Microsoft Wins Browser War, Abandons 'Innovation' 794
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."
Purists (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure about "Microsoft wins"... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, I'm not sure if, in these numbers, "Netscape" includes "Mozilla".
P.S. This HTTP POST request sent by Mozilla.
Browser Wars Over? (Score:4, Interesting)
A small current marketshare can in no way infer that "The Browser Wars are Over" and that Internet Explorer will ALWAYS be the de-facto standard. Sure, Mozilla may have not have a huge marketshare at the moment, but then again, neither does Linux in terms of common Desktop usage to the average user.
I feel that when Linux really takes off as a real Windows alternative to the average user, Mozilla will really begin to shine, and it's market share will increase as Linux's market share increases.
The Browser Wars are certainly not over yet...they are just being postponed for a little while.
Re:Ease (Score:3, Interesting)
Obscurity is an evil now?
The only way to stop the cycle is to enforce the ruling to have Microsoft remove the browser from the OS.
Alternatively, the OEMs could start placing icons for Firebird and the free version of Opera on the desktops. Unfortunately, Microsoft would make their lives difficult if they tried the way things stand.
Maybe it's time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why should they improve IE ? (Score:5, Interesting)
How many web sites still say "requires IE5+" or whatever? How many websites rely on IE's quirks? By abusing their monopoly position, MS made "the web" and IE synonymous for most users, and required for many things (online banking, for example, often requires IE).
Of course customers want good browsers. They just can't see them past the big blue e on their desktop.
Re:Innovation with plugins (Score:5, Interesting)
IE is simple (mostly), but there's LOTS of room for improvement. It's no longer the best browser by any measure. Monopolies suck, plain and simple.
Long Time IE User (Score:5, Interesting)
I also work with several people who felt the same way.
In January or so I switched over to Opera because I got sick and tired of the pop-ups and IE had no good defense against them.
I had been using Mozilla at work for some time--having to develop for both IE and Mozilla platforms--but I hadn't been too impressed with it until about the end of the summer.
These security holes and the apparent lax nature by which MS is handling them in IE have actually scared most of my coworkers away from Internet Explorer for their day-to-day ops.
I mean, of course, when you go to the MSDN web site, you can't find a damn browser out there other then theirs that displays their pages with any kind of reliability (and I'm sure that's intentional). But for almost anything else, most sites written for IE display relatively well in Mozilla, better IMHO in Opera, and seem to display almost the same as IE in the latest build of Konquerer. And quite frankly, things seem quite a bit zippier in any one of those than in IE.
Most people won't switch because their too lazy to download the latest builds of the alternative platforms...fear though, is quite a powerful motivator.
Re:slashdotters unite to teach about alternatives (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can't say I have much sympathy for them. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I do. The main problem is that the customer throws a fit if the page doesn't display 'correctly' in a browser with the largest market share, which means you end up compromising the stylesheets and markup to please them, usually squeezing your budgets because you're competing with 'HTML 4.01 transitionals'.
So please don't blame developers; we've been badgering MS on regular occasions to fix their browser to match the recommendations that they helped to write in the first place.
Re:the big mo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the big mo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ease (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:slashdotters unite to teach about alternatives (Score:2, Interesting)
Last time I heard this kind of proposition, it was from an Amway salesperson. Didn't work then either.
Pyramid growth doesn't work if there's inertia in the first few levels. And there will be lots of inertia. As soon as you tell grandma that she's got to "download" something and "install" it, her eyes glaze over, she gives you a polite, "Yes dear. Of course I'll try it." and she goes back to her AOL/IE prepackaged system to check on the grandkids' picture.
JoAnn
Vulnerabilities disappeared (Score:3, Interesting)
Pivx was the company that had a website with a list of 31 vulnerabilities [216.239.57.104] in Internet Explorer. Two days ago they pulled it [pivx.com] with what sounds like a nice way of saying they were pressured to do so.
On Plug-ins (Score:2, Interesting)
Macromedia also uses their popularity to get into the middle-ware market with Coldfusion competing with ASP so Microsoft is effected. If they had better (standard) CSS and Javascript support on Explorer that would take market share from Flash and thus Coldfusion.
