Browser War!", but really... IE is a clunky, buggy, crash-prone and behind the times mess. Its mere existence is a pure security risk. It lacks numerous useful (not just frivolous) features that many other browsers have (i.e. tabs, popup blocking, working java, etc).

In short, IE is at the bottom of the pile. It may have had some advantages in the past, but aside from the New Crayola Interface, using IE feels like 1998 all over again.

Re:While we're on the topic: IE and PNG

[_xeno_]

I can make a PNG with a color like #3366CC and IE will render it closer to #0066CC. Very subtle difference but noticeable.

First of all, I think the difference between #3366CC and #0066CC is quite noticible, but that's beside the point. The reality is that IE is actually operating the way it's supposed to - the PNG standard includes a feature called "gamma correction" where a gamma number is stored into the PNG image and the given viewer is supposed to correct for the gamma on their system.

Obviously, something's wrong with the gamma support in one of the applications - either Photoshop is saving an incorrect gamma value, or IE is using an incorrect gamma correction routine and is making the image darker than it really is.

For web use, you should disable gamma correction by not saving it to the PNG file - this will prevent gamma correction from taking place and make a #3366CC color come out as #3366CC in any viewer so that it matches an HTML #3366CC. It's a simple checkbox in the Gimp (where I do most of my simple PNG editing - I'm a programmer, not a graphic artist), but I don't know how to do it through Photoshop. I'd imagine it's possible, though.

Re:the little mo

[asa]

I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.

How so? It's the exact same technology. In fact, Mozilla is going to split up into Firebird and Thunderbird soon. So, Firebird is simply Mozilla without the e-mail client.

No it's not. Firebird is a completely different application based the Mozilla Gecko core technologies. It shares much of the Mozilla backend but it is not "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client." If you want to use "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client," then select Navigator only in the Mozilla installer. Compare that to firebird and you'll see how they're quite different applications.

--Asa

Re:the big mo

[wsapplegate]

> how exactly could it do better than blocking *all* popup ads I don't want to see?

Hmmmmm... Let me check... What about blocking the popup ads I don't want to see AND not blocking the useful pop-ups I need on some websites ? Konqueror does just that with its `` intelligent '' (grrrr... why is /. stripping my angle quotes ? The lameness filter doesn't like good typography ?) javascript mode, where it selectively allows popups based on the event that triggered them : an onClick() would be A-OK while an onLoad() would be a big no-no. Mozilla doesn't seem to care and still forces me to (1) wonder why the Hell my clicks don't seem to do anything, (2) look at the $@!# URI, (3) go into the preferences screen and (4) unblock the site. Plain stupid.

OK, Moz has some good things (a very good rendering, to start with), but I still find it slow (compared to Konqi), and sometimes just stupid (I'm still wondering what use has XUL besides giving me a browser where some widgets look like my other apps and others do not, and slowing down the software), or broken (why can't I choose which mailer to launch on a mailto: link ?). I'll stop here the rant, but I frankly don't think the quest for the ideal browser stops at Mozilla's FTP site.

Oh, and BTW, if you want to compare pop-up blockers, here's a site [popuptest.com] that could be of interest...

Re:This is nothing new

[Tronster]

I think the point many have made here that when MS's competition doesn't exist, innovation slows to a trickle is correct.

For your example of Programming Tools though, I would say Java technologies are what has force MS to create .NET, and would disagree about no innovation in the Visual IDE.

As a Visual Studio 6 and .NET developer (for both leisure and enterprise software), I have observed that Visual Studio .NET contains many features not integrated in other developer packages (KDevelop, Boreland, etc...) I was happy to see Borland stepping up to the fight with C++BuilderX as that means alternatives are starting to emerge.

Re:This is nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

IDE slowed to a trickle? Have you even looked at them recently? In the past two years the engine was entirely overhauled, and languages brought significantly closer to spec, remote debugging introduced, portable emulation for debugging provided, etc. And in a year's time another version will be out that provides significantly more features.

Your breath smells when you talk out of your ass.