Microsoft Not Worried about FireFox 674
didde writes "It seems like our friends in Redmond are quite happy about IE. According to this article, they won't be updating it until Longhorn. My favorite quote would be [We have a very, very innovative set of capabilities that we're putting in the next version. And in the meantime it's an extensible platform, and there will be a set of extensions that Microsoft does as well as others.] Oh boy, are they actually working side by side with the virusmakers and phishers?" That just gives the MozBoys a year head start.
New Exploit found (Score:3, Interesting)
Silicon.com [silicon.com] reports that there's a new Trojan named Phel that takes advantage of the Help (get it?) controls in internet explorer. Though the expoit's been known about since October, Microsoft is still "testing" the patch, and isn't expected to release it anytime soon.
Re:Working with phishers? (Score:0, Interesting)
Microsoft could close these loopholes back up, so why aren't they? Most likely they are getting quite a bit of money (bribes) from the spyware companies, and feel no need to take away this revenue stream. Sounds pretty suspicious to me.
Re:If they have to say they aren't worried... (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox is nice, but not Perfect (Score:1, Interesting)
And so, I'm sorry to say that IE has the most correct model of settings there is. Konqueror has the next best, and Firefox still uses the old Netscape model. I want to browse by default with cookies and Javascript turned off and Java disabled. These settings often need to be turned on together by site. It's more correct to group the settings by site than it is to group them by feature. IE groups its settings by what ``zone'' a site falls in. If instead of only providing four zones, they allowed a user configurable number of zones (perhaps one for each site looked at frequently), then they'd have something nice. Not that I'll ever use IE again anyway.
I'd also like super logging capabilities. Offline browsing doesn't always work with Firefox, as some image or something wasn't cached for some reason. This is unacceptable. The webserver I accessed has a record of every file I downloaded from them. I want a record of this too, and the ability to store any file I download indefinitely.
Remember. A web browser is my interface to the Internet, not the Internet's interface to me.
These are all complaints against Firefox. Internet Explorer is beyond repair, no matter how confident Microsoft is about it. IE's mishandling of MIME types makes it unsafe to even let IE _touch_ Freenet. IE has a horrible track record. If I were in charge of IE, I'd glue Active-X stuff onto Firefox to get the next version of IE.
Head Start? (Score:5, Interesting)
They'll need that head start.. Has anyone here actually tried developing for the Mozilla platform? It isn't a walk in the park. The documentation available on XULplanet, mozilla.org, etc, although improving, is rather sparse and frequently out of date. Even some books on mozilla development are out of date already - RAD in Mozilla (published this year I believe) has some wrong details about XUL tree selections, for example. One thing that the mozilla development community needs badly right now is a php.net, wiki-style website to encourage anyone and everyone to frequently update documentation easily and in small pieces. This is a tremendous amount of work, but I for one would be more than willing to contribute bits and pieces as I come across them. This basic documentation step needs to be done to encourage people to develop sites and applications for the Mozilla platform -- and to a greater extent, more modern w3c standards (DOM2/3,CSS2/3,etc).
I think that what the Firefox devs have done is an absolutely amazing feat of marketing and UI-cleanup, however, there is a huge amount of legacy code in web applications and scripts and pages in general dedicated to MSIE's own proprietary DOM, ActiveX, and rendering quirks. We need to bring those people to the standards-compliant world and, to a lesser extent, to the Mozilla platform.
I just don't see that critical mass in the application side of things yet, and that will be part of winning the battle. If XAML and so-forth start to make inroads, we are in trouble.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as Linux is concerned, it is doing very well on the server but is pretty insignificant on the desktop and will probably remain so for the furseeable future.
I'm not worried either. (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft seems to have fogotten that competition benefits everyone, including their own bottom line.
I for one, choose to use Firefox. Not because it's open source, but because it works for me.
Re:Worse=better (Score:2, Interesting)
They could then do crazy things like offer desktop/file search from your bowser... yeah google do this for you today, but MS could go deeper, they could intrgrate all this technology so that your standard windows file chooser applet is integrated.
