What does IE 5 bring to the table?

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So for the mean time, AOL's approximately 16 percent of the browser market remains in IE's court--but Microsoft can hardly count on keeping it.

The meaning of Mozilla.org
Another radical move by Netscape to shake up the browser landscape came more than a year ago when the company decided to publish the source code to its browser and create the Mozilla.org group to shepherd the global volunteer development of the code. Netscape also made its browser free of charge at that time, bringing its pricing in line with Microsoft's.

While the first products of the Mozilla effort have barely come to light--a developer preview of the Version 5 "Gecko" browser engine was released in December--Netscape is betting that the open source model will accelerate and bolster development.

The firm has pointed out that in an open source effort, the coders working on the browser are often the same people who devised the technologies in the first place. And for sheer numbers, no company can hire the number of developers that will flock to a high-profile project like Mozilla.

Browser standards
But Netscape's bold development move has yet to pay off, and IE remains clearly ahead of Communicator on a number of crucial technological fronts. In addition to the important componentization factor, Microsoft has taken the lead on support for some key Web standards, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Extensible Markup Language (XML, and the Document Object Model (DOM).

Despite its lead on standards, however, IE 5 launches to a chorus of complaints from the advocacy group Web Standards Project, which has been a thorn in the side of both browser makers since it launched in August of last year with the goal of pressure firms to hew more closely to standards.

"All in all, while IE5 is a major improvement over IE4, it still falls short, sometimes significantly, in fully supporting standards that are crucial to the continued evolution of the Web," said WSP project leader George Olsen in an email to News.com. "We realize MS has marketing concerns in choosing release dates, but we wish they'd chosen to follow the example of Netscape, which, according to press reports, is delaying Communicator 5.0's release to focus on getting standards support done right."

The WSP cited layout problems with IE 5's implementation of HTML 4.0 and CSS 1, along with problems with the DOM that it said will require developers to prepare "extensive workarounds" to get Dynamic HTML (DHTML) effects.

"Microsoft has told us they are supporting most of DOM," Olsen wrote. "But I'm having a hard time squaring that with test suites showing numerous tags aren't supported."

The WSP claims the IE 5 falls down on some basic XML parsing tasks and that the implementation of XML namespaces "violates both the spirit and the letter of that specification--one of whose co-editors is from Microsoft."

The group also faulted IE 5 for opting for Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) over CSS when documents support both specifications. "This is totally unacceptable given that CSS has been a stable standard since 1996, and XSL is still very far from being finished," Olsen wrote. "IE 5's XSL is an interesting and powerful feature, but it is neither standards-conformant nor interoperable."

Microsoft replies
Microsoft has a tendency to go ballistic when criticized for its browser's standard support, pointing out what even critics concede: IE has been way out in front in supporting standards.

"It's ironic that people are challenging our standards support when we have led by a substantial margin in this area since IE 4," said Windows product manager Mike Nichols in response to the WSP's criticisms. "We're talking 90 percent compliance versus 50 to 60 percent or nothing in case of XML with our competitors. The question I would ask people is where is everybody else with the DOM, with XML, with CSS-2?"

One analyst chimed in to support Microsoft's position that IE 5 is on top of the standards heap, and stressed that standards compliance will spur the growth of the Web.

"Web developers' life is never going to become less complicated, and it's never going to become more manageable," said David Kerley, analyst at Jupiter Communications.

"But Microsoft has reached the highest level of support for those standards, and that will be a huge benefit to developers of Web sites. I think that's been understated. The mutual support on these standards is going to allow for almost a whole new level of interfaces for consumer-targed sites that were just unmanageable to create and support in the past."

On to portals
While the sparring over technology and market share continues, both Microsoft and Netscape appear to be shifting the entire debate. As Netscape has hemorrhaged market share, it has thrown its energies behind server-side software and its Netcenter portal site. Now Netscape claims the browser war is irrelevant. Now, according to Netscape, it's a portal war.

Microsoft does not disagree. But the two companies are staking out opposing positions on how the browser becomes a weapon in the new war. While Netscape has rolled out numerous features that integrate Communicator with Netcenter, Microsoft with IE 5 is taking a more catholic approach. With its Web Accessories feature, any portal or other content site can build an extention to IE 5 that will serve up live content--like headlines, email notifications, or stock quotes--no matter where the user surfs.

In an ironic twist, Microsoft and Netscape have traded places in their long-fought war over "openness." Netscape cried foul when Microsoft integrated its browser with its operating system; now Microsoft disparages Netscape's integration of its browser and portal. And while Netscape points proudly to its worldwide army of developers building Communicator, Microsoft lists a parade of portals preparing to build extensions to IE. Both see strength in numbers.

As Netscape ceases to exist as an independent company, the browser war may be over, or the portal wars may just have begun in earnest. In coming months AOL will assess its arsenal, newly fortified, and the federal government may substantially alter Microsoft's. Whatever the battle, the competitive landscape greeting IE 6 is bound to be substantially altered.