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At the office, my cubicle colleague--a Firefox aficionado of long standing--smugly greeted the news by asking me what took so long. But rest assured this is no small concession.
The short answer is I don't have a lot of time or patience to fiddle around getting my different applications to play nice. So when forced to decide between competing software alternatives, yours truly has nearly always gone with the Microsoft offering.
Okay, I'm a wimp who takes the path of least resistance. I'm also less interested in creating the ultimate computing experience known to mankind than in making sure things work the way they should. That's the upside of sticking with a convicted predatory monopolist: You can assume a high degree of uniformity and application integration.
But after being tossed the gauntlet, I finally loaded Firefox at home. To my surprise, the product won me over in short order. I love its pop-up blocker, as well as the ease with which it accesses Really Simple Syndication feeds. I didn't use a stopwatch, but it loads fast and opens Web pages without a hitch.
I can't say the same about Internet Explorer (though Microsoft recently introduced a similar pop-up-blocking feature). Putting your finger on the reasons for the slow response is worthy of a Harvard Business study. In the meantime, it's useful to recall that Microsoft wasn't always so lethargic when it came to juicing up its Web browser technology.
Microsoft was a latecomer to the browser market and scrambled to catch up. Early on, the company stumbled and the first couple of attempts at a Web browser weren't any good. But this was a make-or-break proposition; Microsoft couldn't afford to let Netscape's Web browser displace Windows as the primary interface sitting on the computer between application developers and users.
By the third try, Internet Explorer had pulled even and later became the better Web-browsing application. The rest is history. Unfortunately for Web surfers, it's as if the calendar stopped in 1999.
Actually, that last statement is not fully accurate. There is one major change you can ascribe to Internet Explorer: The PC browser world is in much worse shape. Because management took so long to tackle Internet Explorer's security woes, Microsoft allowed virus writers to exploit vulnerabilities in the browser and wreak untold havoc on unsuspecting computer users.
I've always been impressed with how taken Microsoft's execs are with their technology. With a nearly $8 billion R&D budget, you would expect that much of what Microsoft cooks up in its labs should be quite good. So why hasn't the Web browser substantially advanced since the end of the browser wars?
Microsoft has a couple of pat answers. One is security.
"Customers have told us, 'Please try to minimize the number of nonsecurity changes...so we can deploy security patches without problems,'" said Gary Schare, who runs security product management for the company's Windows division.
And if it's not security, then it's Longhorn.
"Certainly, innovation in the browser is a high priority," according to Schare, who says the plan "is to innovate with the Longhorn release."
As a former president used to say, let me say this about that.
As a card-carrying member of Cynics International, I don't buy the argument that users will enjoy a wonderfully rich Web experience with Longhorn if only they'll wait just a little longer. The best "guesstimate" for Longhorn's already delayed arrival is 2006--at the earliest. Why Microsoft can't speed up its corporate metabolism to ship a better browser update before then remains a mystery.
On the security front, Microsoft has clearly had its hands full. Fixing the myriad holes in Windows and Internet Explorer is no small job. But why should that prevent Microsoft from offering sensible improvements to the browser, such as the inclusion of dynamically updated content from RSS feeds a la Firefox? Beats me.
Microsoft could also help out many developers by doing a better job offering support for CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, a Web standard increasingly important to design professionals. The company's defenders argue that Internet Explorer was out first with a decent CSS implementation but that Microsoft was left in an awkward spot after the standards subsequently shifted. You couldn't easily muck with the early implementation because that would wreak havoc with tens of thousands of Web sites.
Microsoft will never admit this in public, but the core explanation is the absence of a hard-charging rival to keep it honest. Netscape's removal from center stage was the worst thing that ever happened to Internet Explorer because it allowed Microsoft to put Web browser development on cruise control.
Microsoft still holds more than 90 percent of the browser business, not to mention a desktop PC operating system monopoly that affords it special advantages against wannabe rivals. But for the first time in a long time Microsoft is losing share of the browser market--albeit only a couple of points so far--to the likes of Firefox, Safari and Opera--and maybe even Google in the not-too-distant future.