Then when you want to open a file you can searh your disk, the web or your "search group" (where a search group could be a group of colleagues or friends PC's, imagine waste http://waste.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] integrated into the OS, and included in your search results?
Naturally all this would be nicely integrated with DRM (incase your searching of sharing any mp3's divx or whatever).
MS could release longhorn with technology like this to great fanfare, sure most of this is doable today, but MS can kick up quite a stink and are mighty handy at the old Marketing game....
Mozilla, Viruses and Exploits (Score:4, Interesting)
This is probbably true, at this point in time.
A common misconception (which happens to be one of my pet peeves) is that this is because microsoft write bad code, microsoft devs are not security minded or are incompetent, open source code is better code just because it is open source, or Microsoft are in league with virusmakers, and various other manner of of BS.
Here's the news people: Microsoft can afford as good a development team as anyone else. They can afford to hire extra devs for their QA teams as well as their dev teams, QA devs that read code, something many software houses just hire techs that know mercury products for. They can afford to have two (probbably more) devs per line of code - one to stick back and fix bugs, another to run ahead with the next generation of code. Not many software houses can do that (thus affording a larger dev attention span to bugs) either.
And Open Source is as prone to bad methodology, bad coding, non-security-minded coding, bugs and what-have-you as any other code. OS devs make mistakes too.
The advantage MS has in many highly-paid devs is offset by open source being exposed to immense scrutiny levels by being open, but, having seen quite a bit of OS, this doesn't always guarantee someone will volunteer to fix it.
I don't think either has a check-mate advantage over the other in this respect.
Today, Firefox's security advantage lies in one single factor: The very little attention it is getting from the people who write exploits.
Once it makes more sense for them to assume mostly FF browsers will be running their malware, they *will* write malware for FF, open source or no open source. They *will* find ways to exploit FF, or any number of its (sometimes very-widely-installed) extensions, which do not undergo the same code scrutiny of the core FF team. They *will* find ways to exploit plugins, which are often not Open Source at all and are as exploitable as IE in this sense.
All it takes is a critical mass installbase for FF, and that cozy misleading feeling of security will fly right out the window.
My 2 cents.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:1, Interesting)
"But your desktop is not The Desktop, you don't count, because you're tech-savvy enough to run linux".
Bullshit. Linux is already on thousands upon thousands of desktops, mine included. Linux is ready for anyone with a normal IQ. I realise that excludes large swathes of the USA, but hey, Microsoft can have the idiots - I only care about Microsoft when they start to try to stop ME doing what I want to by paying for new ultra-fascistic patent laws.
Why do Microsoft need a browser? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:2, Interesting)
MS inherited the old Netware/Vines market for intranet servers, but the Internet server market has never really belonged to them - what inroads they have made in that market are not strong enough to survive a better product as anything other than a legacy system. Linux will not be able to take the intranet market from MS for quite some time, but their market share in that space must be suffering a steady erosion. I agree that Linux on the desktop is still a long ways off (if ever), the economics of the PC business would need to change - the current system is kind of deadlocked into place, but one of the keystones could somehow slip and everything shift into a new placement.
Re:Head Start? (Score:4, Interesting)
I couldn't agree with this more (and I wish that I hadn't already posted elsewhere in this article, so I could mod this up :-( ).
I have on three separate occasions started to attempt some some-scale Moz-based Web Service development stuff, armed with books and the lastest available info off the mozdev site. On all three occasions the result was the same: after about eight hours of massaging examples with increasing frustration, I finally admitted defeat and decided to wait until someone else has done something sufficiently similar so I could look at it and figure out how this stuff really works.
Now, I readily admit that I was doing this simply for fun to try to understand how things like SOAP are supposed to work in Moz -- so I wasn't in the usual panicy desperation mode that absolutely forces one to figure things out at any cost, but even so I found it disheartening that I couldn't simply read an article and example or two and make stuff work.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:5, Interesting)
The default homepage (Score:4, Interesting)
If some other browser gets the marketshare then MSN loses exposure which costs MS ad revenue.
