Who would be dumb enough to use IE ?
Well Microsoft is just gonna copy them all anyway and make a less secure ripped version of Mac’s and Mozilla’s
Chris: “Firefox’s inability to do anything in a tab while another tab is loading…how many Jetman games have I died in through another tab loading? :)”
Huh? I don’t have that problem at all (currently with FF 2.0.0.10). I always right click links and choose “Open in New Tab” and then continue whatever I’m doing in the current tab while the other one is loading. I often have six or more tabs loading while I continue reading in the original one, scrolling through the page.
ChrisVB: Back to /. with you, script kiddie. Senseless MS bashing is ridiculous, and shows a severe lack of intelligence. Go back to the other kids - grownups are talking here.
As a developer, more browsers is bad news … more potential browser compatibility problems, more development headaches, end user getting confused. We should all campaign for just one open source browser!
You have actually left opera, which had and has more features than firefox from its first version, which is also a very good competitor in browser war
Ya know, we can’t always blame Microsoft folks. If the W3C specs for CSS, HTML, XHTML, etc were more rigidly defined, we probably wouldn’t even be having this discussion right now.
The purpose of IE was to break Netscape Corporation, so for their purposes it’s an obsolete technology. It’s the default browser on Windows, which is pretty much it’s only business requirement. After they murdered their competition, you can almost see their blase attitude toward maintaining this now largely useless product. They didn’t really care if you used IE or not as long as you weren’t using Netscape. They can’t murder open source in the same manner, so they are more or less just abandoning the fight and relying on the fact that most people will just use whatever is already installed on their machine. IE exemplifies Microsoft: destroy the competition by any means and then settle for good enough. The only reason they update IE is when it starts getting so behind that it’s perceived as an embarrassment.
I’m impressed with the XPath support alone
Does this include the XPath support on the DOM parser? That would be awesome. Even moreso if M$ did it. Isn’t that a no-brainer? Especially if you’re doing SVG
IE exemplifies Microsoft: destroy the competition by any means and then settle for good enough. The only reason they update IE is when it starts getting so behind that it’s perceived as an embarrassment.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I think Microsoft can do much, much better. Other product groups actually innovate, even when MS has a huge lead (eg: Office 2007), and they are more honest and open about what they’re doing and where they are going.
We just need that attitude to bleed over to the IE group. If MSFT doesn’t start treating the browser as the mission critical app that it is – and honestly, what app would users possibly spend more time in today? – then they’re in deep, deep trouble.
OpenSource people with Firefox, Opera just help Microsoft to keep clean on the platform at web browsers sphere. Other aspect is that Opera has functionality like little system perhaps the target is platform not a web browser ;-).
This isn’t the only abandoned non-box product. What about Windows Scripting Host? I was blown away by the various scripting options on Mac. Automator is awesome. Windows only has WHS, which has effectively been abandoned years ago without a replacement. Does MS really believe the whole world is going to learn .Net or that no one needs something like WHS?
The resource allocator as MS should be fired. Products that people use like IE and WHS are ignored, while money losers like MSN and XBox can blow the whole wad.
What’s the downside to Microsoft if Internet Explorer stagnates? People start making Silverlight apps to take advantage of faster js rendering and Microsoft gets a decent install base.
You ended your article with “any hope left”.
Any hope left for what?
For Microsoft? For the web?
I love programming for the web. Because really, having to fight who’s actually following what standards, and hacking/bypassing/stitching together a bunch of BS to make an ‘in browser’ desktop app is just … fantastic.
Flash is hilarious: what’s the best way to make a website/app immune to the browser/web BS? Easy – don’t make it a website. Load this plugin, and run a desktop application that’s compiled into this little web panel thing.
“What If They Gave a Browser War and Microsoft Never Came?”
Why, then, war will come to you.
I have very little faith in Microsoft in this point to deliver a quality web browser. Simon had it right: the question is whether or not browsers are the future. I think Microsoft’s answer is “no”.
