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Naive about IE? Give me a break.

I say:
"I've never understood how Microsoft has profited from IE's dominance."

Charles says:
"This is a very naive view. There is a certain base level of standards compliance that all browsers implement. Beyond that, Microsoft has added siginificant functional enhancements to IE which allow it to do much more than browers such as Netscape or Firefox." He goes on to say it has more to do with intranets than the Internet.

Either way, I have to respectfully say that he's full of crap. That sounds like a quote from the MS PR handbook.

Anyone using Firefox right now that is missing out due to the lack of "significant functional enhancements" in IE? Anyone?

*crickets chirp*

That's about what I figured. Yeah, I'm sure you can find some exceptions, but give me a break. Heck, even in Corporate America I see no IE-dependence. In fact, I get mini-throw-up every time I start a new gig and find that a company is still hanging on to Lotus Notes databases, Domino Web servers and such.

I'm as much of a Microsoft cheerleader than anyone. MS products have changed my life and I wrote a book about them. But I haven't seen anyone give any compelling evidence that IE allowed them to earn actual money. Yeah, they killed Netscape by pushing out IE, but so what? Netscape was a company with the most riciulous business plan ever conceived (if there really was one at all), and the product sucked and got worse every release. The hardcore Internet dorks like me started with Netscape, and eventually moved to IE because Navigator sucked.

That's what kills me about the last six or seven years about this saga. There are really two issues that everyone intermingles into this demonization of Microsoft. The first is that Microsoft used its monopoly to squash competition. Seriously, what competition did Netscape offer? I'm not saying it's right, but to suggest that Netscape was ever going to be a bona fide profitable business is a fantasy.

The second issue is that proprietary IE features would cause Microsoft to own the Web. (Ironically, it should be noted that Netscape's early versions had "extensions" to HTML that did the very same thing.) Yet here we are talking about the relative explosion in market share by Firefox. Huh. A lot of good that desktop monopoly did Microsoft, eh?

7 Comments

  • I think the only reason noone is "missing out" is due to the lengths the FireFox team has gone through. The firefox code would look alot different today had NetScape won the browser war.



    I also think MS has shifted focuses in the last few years. They now seem less agressive towards other browsers. But when MS was thinking of making a shift from Winforms to WebApps they wanted to be the only web browser in town.



    The other funny twist in this big story is IE on the MAC. I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.

  • Wow.



    Ok. So Msft decides to drop out of the browser market at 3.0. Netscape continutes ahead and pioneers dhtml and becomes the dominate browser with 90-95% market base. Now 2 years later microsoft wants to impliment ActiveX or whatever technology, but Netscape says "nope! sorry we're not gonna support that".



    (there are your dang crickets again...)



    Why does firefox support activex? because they have to stay competitive with IE. If microsoft had given up on IE, they would have handed the users experience of the internet over to netscape.



    That would have been disasterous.

  • The user's experience is being dictated by the people that publish content, not the people making browsers.

  • "Why does firefox support activex? because they have to stay competitive with IE. If microsoft had given up on IE, they would have handed the users experience of the internet over to netscape."



    Firefox *does not* natively support ActiveX.

  • " The user's experience is being dictated by the people that publish content, not the people making browsers."



    This is true except that what we publish is always (well, make that SHOULD always) be written with an audience in mind. An audience that uses a piece of software to view our content. A piece of software that, for the most part (and we are talking 1999-2002 here, not the future), was a browser and was made by Microsoft.



    In 1999 you made a choice of whether or not to use Netscape's "layer" tag. I chose to not use it. I also chose to not use some very cool IE DHTML features in 2000. However, when I started doing intranet-only web apps, I suddenly had exactly 1 browser to test and was able to use all of those IE-only features. About a year later, Netscape was all but dead and IE had such a high market share that people began using those IE-only features on the web without much fear because 90% of the world was using IE.



    When you publish anything on the Internet now, you are publishing with knowledge that it will probably need to work in IE and Firefox at the very least. However, you don't just publish anything you want with no regard for those browsers. You don't write all of your client-side code in VBScript if you want it to work in Firefox, so Firefox does matter when decide what you publish. You don't write everything to meet the XHTML 1.0 Standard with no regard for how IE will render it, so IE does matter when you decide what to publish.



    By forcing web content providers/programmers to hack our way through things in order to make a page work on both IE and Firefox, browsers do dictate what we publish in a very real way, even if only because it reduces the amount of things we can publish because it takes longer to do so.

  • I see a lot of issues with ASP.Net that seem to stem from IE's dominance. People discover that certain styles don't seem to work in Firefox or that dynamic form validation doesn't work. It's not that Firefox is broken, but the out-of-the-box javascript is IE specific, or the ASP.Net adaptive rendering treats Firefox like Netscape 4. Anyone care to take bets on whether ASP.Net 2.0 callbacks will work in Firefox or Safari? Google's proved that it's technically possible in those browsers (and Opera soon..).



    Even if IE 7 came out tomorrow and was good enough to demolish Firefox for the most anal web masters, we'd still have to deal with the occurance of IE 5.x "in the wild." IE 5 is the new Netscape 4.



    Still, things are way better than they used to be. The amount of CSS hackery I have to do now pales in comparison to the weird HTML bag of tricks I used to use...

  • "still hanging on to Lotus Notes databases"? You make it sound like a dead product, not one that is the market leader (according to Gartner). There are new Notes customers every day; it's not exactly the legacy you make it out to be.

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