The only thing holding innovations like Flash back is their reliance on proprietary software. If there were open source equivalents to the Flash plug-in and authoring environment then the technology could really take off and maybe become more standardized and integrated into most browsers.
Companies like Microsoft and even Macromedia can not afford to liberate their technology to the degree it takes to change the browser. Our only hope is projects that are open to the public.
Mozilla Stats and Mozilla Aware Sites (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there some global browser stat site similar to what netcraft is to servers?
To encourage participation I recently added a browser aware cart (flexcart) that gives a 5% automatic discount if you are using a 1.0+ mozilla client.
The best observer of the browsers wars... (Score:2, Interesting)
I *LOVE* the big mo (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been testing Mozilla since the 0.6 release, I think, and I switched to it as my primary browser just before it went to 1.0. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was that IE couldn't properly render sites that were being Borg'd into MSN (i.e., ESPN). Mozilla had no such problems.
Tabbed browsing and popup-blocking were merely the icing on the cake, but now that I use Mozilla as my primary browser, I cringe when I'm forced to use IE for anything.
A couple of problems... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just this past week, I've installed Mozilla Firebird on both my work and home computers. I love the tabbed browsing interface - which is one thing I think IE needs to avoid losing market share to Opera and Mozilla.
I do see a couple of problems with using Mozilla as my full-time browser, though. First, is that (like it or not) many more pages are designed to work correctly with IE - without any consideration for other browsers. The company I work for is guilty of this, but I can't necessarily blame them because the other browsers have such a small market share. Why waste expensive development hours on something that a very small percentage of users will ever notice?
The second problem is that the Mozilla Firebird browser doesn't work nearly as well with accessing our Intranet sites at work because of all of the strange URLs that we have. It wants to add
Overall, I'm really impressed with Mozilla, but it's not quite to the point where I can quit using IE and switch over. That's where they need to get before they can possibly win the browser war.
Re:I'm not sure about "Microsoft wins"... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Innovation with plugins (Score:1, Interesting)
- Reading news.bbc.co.uk, I just middle-click on every story that interests me. They load in the background as tabs. I just click through all the topics, and suddenly I have 15 stories up there in the tab bar. Then it's just a matter of pressing the close button repeatedly as I finish with each story. Sure, I could open each story in a new window, but that would mess with whatever other app I'm running at the time by clogging up my task area.
- I have bookmarks that open up 15+ sites all at once. Great for reading all those webcomics, or all those blogs.
- On slashdot I often want to reply to comments before I'm done reading all of the comments. Most of the time I open up the reply window in a new tab, and that way all the comments I want to reply to in a story are neatly arranged in tabs after I'm done reading the main comments page.
I could give countless other examples, but it basically boils down to less clicks, and less wasted task area real estate.
Re:The purpose of a browser monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just blatant (and incorrect) Bush-bashing. The Clinton administration had backed away from going after Microsoft years before (and the states coalitions self-destructed almost as soon as they started, once MS leaned *hard* on OEMs and parts suppliers all over the country.) In fact, the DoJ began actively "losing" their case long before Bush was even a candidate. They did this in many ways, but mostly by restricting the entire argument of MS's misbehaviour to one tiny thing, which was a relatively small offense, given al lthe MS had done wrong: bundling the browser with the OS. Other huge infringements that could have been used were completely ignored, as MS had Reno bought and paid for within weeks of her press conference announcing the DOJ was going after Microsoft. The things ignored included the truly damning evidence from the Caldera suit, which clearly showed Gates and other top MS honchos were directly involved in deliberate efforts to ensure that other products could NOT operate with Windows, even if that meant adding encrypted code specifically to break those products: a very clear abuse of monopoly power.
In reality, the Bush administration just looked at the hash that Reno and the DoJ had made of an eminently winnable case and (quite correctly) decided that there was no point throwing good money after bad. The damage was done - Reno and the DoJ had had the best of all possible positions, and totally blown it. As much as I would have liked to see things turn out differently, this was the right call, given the situation.
