Yahoo Pushing IE7 On Firefox Users 300
El Lobo writes "Looks like things are heating up again in the browser wars. Google has been openly supporting Firefox, so now Yahoo is displaying a new feature on search results pages for FireFox users. It appears that Yahoo is pushing downloads of IE7 from Microsoft and including itself as the default search engine installed in the file menu area." I got the invitation to download IE7 when running Firefox on a Mac, and even when running IE5 under CrossOver; but not when running IE7 under Parallels.
Yahoo Games (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Not "pushing" until they block your user agent. (Score:3, Interesting)
Search-Market Consolidation and Free Market (Score:5, Interesting)
The same happened in the market for 0x86 processors. The market once had numerous strong competitors: AMD, Nexgen, Cyrix, Centaur, and Intel. Now, there are only 2 major players: AMD and Intel.
The search market is facing a similar consolidation -- in 2 phases. The market once had numerous strong competitors: Microsoft, Google, AltaVista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, etc. After the first phase of consolidation, there are 3 major players: Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Now, the market is entering the second phase of consolidation. Like the personal computer, the search tool is a commodity product with almost no product differentiation. A search on Yahoo works just like a search on Microsoft Live. Why do we need 3 essentially identical products on the market?
The market appears to be consolidating into (1) Google being the major player and (2) the merger of Microsoft and Yahoo being the minor player. The recent loss of search market share from Yahoo to Google is also nudging Yahoo into being acquired by Microsoft.
Yahoo is leaning in that direction by giving preference to IE7.
ads? too many (Score:3, Interesting)
Compare that to google with it's adsense ads. Small, unobtrusive, text ads....
Whether Yahoo prefers IE or not [btw the BETA client works just fine in Seamonkey..] is moot compared to the horrible placement of all the ads...
Tom
yahoo pushing firefox - no really (Score:4, Interesting)
"Use Yahoo! to search from Firefox
Just select "Yahoo!" from the search box drop-down menu in your browser"
screenshot [flickr.com]
So Yahoo seems to be advertising its own search service more than anything else. Huh...who'd have though a search company advertising their own search service - the horror. They are hardly pushing it - that'd be forcing you to download IE7 with the yahoo toolbar bundled and blocking dedicated FF+typically Google users like me.
Utter bs. Must be a slow news day.
huh! (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yahoo? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fair enough (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not about search... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fair enough (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, I always have problems with people that begin their argument with "the fact that." Most of the time these "facts" turn out to be opinions.
That aside, why is it that everyone makes such a big freakin' deal about what browser Joe Customer uses? The argument I see most posted goes something like this:
Microsoft has forced too many users to IE! They're anti-competitive--leaving no room for alternatives! Too many people use IE! Don't they know that everyone should be using Firefox?
Maybe I'm a little on the thick side today, but how is everybody using Firefox better than everybody using IE? Isn't that just as anti-competitive?
And, before you web designers and developers start chiming in about CSS compliance, think about this: in a hypothetical world where all extant browsers were CSSx compliant, would it really matter which browser anyone used?
What I've found over the years is that it's an extremely teenage attitude to assert that just because one prefers iPod over Zune, or Firefox over IE, or Skecher over Nike, that everyone else should as well. I believe it's called...egocentrism?
Re:Fair enough (Score:3, Interesting)
The "development branch", the "alpha", the "beta" and the "release candidate" don't count. If you want to compare development branches, Opera [opera.com], Konqueror [kde.org], and Safari make Firefox look even more pathetic.
Re:Fair enough (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that the Linux side of things should *REALLY* start to emphasize binary compatible trees at the kernel level, as I honestly get tired of having to update drivers every kernel update... Sometimes things break when this happens.. far less likely with BSD over Linux.
Emerge which is Gentoo's claim to fame is modelled after the BSD ports system, which has been around far longer. BSD's binary package system has been around longer than apt, yum, or other linux distribution systems is stable, and consistant.
The down side is BSD hasn't reached any critical mass. The FreeBSD, and I would assume the OpenBSD installers are a painful experience getting a system setup, especially getting software raid working (though I prefer hardware). Driver support is limited, and most new drivers are ports of linux drivers, however the support layer is pretty good. There is also a linux compatability layer which will allow for most linux binaries to run.
For the desktop side, PC-BSD [pcbsd.org] has made huge strides, it's very easy to get installed, and use... there are a few other desktop oriented versions, but imho this is the best. It's installer is based in QT and is basically a FreeBSD 6.x install with X-Windows, and KDE installed an preconfigured, there are also some extra configuration utilities that are enhanced, in addition to some custom utils.
Re:Fair enough (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be nice to see Konqueror's browser engine ported to a usable browser for Windows, for at least testing... I finally got around (today) to tweaking my hobby website for non-windows users, given that pt sizes are different between windows and osx or linux.
I would suggest at *LEAST* testing in a minimum of IE6 (if you need to support it), IE7 (though some of the bugs in it *REALLY* piss me off), and Forefox 2
Suggestion: Use a platform that supports server-side scripting. Have the header section issue css files as follows...
- site.css
- site.BROWSER.css
- site.BROWSER.MAJ.css
- site.BROWSER.MAJ.MIN.css
- page.ext.css
- page.ext.BROWSER.css
- page.ext.BROWSER.MAJ.css
- page.ext.BROWSER.MAJ.MIN.css
Where the actual file exists, and browser is broken down into the class of browser. This way you can have your main css, and tweak for browser instances... you can also have a page css, as well as browser tweaks at that level, yes, checking for each of these files existance is a small overhead (not bad with most file-systems that cache this information), but it is well worth it. Generally I have the site, site.IE, site.OPERA, and site.IE.7.0 at this point, and rarely have to include browser specific tweaks in the page's css.Re:Fair enough (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No need for CSS hacks (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course if the CSS hack wasnt widespread, there wouldnt be much gain from eliminating the advertising...
