What If They Gave a Browser War and Microsoft Never Came?

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I don’t think that secretive development is the problem. Apple tends to be ber-sensitive about what they develop and still manage to be cutting edge and impressive most of the time.

Opera has closed-source model, “when it’s ready” schedule and they’ve managed to create one of the top SVG rendering engines, most complete CSS 2.1 implementation and recently jaw-dropping JS+DOM engine.

So I think the problem comes down to fear of progress. Chris Wilson does not want any backward compatibility trouble which were trouble for IE7, and his solution seems to be do absolutely nothing about it. The less they upgrade IE, the less compatibility problems they get.

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I suspect that it is taking time to integrate new features into IE8, some of which (such as VBx and their .Net-ified JavaScript) are still incomplete. I wouldn’t be surprised to see additional security hardening extending the development cycle either.

FireFox didn’t take off due to features or functions. It was just successfully marketed to the same sort of people who “need” a new cell phone every 12 months. It catered to conspicuous consumption and short attention spans, something the Mac market is all about (to get back on topic). I’m not saying those other platforms lack abosolute advantages, just that those advantages are irrelevant to uptake in this world of Madison Avenue psyops.

23

“So I think the problem comes down to fear of progress. Chris Wilson does not want any backward compatibility trouble which were trouble for IE7, and his solution seems to be do absolutely nothing about it. The less they upgrade IE, the less compatibility problems they get.”

Exactly!
And it’s also obvious in other areas they work.
Vista: big upgrade for the user, everybody cries foul.
Office2007: big UI changes, many people don’t like it.
(I’ve never used Vista or Office 2007)

If MS wants to move ahead, they have to make big changes to their existing products, but those products are their source of income! So they don’t dare to. Because when they do, users are alienated and start increasingly looking at other products: Linux, OSX, OpenOffice, …
MS is locked by their own money cows!

24

In Romania (East Europe) Opera has a market share of approx. 5% and Safari something like 0,3%…

Opera fan,

Andrei Rinea.

25

I just want to say that i love your color scheme and minimalism design for this website. It’s absolutely perfect in terms of readability and ease of use.

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I’m sure Microsoft’s IE engineers are smart and forward-thinking, but they have a huge backwards-compatibility problem to contend with, especially with some of those enterprise applications that most of us never think about. And the corporation’s strategic advantage is to commit just enough resources to keep MSIE balanced in the most-popular but least-capable position. The web mustn’t get good enough fast enough to let Google build a better MS Office in the browser.

Firefox, Opera, and Safari can all relaunch with your previous session’s browser tabs restored. Add persistent storage and state, auto-launch the browser at boot time, and you might not bother ever looking at the OS again. Microsoft fears this, and Apple is probably keeping an eye out for it too.

But the current situation isn’t likely to change, unless someone comes up with a next Napster or Facebook and has the balls to ignore MSIE compatibility. Perhaps such a thing might first appear on a phone, or game console, or in your car rather than on the computer desktop.

27

The real annoyance from my perspective is that IE7 isn’t enough of a stopgap - the fact that they didn’t release IE7 for 2000 is a dealbreaker that means many web developers must continue to suffer with IE6 for a long time yet. That’s YEARS MORE of the increased development times and painful workarounds that we all know and hate. There are of course no shortage of people in MS who understand and would like to have avoided the costs to the development community at large which that decision would mean - but they lost out to the “platform uber alles” pinheads. Microsoft as a company still just fundamentally doesn’t get it.

Working on a greenfield web app project right now, blazing along. Guess what? At least 20% of our existing customer base is on Win2K (these are people who got dragged from Win9x kicking and screaming), and we don’t think we can be prescribing Firefox in a hard-line “use it or go home” sense. IE6 of course botches all kinds of standards-based (X)HTML and CSS, where most every other browser out there treats it in a relatively uniform way. So, add a tremendous amount of thankless, head-splitting analysis and hacks to what is otherwise a fast-moving and fun project - because we still need to support this pig. Thanks Microsoft!

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“FireFox didn’t take off due to features or functions. It was just successfully marketed to the same sort of people who “need” a new cell phone every 12 months. It catered to conspicuous consumption and short attention spans, something the Mac market is all about (to get back on topic). I’m not saying those other platforms lack abosolute advantages, just that those advantages are irrelevant to uptake in this world of Madison Avenue psyops.”

Actually hmmm, firefox started getting popular due to its superior security features. Many end users only started using firefox because it’s more secure. Micro$oft is far behind in the browser world, something as simple as tabbed browsing, I remember tabs in netscape!

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Hmmm most of the reviews of Firefox 3 Alphas that I’ve read say that it is still insanely hogs memory, doesn’t give it back and calls it a feature. Wish they’d fix that. It is also strange not to mention Opera since it has had the supposedly impressive list of new Safari features for a while.

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Firefox took off because it was the best by a long shot, they successfully marketed to me and my cell phone is 8 (yes 8) years old. At the start it was fast, secure (except its password store feature) with an amazing add on facility. It won on merit. EB needs to get his facts straight.

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Opera 9.5 FTW

Funny you didn’t even mention it.

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“Besides, the reason why MS can’t tell anything about IE8, is that they themselves don’t know what will be in!”

Possibly true. Though at the very least they could/should have had an “IE 7.5” out by now with more progress made on the fixes and catching up to standards they begun in IE7.

