The inability of IE to evolve

Wow, have you read this story from The New York Times (via News.com)? The author just slams the guy from Microsoft, and quite frankly, he kind of deserves it for some of the stupid things he said. Granted, I'll offer that they might have been taken out of context, but that last analogy isn't very good.

My personal feeling is, and has been since I first saw the Web with Mosaic 1.0, that the browser is largely inconsequential in terms of any company's business. If I were to start a new company today, a company that builds Web browsers would not be among my considerations. I've never understood how Microsoft has profited from IE's dominance, or how Netscape back in the day made a buck when you could download the browser for free. Neither company has scored any extra revenue from me, any more than Mozilla has by me using Firefox. The only thing at stake is to say, "ours has more users." That's such a dotcom business plan.

Now of course the Microsoft haters (you know, the tools and morons that refer to the company as "M$," because that dollar sign means capitalism is bad or something) are going to say that they're trying to extend their desktop dominance to the Web. Really? How? Has IE's dominance prevented you from using the Web? There was this long-standing theory that as applications more commonly became Web-based that the browser would be the gateway to those apps, and somehow Microsoft's browser would control it all. That was a stupid theory because it assumes that the Web itself could only be viewed by IE.

If you want to bitch about IE, then by all means complain about the legitimate problems like security and the worst CSS rendering of any browser. Those are things that irritate the crap out of me, and they're the reason I don't use IE anymore.

Despite this, Microsoft is not being harmed by my decision (as a .NET developer, they're obviously getting my money in other ways). In fact, I start to wonder why Microsoft continues to build a browser at all. The one they have doesn't work as it should, there's no sequel in sight, and with XP SP2, there isn't a single reason you need it (Windows Update works on its own, without the browser itself).

8 Comments

  • I totally agree! It would make perfect sense then that Microsoft should make IE it's first real Open Source / Community Developed project! :)



    If they don't want to update it and release new versions why not release it!

  • http://joeydotnet.com/blog/archive/2004/12/20/157.aspx

  • They can never open source IE - simple problem is that a ton of other MS products depend on the API provided by IE for their content rendering - as evidenced by the number of products affected when an IE security bug shows up. One thing I would like is for MS to freeze IE (it effectively is anyway), enabling continued support for extant products - then move on with developing a new browser (or even - radically - adopt Firefox). The HTML-like syntax of Avalon markup has led a fair few people to speculate that the direction MS may move is to totally move their web effort to this 'richer' model however I do feel it'd be a mistake to fragment the market this way.

  • Things like ActiveX are MS IE only, so any companies that develop their Intranet to use should software are locked into IE. Plus things like NT Authentication Challenge/Response are really work in IE in a seemless way.



    ( I mention these, because I'm part of a board looking at getting Firefox as our standard browser. But these are some of the issue I've come up against so far preventing this )

  • If Microsoft didn't package a browser w/ their operating system, someone else would have a chance at having dominance in that area. Or worse yet, MS users would be forced to find a non MS product to accomplish something.



    Either of these situations might get people thinking that other companies might offer services that MS doesn't. That could have negative impacts on their goal of having an MS powered computer in every home.

  • Mozilla supports ActiveX controls if you enabe it (which involves compiling your own version fromt he source). They just call it something else (XPCOM, which is just like ActiveX controls, except without the little security ActiveX has).

  • Oh, and of course the 'less powerful' Firefox lets you use ActiveX by providing a plugin as well :-)

    http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm

  • Charles Chen: http://wilcoding.xs4all.nl/Wilco/View.aspx?NewsID=139 </shameless-plug>. Works fine in Mozilla based browsers, and should work fine in Opera 7.6 too if they would fixed their XMLHTTP API.

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