FireFox doesn't offer anything that MS can't offer in IE. It's also far easier to recreate than to innovate. This is why they aren't too worried. It's simply an issue of economic viability as to whether or not MS will implement those features and push the updates out the door.
Re:I am worried about Firefox. Still needs work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I'm not saying your pet enhancement-bug isn't important, just that the devs have decided it's not worth the amount of work at the moment. Remember that there are over 5000 open non-enhancement bugs on the firefox product only...
Also, the enhancement you're talking about is going to be very, very difficult to implement without breaking stuff. I'm 99% sure that it's not even possible to do it without breaking some valid web-pages with onload and onunload javascript (and no, Opera hasn't succeeded in this, see this [quirksmode.org] for an example). Unless you have a solution for those problems, I suggest you choose a different tone for your critique...
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:2, Interesting)
(Ghandi)
Hope it's better than the current Longhorn Alpha (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a peice of crap. It's got a few minor improvements over IE6 (popup blocking, more security stuff), but adds:
1) The buttons are different sizes and placed in strange places to make it look more 'modern', but all it does is confuse the person using it.
2) On the File-Edit-View-etc bar, the background is light gray and the text is white. Very hard to see.
3) Back and forward buttons above the File-Edit-View bar, everything else below, and very small.
4) No major improvements over IE6 SP2.
5) Slow page load times.
6) Bloat- FireFox loads twice as fast.
In short, the current IE7 builds look bleak. Hopefully they'll improve for MS's sake, but otherwise, they're really not doing much other than ripping off Safari's look and rearranging the buttons to make it harder to figure out.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not the really important thing though. The really important thing is that they have been unable to leverage those monopolies to gain monopolies in other fields despite trying desparately to do so.
They have suffered one severe setback another whether it's MSN, MS-TV (whatever the hell that was), set top boxes, MS at work, SQL server, IIS, NT server, Active directory,
Some of those products are successful but none of them have achieved a monopoly which is the only goal for MS that counts.
As long as MS fails to leverage their monopolies to achieve other the world is a better place.
In time their current monopolies will erode and wither, all empires fall eventually but the big ones take a while.
How do you get a patch is to OSS? (Score:2, Interesting)
A new poster will have and changes vigorously scrutinised, and even for the more regular project members there are quite a few people reading the list who will validate the patches whoever they are from.
Having said that trust levels are a bit mixed, the code of more frequent contributors tends to get glanced over causing bugs to needlessly be introduced.
The main problems I have found with OSS are:
Too few standards and integration, as a obvious example look at config files or command line arguments(what do I do for: help, version, verbose?). I think this is because the amount of organisation required to standardise software is quite high, and no one likes doing that kind of nitty-gritty work anyway.
Feature creep.
a: When a new version is released typically it has, stable functions, new slightly buggy functions and unsupported or beta functions that break 50% of the time. Commercial software would have dropped the broken functions regardless of how important they are.
As an example KDE document relations tool bar [kde.org].
b: OSS never seems to stop being developed, why can libxyz or whatever be written and put on a 6 month update cycle to take account of any changes. If libxyz really needs all this extra functionality why mot make a separate library and agree some standards so everyone can use it? If it's still being hacked, do a re-write with a better architecture that doesn't require so many updates.
As an example, emerge -up world tells me
sys-libs/db, come on guy's freeze berky db and start working on a more advanced db instead of trying to hack improvements in.
Wikis don't work for technical documentation. (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing that the mozilla development community needs badly right now is a php.net, wiki-style website to encourage anyone and everyone to frequently update documentation easily and in small pieces.
Wikis don't work for technical documentation! In order for technical documentation to be usable, it has to be clear, complete, correct, and current. That is the bare minimum. In order for it to be good, it also has to be consistent.
Wikis don't guarantee any of the above criteria. Wiki advocates have even argued against completeness because it discourages participation. They've also decided against correctness in favor of a neutral point-of-view. Many under-edited contributions from different people also guarantee duplication, contradiction, and inconsistency. If anyone tries to straighten out the mess, then revert wars are the result.