And yes, I'm pretty familiar with what went on, as I was up to my armpits in IBM lawyers dealing with this from IBM's perspective for quite a while, and left Dell to avoid having to lie to the DoJ to protect Microsoft, which my boss quite probably would have expected had I stayed. (He did not hold a particularly high view of the law, even after being directly responsible for Dell having to shell out the largest corporate fine in Federal Trade Commission history - with "no admission of wrongdoing", of course...)
There's no question MS abused thier monopoly power, but the Sherman antitrust act has really been a complete joke since the forces for monopoly managed to keep Teddy Roosevelt from being elected president in 1912. (No that I think they were directly implicated in his shooting (there's no evidence I'm aware of there), but they cetainly did everything they could to capitalize on it, kmowing that he was the only candidate that would be sure to cause trouble for the monopolists, and would very likely ask Congress for even stricter regulations and penalty of monopoly abuse. The game's been over since then, and the monopolists won..)
This IS Something new (Score:4, Interesting)
What we have today is different than what has happened before. Before, one company dominated word processing, another had a lock on spreadsheets, another was the king of databases. But look at the situation now. When it comes to "productivity applications" (i.e. the programs that 90% of users use 90% of the time), the leaders are products FROM A SINGLE COMPANY.
Word Processing: Word
Spreadsheets: Excel
Presentation: PowerPoint
Planning: Visio
Database: Access
Web Browsing: IE
Email: Outlook
It goes on and on. No one is going to dethrone MS because they control the whole field. No one can get money and mindshare by succeeding in one area and then move into others, because MS controls ALL the areas. MS makes sure that most PCs come with MS applications that do everything, obviating the need to purchase any other software. If you're Joe/Jane User with limited funds, and your $500 Dell comes with programs to do all the things you need to do, why in the world would you spend more money or more time installing other programs that do the same thing?
Microsoft has a lock on the whole computer, especially now that they're extending their reach into the BIOS. The only reason they need to add more features now is to force users to upgrade their computers and feed the upgrade cycle.
As long as people can spend less than $1000 on a complete system that comes ready to use and has software that does everything they need it to pre-installed, and works pretty well most of the time, no one is going to switch to anything else.
Re:CSS (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree... I've made this very mistake with clients in the past. When things don't look good under IE 5.5 or sometimes even 5.0, they don't look at you as a cutting edge developer who they want to support, they look at you as someone too stupid to use conventional, reliable web coding techniques that work across browsers.
Still, even if you tend to the idea that the standards that matter most from a practical standpoint are de facto standards -- something which is certainly true when it comes to going to bat for your client -- the current state of things is *still* a problem. CSS wasn't just invented as a religion (though it's been adopted as such among some people) -- it was invented as a good solution to some practical problems. There are layout/design tasks made orders of magnitude easier by CSS (and a few that are impossible without it) -- and they'd be easier still if IE played to the standards. But they don't, and in that sense, Microsoft's refusal to invest the resources it would take to make this possible is a robbery of time and therefore money from web developers and their clients.
Re:Pass around Mozilla (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact is that people KNOW it works, and for that simple reason won't change. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! And they seriously believe it's not broken.
My girlfriend is also a fanatic Windows ME user, how strange that may sound. One moment she can strongly advocate that it's the most stable thing in the world, and the next tell me that she has to get off ICQ because she's going to burn a CD.
"Friends don't let friends use internet explorer". So true, but my friends REALLY believe it works, and they apparently have no problem with getting a virus because outlook autoexecuted it, or because they ran into another exploiting page. The internet is dangerous, it happens. I don't get the virus? Well, I'm a geek, my virus definitions are probably updated. Well, guess what: I haven't updated my windows 2K for at least the last six months.
Bottom line is: Internet Explorer works. It's insecure like you wouldn't believe it, it's slow, it doesn't do CSS or PNG transparency, it doesn't support tabs nor block popups, but they can see the pages. If they run into a page that doesn't work in ie, they avoid it, the page is bad. So do their friends, so that's no problem. If the same should happen in mozilla, the browser is bad - especially since all their friends use that page!