Re:Fair enough (Score:5, Interesting)
See here is again is what people don't get...
One of the reasons IE became as popular as it did is that it didn't 'fail' when pages were formatted improperly or 'downloaded' improperly (remember dial up?)
In the 4.x browser war days there were a couple of things that MADE people prefer IE or Netscape. One of them was the fact that a missing tag at the end of a table wouldn't cause the page to not display AT ALL as it did in Netscape, so even if the page was messed up, IE would try to render it based on the information it had.
Now a lot of people see this as a flaw, but if you look at the technology it is actually a 'smart' feature that the browser would at the very least display a page even if it wasn't formed properly. Call it a form of programming 'intelligence'.
This is NO different than the CSS failures of IE and Firefox of today. They support 'legacy' tags that both browsers used and are not 'compliant', and they also will try to render page parts even if the tags and improperly formed. THIS IS WHY neither will ever fully pass all the CSS page tests on the web like ACID2, as they don't test for ability, but they MAINLY test for a browser's INABILITY to handle bad data and the developers expect the browser to NOT display the improperly formed tags.
This is really an argument that can go either way, as I see benefits in 'forcing' compliance, but I also understand that some sites are old and their data would be inaccessible or lost if every browser only conformed to strict CSS and ignored legacy tags or malformed tags. This is where I go, well it isn't hurting anyone for the browsers to be a bit smarter than the site developers.
Also everyone applauds Safari for being strict CSS, but the side note in this story is Safari also doesn't have to have any intelligence built in, nor does it worry about or handle old tags or malformed pages, they all become 'unworthy' and Safari isn't 'smart' enough to render them.
As for the browser wars of 4.x, there were a couple of other reasons IE was prefered over Netscape. Like the page refreshing when it was resized on Netscape or raw display performance.
In the end, I would pick Firefox or IE7 and their 'flaws', legacy support, and ability to render malformed pages over Safari any day. Web developers tend to suck in general and I would rather have some intelligence in my browser to help counteract crap pages, even if it means the browser will fail CSS standards.
However if you are web developer, just design the page with proper standards, watch for IE7 and not assume it renders like IE6 which sucked on several CSS abilities. Then just go for standards. PS the above posts are correct - TEST IN EVERY browser you can get your hands on, there are like 5 major browser players, it is not hard to do.
Re:Fair enough (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't a browser's responsibility, this is the design package's responsibility. We are past the days of people using notepad for major sites, so we also should be past the days of relying on the browser to tell us what we messed up.
Sadly, one of the companies that FINALLY has seemed to get this is MS, their new Web Designer/Sharepoint (Frontpage replacement) is very good about forcing the developer to adhere to the page rules they select. If they choose XHTML Strict, CSS xx, then the application will scold them if any tag is messed up and even explain why.
Sadly the old Frontpage really failed here, as well as dreamweaver and other tools. For example, just opening a site that the old Frontpage 2003 thought was perfect will show 100s of errors on the page and even explains that this tag will work but is not compliant and should be changed. Also incorporating the VS style of intellisense and redlining it might push a lot of developers to start making compliant sites.
I just hope the rest of the industry follows suit and not only builds better compliant making tools, but also forces the developers to adhere. Right now there are so many site development tools that try to make things easy for the developers, but in generating the code (like dreamweaver for example) the software generated code fails compliance miserably. Not everyone is a tag guru and can't then fix the software generated html that is messed up.
I think we all should put more pressure on site development tools and hosting sites that use really crappy standards, rather than complain about something that should be for end users, the browser.
Re:Fair enough (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't totally disagree with you, but here is where we are all focusing on the wrong end of this situation.
It should NOT be the browser's responsibility to debug our sites. Browsers are END USER tools that are to display the page the best it can with what crap the site provides. So, intelligence in the browser DOES screw the developer, but it HELPS the end users and that is what it should do, as they are the customers of the sites, the base.
We should instead focus on development tools that are smarter about compliance and force developers to adhere. Using MS as an example, a little intellisense wouldn't hurt a lot of the site developers. (Self closing tags, proper tags, redline bad tags, object preditction, etc.)
We shouldn't be developing major sites in notepad anymore, those days should be as far gone as developing Halo3 in notepad and compiling from the command prompt.
The development tools are where we should focus our anger about allowing crap they shouldn't or at least warning developers about crap tags. As I pointed out in another post, MS has finally 'gotten' this through their head, and the new replacement for frontpage is more of a site development environment. As far as web development tools, it is by far the most complete our developers have seen for keeping strict compliance, and is quite refreshing for them that they had some assistance that they are not using outdated tags or breaking the rules.
This is where the focus needs to be right now, espeically with so many standards and so few people understanding them well.
The only bridge between your concept of using a browser for debugging would be to ask for debugging versions of IE and Firefox (true debugging versions, not just one that displays crap wrong.) However, the focus right now STILL needs to be on the site development tools to do their job, expecially when there is software out there that generates HTML for novices and the generated HTML is horribly wrong when it comes to standards or compliance.
Windows geeks or anyone with a VM should check out the new Frontpage replacement software - it is in two versions, Sharepoint Designer as a part of Office and Web Designer as a part of the Expression projects. I think the betas are still available for download, and if not trial versions should be before long. They are not perfect, but a MAJOR step in the right direction considering these are from MS...