So take it from a documentation volunteer, the best results are produced by a central maintainer. The maintainer coordinates contributions and edits them with the reader in mind. The maintainer can either be a person or a team, depending on the size of the task.
Re:Mozilla, Viruses and Exploits (Score:1, Interesting)
To add a little to what has been said, it's actually untrue that Firefox has not been subjected to any attention by malware writers. The whitelistinng of XPIs and "Information Bar" were a direct response to sites that tried to force users to install some piece of spyware onto their computer.
Now I don't claim that Firefox is in any sense immune to security issues; extensions have the possibility to be a walking nightmare (extensions on update.mozilla.org don't get formal code review and so could contain hidden keyloggers and so on, extension authors may unwittingly introduce security problems into the chrome code, and so on) but it's certianly not clear that the Mozilla Foundation will repeat the years of neglect by Microsoft that led to the current web environment. If Microsoft had released something like XP SP2 in 2002 when it was first needed, IE would never have got a reputation for sieve-like security (among the general populus, at least) and Firefox would have much less momentum.
I should probably make an insightful comment about capatalism here but...
I forsee a beating or two in redmond tonight... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ouch.
I still have to use IE for a couple of sites - mostly ones inside my own company. And that's fine; I trust my own IT people and my own HR department. But using IE to casually browse the web just seems like a very bad idea.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:2, Interesting)
Vast quantities of the transactions comprimising the world's economy are handled as cells in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. A virus that quietly mucked with them (instead of shouting "Look at Me, my author is elite!!!" (can't be arsed writing in leetspeak)), would cause untold havoc once its existence came to light (hopefully well after the fact) - the c(r)apitalist system would become much less trustworthy, markets would crash, people would demand all their money from banks, etc.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:3, Interesting)
Internet Explorer isn't being updated.
Windows Server 2003 is a yawn.
SQL Server hasn't done anything exciting, except come out with a desktop version.
Anything new in Office?
On top of that, they are being slaughtered by Apple who keeps coming out with great things that people need to buy. Apple keeps redefining what the computer experience is. Linux keeps redefining what the server experience is.
Where did Microsoft go? Honestly, I at least expected some vaporware.
What gives? Not that I'm complaining, though.
Re:'Innovations' (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm really glad we have all of this freedom to innovate. I mean, look at how far the word processor market has advanced, give ten years of freedom. Since Office 95, Word has improved by... um... well, at least the paperclip is 3D now.
Okay, Word is stagnant. But - but - but we have freedom to operate! Without this, we wouldn't've had the flood of new competitors in the word processor market who've striven to dethrone Word by heavily pushing the development edge and offering great, innovative alternatives! ... Er, wait, that hasn't happened either.
Face reality. In most software markets, "freedom to innovate" means that everyone sits around and waits for someone to develop an improvement, and then they copy that improvement. So what's the point of wasting money on R&D when your competitors will do it for you? Specifically, what's the point of creating a whole new product to take on Microsoft, the king of stolen innovation?
And so, the word processor market has stagnated for a decade. Ditto spreadsheets. Ditto small database software, too, and PowerPoint, and Media Player. We've seen the same apps banged out with 1995+(x) labels, the same price tags, and no new features. It's likely to continue.
This cycle of stagnation is exactly what software patents are designed to break. It gives companies to invest in researching new ways of doing things, on the promise that their competitors won't immdiately copy them. Yes, the bleeding edge is likely to be dulled by patent concerns. But it spurs development in commodity applications, which, in fact, comprise most of the software market.
Keep in mind that biotechnologists raised the same chicken-little cry when the USPTO started issuing biotech patents: an end to biotech innovation, interference with daily activities, and general calamity for the future of biotech. Thirty years later, biotech looks amazingly vibrant - one of the few bright spots in our post-industrial economy.