I believe Silverlight is their key focus for online market share; if Silverlight is the means by which rich Internet applications are delivered, then what does it matter if the hosting application is Firefox, Opera or Safari?
Bundle Silverlight in future versions of Windows, make it a ‘critical update’ for existing versions and do little to further the implementation of W3C standards…and you’ve gone a long way towards making Silverlight the de facto standard for any web applications more sophisticated than a simple blog comment form.
Make your Silverlight development tools freely available, and you can attract developers otherwise dissuaded by the price tag of the Adobe’s products. Allow .NET developers to easily create Silverlight applications and you’ve attracted a crowd that wasn’t too eager to fight with ActionScript and can now use their favorite language to do the trick.
Where Netscape was the target in the 90s, I believe Flash and (to a lesser extent) advanced browser features are in Microsoft’s sights now. If you have greater market share than the former and a more consistently-implemented version of the latter, then you’ve conquered the Online Platform.
Then it doesn’t matter as much what competitors like Google do – since they’re going to have to use your tool to deliver content to the end user.
Then again, I could be completely wrong and the IE8 division is staffed by incompetents…in which case we’ll continue to see gains by Opera, Firefox and Safari until the issue of a Microsoft web browser is moot.
I think MS are going to do the usual (I suspect this is why IE7 was late) … I’m not sure enough MS people really get it that the web is what we want and back in the day they tried to shove smart clients down our throats and when the web became hot they just dumped IE7 on us - because … come on … its crap and I think now they probably still think google is a phase and that IE8 isn’t really important until its too bloody late and then bang … another steaming pile of rushed catch-up style coding. Silverlight is another reason IE8 doesn’t matter … get it yet? (smart client part 2) - if SL is “the” thing who cares about the browser.
We all like to think it will be different, we all hope and pray that IE8 will be WOW but without community involvement … its going to suck. I just deal with firefox and its crappy rendering but at least its fast.
Doesn’t this conflict with your recent feature bloat article?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000980.html
David, Safari does not actually use KHTML; it uses WebKit. The latter may have begun life as a fork of KHTML, but the code-bases diverged pretty significantly, to the extent that the two are now effectively two different rendering engines. In fact, the KDE team has chosen to replace KHTML with WebKit in KDE 4.
And as for all the comments which state that browsers make no money, you could not be more wrong. Browser vendors earn a decent amount of income through the integration of search, with Google and Yahoo paying them for each search request sent through the browser’s integrated search bar. The income from this is substantial enough to keep Firefox going and it was sufficient for Opera to make its browser free. In the same vein, even though Microsoft can’t make a profit on IE directly (because it will only partner with its own Live Search), the extra traffic that IE moves to Live Search’s servers instead of those of Google and Yahoo make it more than worth the cost of development. That’s why IE8 really will launch within a year or two.
So all these apps are moving to the Web and Microsoft is acting like it didn’t notice… or doesn’t want to. Considering the vast amount of daily exobytes that gets package by HTTP packets, why would they suddenly stop believing in HTML?
Let me rephrase that question: why would anyone in their right mind would go on believing in an ajaxified kludge when you could theorically improve the Web platform itself, the end results and the development environment by the introduction of a pre-packaged toolset that would work on the world’s largest userbase, namingly Windows OS?
What if you could change the world (again) by revamping the deploy once, run everywhere paradigm made popular by the Web and cash in on it?
The next war won’t be a browser war. It will be the fight for the ultimate application platform. Some of the concurrents are already lining up: Adobe (AIR), Mozilla (Firefox/Prism/XulRunner), "Open"Lazslow, and Microsoft Sliverlight, … You may even throw in Android, if you like. Who else am I forgetting?
I truly belive that the need (or temptation) for a “browserless Web” is very real, but until the infrastructure is there for developers and content producers to really start leveraging the coming medium, we’ll be happy to welcome any sort of enhancements made to that good old Web-2.0-enabled technology.
If we ever trade for the new platform our klunky (by comparison) browsers and habits, I’m only concerned that somebody might end up “owning” a considerable part of the Web.