Does Microsoft actually make any money from IE? I can’t see how they would. So why not open-source it, or just plain abandon it?
They need to
seriously
redo their browser from SCRATCH!
“But how, exactly, does silence help the massive audience of people who use Internet Explorer on a daily basis?”
You don’t use a Mac do you? Apple hasn’t announced anything about anything before they are ready to put it on the shelf. Maybe they are taking a page from the Apple playbook. Though it seems comments here would suggest that there is some news out there.
Browser FEATURES??
All 97% of web users care about is do the web sites I CARE ABOUT work properly in my browser?
As long as google mail, facebook, and Deb’s Big House of Smut work fine on what they have, the general population isn’t going to care about CSS 3.0, RSS 2.0, or even browser security.
One exception: browser tabs. That’s worth a switch, and I think that’s when IE lost a fair portion of its userbase. Then it became “cool” to use ffox, and that carried some additional momentum.
I wonder if we’ll see a mainstream, non-Safari webkitbased browser emerge. Safari is such a bizarro app on Windows.
Why do you care?
Wondering about what Microsoft could do for web browsers is like wondering how castration could solve your impotency.
The net input Microsoft has had in email and browsers are billions of dollars of damages, and millions of developer hours of frustration.
Dump 'em.
Why, then they’d bring the war to Microsoft…
I have Safari 3.0.4 installed on Windows but the web development tools are not available for Windows. Netscape never died. You can download Netscape 9 but it is just Firefox with Netscape branding. All of my Firefox extensions work in Netscape 9. Opera has some nice developer tools but only the XMLHttpRequest logger seems innovative. Fiddler is great if you want to mess with raw HTTP requests and responses.
I’m assuming that the next release of IE is being tied to Silverlight 1.1, and that we’ll be hearing a lot of noise about both at MIX in March.
The quote about perceived problems with MS being due to long and secretive process is dead on. Some areas of the organization are improving in that respect, hopefully they’ll become clueful on a wider scale some day.
I was hoping Atwood would say something like 20% of programmers (the alphas) use FF or Safari, while the remaining 80% dorks use IE rolleyes
I noticed this new feature in the FireFox 3 beta:
“Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.”
Microsoft wants every piece of the pie. There would be NO chance that they wouldn’t show up. They need the homepages to point to their search engine to keep it high in the rankings 
-Denise
Let’s all plunk on our conspiracy theory caps for a second, but lets do so for good reason. I think that all those who say “There’s no money in browsers” are missing something vitally important.
Back in the day, IE6 and its predecessors dominated the browser market. These browsers didn’t do a very good job of implementing W3C standards. In fact, anyone who knows them at all knows that the browsers in those days each pretty much rendered HTML and CSS pretty much however they pleased. Consequently, we had tons of JavaScript (or JScript) code that checked for the browser version, and lots of code bloat to handle the differences.
BUT–from Microsoft’s position, the development tools line pretty much benefited from all of this BECAUSE Microsoft dominated the browser market, and because its implementation of HTML and CSS was king. Additionally, it’s implementation of JavaScript (the aforementioned JScript) was fairly ubiquitous. It only helped Microsft that they could write tools that assumed the developer was targeting IE, because, hey, everyone’s using IE, right?
Having to support a wide variety of other non-Microsoft browsers bloats their development tools, delays product shipment times, and makes things generally difficult for Microsoft. Difficult = costly.
Over time, the push for standards compliance has actually worked out in Microsoft’s favor. IE7 is far more compliant, but it’s no golden child. Further, Microsoft can’t just break all the existing pre-IE7 applications/sites out there. But supporting standards makes sure that Microsoft looks like one of the browser good guys, and that their browser maintains control of the market, so that developers will continue to use it with their tools.
As someone else has pointed out, it’s all about the developers.
IE8 will come out. It will be more standards compliant because its good for Microsoft’s image. But it will maintain Microsoft’s effort to control the direction of HTML/CSS/JavaScript implementation in the browser because it directly impacts how costly their tools are to develop and how well they work. It would be disastrous for Microsoft if some OTHER company (or companies) suddenly became the sole decision makers in that area.
Tear-off tabs in Safari 3 for Windows/OS X make my heart sing.
Another interesting aspect of the new browser war is that of the big 4 browsers, 2 of them, Firefox and WebKit, are Open Source.
Webkit is also making some inroads as the choice if you want to embed a web browser in your framework/app/device. It’s in Adobe AIR, Google Android, and Nokia is working on a port of it.
I’m looking for a new browser. At last glance, FF Beta 3 was eating my PC, using 700+ megs of RAM. Solved the buffer overflow problems? Not yet. Damn! FF2 just froze again. What to do? What to do? Konqueror? Nautilus?.. Big is the enemy of cool.
I’ve used firefox… it sucks big time. There’s just too much to it, and it tries to do to much for me. If I want something done, I’ll go do it myself. I’ve used IE for years and have never had a single complaint about it. It opens every web-page I’ve ever been to (which is in the hundreds of thousands) perfectly. It’s a simple browser, and why would I ever want anything more?
Opera Firefox Safari
I have a mac there is no IE
GooGLE inspirational experiences
You’re wrong about the “Browser Wars”. Safari for Windows isn’t a browser as much as a platform for developers to test their WebKit applications on.
Safari has some very interesting features. It doesn’t use an Apple produced rendering engine. Instead, it uses the open source KHTML rendering engine. This rendering engine (much like IE’s) is built into Mac OS. Any Mac OS X application can use the engine to render HTML code.
What makes Safari really interesting is that it is one of the few browsers that can actually pass the ACID2 test (http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/), and to Apple, that’s the real key. Apple sees its future as a company that will produce really cool hardware that interfaces with the Internet and webpages.
If you ask someone who uses the iPhone what they really like about the phone, its the browser. The iPhone is a mediocre camera, a mid-quality phone, and a pretty good MP3 player. However, the iPhone is completely unsurpassed as a portable Internet browsing platform.
And, that’s why there is Safari for Windows: It allows Windows developers to create web-enabled applications for the iPhone and for the many other web-enabled products that Apple will be producing in the coming years.
What is really interesting is that Android also comes with a Google version of the same WebKit. And, this same WebKit is being ported over to Gnome.
It isn’t a browser war. It’s a browser rendering engine war. The winner controls the way small web-enabled electronics will work over Internet. Apple and Google are banking on an open source KHTML engine.
Microsoft’s problem is not coming out with a new version of IE 8, but a rendering engine that can be used with IE 8.
zeroturn’s link to IE 8 leaked information is bogus, as any regular reader of Channel 9 could tell you. That was Jamie’s imagination running wild, not actual Microsoft specs.
“Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged”: I think that’s THE great weakness of Firefox, glad to hear they’re fixing it, though some guys who have tested the beta version didn’t find it improved very much.
I don’t use IE, mainly because of the ‘integration’ with windows and the big danger than comes with it