“MS cannot innovate, it’s as simple as that.
Has MS ever made anything totally out of the blue? Something that wasn’t based on an idea of a competitor or bought in?”

Disagree. Microsoft can innovate as well as most of their competitors, at least in some areas and at some times.

XBox 360 was quite an innovative hardware design, for example.

IE4 was quite innovative in its day. Some of its ideas didn’t take off too well at the time but look at Widgets / Gadgets now and tell me that isn’t inspired by (among other things sure) IE4’s Active Desktop.

Staying with IE, the whole damn problem with that and netscape navigator was that back in the day each company innovated a little too much by trying to extend HTML in their own directions instead of sticking closely to the standards.

Actually speaking of standards. Active Directory could arguably be described as an innovative series of extensions to LDAP type services. If those changes were made by someone else I think that is exactly how they would have been described, but instead Microsoft are blamed for using proprietary extensions. But… surely that’s how a lot of innovation can be described?

Was the car really a brand new thing or was it embracing and extending the horse drawn carriage by removing the horse and adding some kind of proprietary self-propelling engine?

Is slagging off Microsoft for everything they do regardless of whether or not they deserve it really innovative on the part of the slashyawn crowd, or simply embracing and extending the reception IBM got back in the day?

“And especially wrt the Internet MS has always been a follower, never a leader. Sure, when they throw their weight behind something, they can easily catch up, but they cannot take the lead and for sure not with their stupid obsession with Google.”

Ok. We can all agree that being obsessed with another company instead of being obsessed with the cool things your own people might build if you only gave them the resources they ask for then get out of the way is no way to innovate.

Of course, innovation is all well and good but all these companies are measured by the money they make, not the innovation they display. Putting a bit of meat and some salad between two bars of soap might arguably be called innovation in the field of sandwich making, which just goes to show you that being obsessed with “innovation” at the expense of making what people want isn’t a good thing either.

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Hey Now Jeff,
I agree with you the add-on to Firefox are 2nd to none the competition is good for everyone. After reading this post I realize Apple is a contender. The reality is that such a large percentage of users will only use IE not even know about other browsers. I like thee last statement too, it is the most important app. For some it’s the only app they use.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto

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I think the perspective is all wrong. Why do we want I.E. complicating matters regarding standards etc. A better solution for both the consumer and Microsoft would be declaring explicitly that MS will never ever ever produce another browser, and that future versions of Windows will be shipped with an open source browser, with a default home page pointing to a Microsoft site, listing the latest versions of the major browser software (Firefox, Opera, Netscape etc.) and a detailed description of the performance and how well it adheres to standards, so that those who wish to change browsers can do so informed. I NEVER want to see another I.E. rolling out ‘special’ MS only features and quirks.

While we’re on the subject of browsers, I have just had to take my car for an MOT (road worthiness test). Why can’t code be built into all browsers, that tells a user (who is using IE 5.5 for example) that the internet ‘superhighway’ no longer supports the use of such a piece of crap, and that they can upgrade (link) or go back to the encyclopaedia and snail mail. My company is currently developing a variant of a usb jack in the box, that punches users instead of throwing up the error beep. This I hope will become a standard

Ouch! looks like I’ve just joined the S.S… now where did I stash those hard disks with digital art…?

35

Red,
Why shouldn’t Microsoft be allowed to ship a browser? Do you think they are the only ones with a shady past wrt standards support cough netscape cough?

I like the idea that someone else suggested where the current IE codebase is taken out and shot and Microsoft ship and all-new browser. I suspect that the current IE codebase has too much political and technical baggage now to ever produce a great new browser.

36

“IE 6 was a great browser-- in 2001.”

That actually made me laugh out loud.

Seconded. I began using Mozilla in 2001. It was already better than IE6.

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I found your article to be very inspiring. Specifically, it inspired me to find out who came up with that annoying “not so much” catchphrase that is polluting almost every blog I read. It was kind of funny the first few times I read it, but a few thousand times later it began to grate. Apparently it was coined a while back and used sometimes on Buffy but Jon Stewart is to blame for its current popularity:

http://www.azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/1031catchphrases1031.html

More on topic, who cares if Microsoft even comes out with an IE8? Would it be such a travesty if they bowed out of the browser market? There’s obviously value in competition, but there’s plenty of competition without Microsoft being in the game. The bad thing about Microsoft is they have too much influence, so if they choose to ignore broad areas of the standards, then that becomes the accepted way of doing things.

Most of the non-Microsoft browsers compete with each other on standards compliance, which is great because it moves everyone closer to the standards and makes browsers more of a commodity (exactly what Microsoft wants, hence their actions). That is good for the user, because they can they use any browser with the assurance that its page rendering will the the same, so they can choose the one with the feature set they like best.

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Correction to a typo in my previous comment: Making browsers a commodity is exactly what Microsoft does NOT want, hence their actions in putting their twist on various aspects of the standards and forcing competitors to render in “IE-compatible” mode.

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I don’t buy the without Microsoft we be in green fields argument with rosey glasses and waterfalls argument.

If Mozilla and Mac are so much better equipped why haven’t they. There are a lot of fish in the browser pond. I think there are reasons why your list hasn’t made it in any browsers beyond Microsoft.

Could it be technical or the fact the browsers are free and do not make any money. No those are practical arguments right ?

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I think the main reason people use Internet Explorer over other web browsers is that IE comes pre-installed on Windows machines.