- David Stein
Re:If they have to say they aren't worried... (Score:3, Interesting)
-- Bill Gates, 1993
I am very thankful he had this attitude (apparently for at least a few years?) :-) If Microsoft had jumped on the web bandwagon and started offering a cheap web server with one of their server products, life on the web would probably be sucky indeed. Or if the web hadn't caught on for a few more years. They obviously clued in when they started including explorer with the OS though huh?
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft no longer dominates the world of talking Barney dolls.
Of course the Barney partnership was the real PR blunder, all that anti-trust stuff was just people trying to get at Barney through Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft is under any threat in the desktop area from Linux any more than they are under threat from Apple. Its actually quite hard to loose a dominant market position in the software industry because of the network effect.
The companies that have lost a dominant position have mostly done so through total negligence. Lotus and Wordperfect both refused to support either the Microsoft or the IBM GUI. They also charged a bucketload of cash for their product and did not drop prices when computing became a mass market. When I bought my first copy of office it was cheaper than buying either Lotus OR Wordperfect.
The markets that have gone Linux are mostly markets that ten years ago were dominated by 'engineering workstations', mostly running SunOs or Solaris.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting you should say that. All the people I know who want new computers
are migrating from Windows machines to Macs based on the advice of their more
technically minded friends (who, by the way, run linux or plan 9 on their own
desktops).
The business desktop seems to be the last refuge of Windows. I expect this
to change in the near future.
Makes perfect sense not to be worried (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Security.
2. Tabbed browsing.
3. Popup blocking.
4. Various little things, like a better Options dialog and nicer text searching.
Now let's look at this from the point of view of a multi-billion dollar sofware development house that already has an existing and popular browser (i.e. Microsoft):
1. The big security problem is allowing ActiveX controls. You can already fix this by raising your security level to High. Microsoft can make this the default in ten seconds of developer time.
2. Tabbed browsing is nice, but how long would it take to add to IE? A week? A month? Microsoft could do this in a hearbeat, and likely already has internally.
3. Popup blocking is something that Microsoft added as part of XP Service Pack 2.
4. Again, as with #2, these would be doddles for Microsoft to add.
Now what's more likely here is that Microsoft is thinking big and has something up its sleeve that the FireFox guys aren't even considering. The worry, for those people who insist upon viewing this as a battle, is that FireFox is going to look like an improved and polished version of IE, and the next IE is going to be leap beyond it.
Because FireFox has problems... (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmm De-facto standard. (Score:1, Interesting)
Please note 95% is higher than Microsoft Office 2003 what comes in with a 92% when compared against documents from all version of Office before it.
Basicly OpenOffice is playing catch up with this fileformat but is doing it better than what microsoft has expected. Snaping backward compad ie not being able to open old document correctly is a Microsoft problem what is getting worse.
Note Version 2.0 this year of OpenOffice will be far more compad than all other versions.
De-facto Standard is not a real standard because it is only De-facto and can be defeated because it is not compad. PDF is the De-facto standard for Business to Business data.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:5, Interesting)
Setup an X server with a pretty desktop.
Tell the users "We'd like to enable you to work faster. From this point forward, just doubleclick this. We installed a new version of Office and Internet explorer, they are called OpenOffice and Firefox. If you don't like this, feel free to use your Windows98 system."
I had zero Win98 users within a month, and zero Windows XP users within 3 months. That's a 400+ user environment.
They still think it's new Windows. The management thinks that not paying for 400 terminal services licenses is priceless.
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We're heard this line before (Score:3, Interesting)
Ask any company CEO, MD and you'll find that staying at the top is another challenge in itself. Microsoft is discovering this (almost certainly the management of all areas already know this).
Firefox is in trouble. (Score:3, Interesting)
MS software is crap; Firefox is superior (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone who's used Firefox knows it's better than IE. It has 10% market share already. More and more people are coming to use it. The things keeping people with MS IE are familiarity and search-costs.
However, people get sick of popups and virus'. You know, most people I know who've gotten food-poisening at a restaurant never go back to that restaurant again. It takes some 200 good experiences to negate just one bad experience with a company.