Maybe this only marks a brief interruption in the company's unparalleled dominance. Microsoft surely remains the odds-on favorite, but I have a hunch more and more computer Web surfers have become as fed up as I am with the status quo.
Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.
25 comments
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There are sites that don't render properly (or crash) in Firefox, so you'll launch IE.
To be "better" then IE, they need to provide what IE does in a better way. Until you can visit every site you can with IE, using another browser, a different choice is not a better browser. And you can't tell me it's the web site developers that I need to hound - I can't fix the site... I can only select my client.
As for ActiveX, why would I want a browser
capable of such insecurity? If I want that, I
will just turn off my firewall.
But as I said, don't switch to reliable software
on my account. If everybody ran Linux, Mozilla
based browers, OpenOffice, etc., I would be out
of a job, as all I do is fix the problems
associated with it.
You Micro$oft junkies pay my bills, and the
customer is always right....
As for ActiveX, why would I want a browser
capable of such insecurity? If I want that, I
will just turn off my firewall.
But as I said, don't switch to reliable software
on my account. If everybody ran Linux, Mozilla
based browers, OpenOffice, etc., I would be out
of a job, as all I do is fix the problems
associated with it.
You Micro$oft junkies pay my bills, and the
customer is always right....
You don't need to dump IE, but that is besides the point. What percentage of sites are you talking about 1%, 5%, surely not more than 10%. So let's assume I can't live without IE for 10% of the sites, not true in my case, but anyway I can use FF 90% of the time and surf in relative safety 90% in relation to IE. Companies always talk about risk reduction but don't seem to have a clue on how actually reduce their risk. Btw among, the many extensions there is a FF extension that lets you view any site in IE with a right mouse click.
It is possible to get by without windows update, although not nearly as efficiently, as most updates are actually available for download before they are released via the update site.
But the main issue here is that because IE is really the foundation that windows is built on, and because MS managed to worm it's way out of any meaningful court decisions that would have forced real compatibility with rival browsers, they are not forced to allow windows update to work with other browsers. Should they be? It's fair to argue that there's no reason why one business should be forced to open itself up to others, and it's also fair to argue that users made the choices that made MS the monopoly it is today. After all there were a great deal of rival operating systems back in the early 90s (more than the two real, and practical, alternatives we have today), but people decided to go with the slick marketing and put windows on 99% of their PC's.
So as a consequence, we are left with the kludge we have today. Either use IE exclusively, or just use as required.
So if it is fair to force MS to give system compatibility to other browsers (so that they work with Windows Update), it is only fair that those that want the compatibility should be forced to pay for it via licensing.
The non-standard website thing is not forgivable though, and there is no reason why creative software doesn't self enforce these standards.
Personally, I don't use IE, except to test sites I create. That's a given for me as a designer. Other than that, I've not had a single occasion when I have had to use it in the last six months.
For all you developers out there, the door is ajar....very ajar...
products.
From a business perspective I haven't seen a good reason for restricting browsers to IE only and a lot of bad ones.
For some reason people seem to forget or do not want to consider that there is something besides Microsoft software. The also don't seem to want to consider that the whole point of standards is to allow systems from different vendors to communicate/interact with each other.
While it is in vendors immediate benefit to make incompatiable systems it is not their longterm benefit. This includes both the Microsoft and the vendors which only will code for Microsoft.
Perhaps a story from over a century ago will better illistrate my point. At the time the big item was fasteners - otherwise known as nuts and bolts. It would seem that a number of differenct vendors made them and they weren't compatiable with each other. The situation was much like today where a vendor could force a mfr. to buy all their nuts and bolts from them for compatiability reasons. Eventually the mess got so bad with parts not fitting togeather or replacement bolts not being available that Congress stepped in. It created a committe called the "Screw thread committe" (I am not kidding) which mandated what the standards would be.
Right now were very much at incompatiable state. The question then occurs will the vendors get their act togeather or will congress do it for them. After all, its happened before.
I've even written my own article detailing many other reasons (including why Firefox is winning the browser war): <a href="http://members.apex-internet.com/sa/windowslinux">http://members.apex-internet.com/sa/windowslinux</a>