Browser wars - why Firefox need to grow up
Ok, so I like the idea of free software. Who doesn't? Since the browser war collapsed in 96-7 everyone in the software business has been looking for the seeds that could bring it back.
Browsers are now a core feature (ironically much as MS claimed in their antitrust case) of the platform you run. Last year Firefox burst on to the scene, and from reading slashdot, you'd think they had never had an alternative. Our new champion. Tabbed browsing makes it *so* much better than IE. But now the honeymoon is over. The uptake has started to flag, and people are starting to find the holes. In addition the great evil of money to do all this charity has entered the argument. Google seem to be playing a backroom game which hasn't fully been revealed, and there are postings from developers saying they don't have enough time.
Obviously the slashdot evangelists have forgotten all about Opera - the plucky fast, alternative to MS hegemony. It cost money - which is of course evil and so must be punished. Browsers are free aren't they? And love is fickle...
Actually Firefox is not that great. My main failing with it is one of its key selling points: adherence to the standards. Standards are good aren't they? Yes, when people obey them. If they don't, because they don't have to, there becomes a new standard the unwritten one. All web developers know that 80-90% of pages will be viewed in IE. Therefore IE is the gold standard. W3C can go hang. The W3C standard was never that good. HTML was described as "forrest gumpish" several years ago and the situation has not markedly improved. IE added lots of neat enhancements that allow things like GMail or Google maps to exist. MS did a good job.
Our company develops content for browsers. Different browsers can cause so many headaches its just not funny. As a content creator I want my stuff to be seen by my audience. My audience (hopefully) wants to see what I have produced. They don't actually care about the standards, they care that they can read the page. They more often than not have IE.
Therein lies the problem for Firefox (and whatever comes after it). When they grow up and realize MS's vision of DHTML was actually pretty good - even if not "officially" sanctioned, they will stand a chance of taking on the world. By this point they should be able to read every page IE can, and several that it cannot. Firefox still cannot do this. More embarrisingly IE seems to work very well with all the standards conformant pages I have found.
The reason Netscape died was it was not very good. I remember 4.6 munching all my memory trying to render a table, crashing inexplicably because a page had a missing tag and grinding to a halt over most DHTML updates. Firefox is a bit better than that. But IE has been doing it right for a long time. Even memory usage is often better in IE - something MS has hardly been famous for.
Going forward I am curious as to what IE 7 will bring. Microsoft products have a habit of reaching their Zenith and then receding. Office and Windows have been on the decline for ages. I am a firm believer there is an A and a B team in MS. The A team writes the NT kernels, SQL server, IE 4-6. The B team write everything else. The shonky XP skins, the zip file extension that dies if a zip has thousands of files in it, and the inexplicably bad network code that means my machine freezes randomly when trying to do things in Explorer. If a B team has been handed IE7, firefox may be in with a chance.
So my message to the Firefox team is quit with the zealotry, remember grandma and grandpa want to be able to use all the cool stuff and not worry that their browser cannot display it. Support all the features of IE, cross platform. Who knows, maybe that would finally lead to Linux gaining some ground on the desktop...
Browsers are now a core feature (ironically much as MS claimed in their antitrust case) of the platform you run. Last year Firefox burst on to the scene, and from reading slashdot, you'd think they had never had an alternative. Our new champion. Tabbed browsing makes it *so* much better than IE. But now the honeymoon is over. The uptake has started to flag, and people are starting to find the holes. In addition the great evil of money to do all this charity has entered the argument. Google seem to be playing a backroom game which hasn't fully been revealed, and there are postings from developers saying they don't have enough time.
Obviously the slashdot evangelists have forgotten all about Opera - the plucky fast, alternative to MS hegemony. It cost money - which is of course evil and so must be punished. Browsers are free aren't they? And love is fickle...
Actually Firefox is not that great. My main failing with it is one of its key selling points: adherence to the standards. Standards are good aren't they? Yes, when people obey them. If they don't, because they don't have to, there becomes a new standard the unwritten one. All web developers know that 80-90% of pages will be viewed in IE. Therefore IE is the gold standard. W3C can go hang. The W3C standard was never that good. HTML was described as "forrest gumpish" several years ago and the situation has not markedly improved. IE added lots of neat enhancements that allow things like GMail or Google maps to exist. MS did a good job.
Our company develops content for browsers. Different browsers can cause so many headaches its just not funny. As a content creator I want my stuff to be seen by my audience. My audience (hopefully) wants to see what I have produced. They don't actually care about the standards, they care that they can read the page. They more often than not have IE.
Therein lies the problem for Firefox (and whatever comes after it). When they grow up and realize MS's vision of DHTML was actually pretty good - even if not "officially" sanctioned, they will stand a chance of taking on the world. By this point they should be able to read every page IE can, and several that it cannot. Firefox still cannot do this. More embarrisingly IE seems to work very well with all the standards conformant pages I have found.
The reason Netscape died was it was not very good. I remember 4.6 munching all my memory trying to render a table, crashing inexplicably because a page had a missing tag and grinding to a halt over most DHTML updates. Firefox is a bit better than that. But IE has been doing it right for a long time. Even memory usage is often better in IE - something MS has hardly been famous for.
Going forward I am curious as to what IE 7 will bring. Microsoft products have a habit of reaching their Zenith and then receding. Office and Windows have been on the decline for ages. I am a firm believer there is an A and a B team in MS. The A team writes the NT kernels, SQL server, IE 4-6. The B team write everything else. The shonky XP skins, the zip file extension that dies if a zip has thousands of files in it, and the inexplicably bad network code that means my machine freezes randomly when trying to do things in Explorer. If a B team has been handed IE7, firefox may be in with a chance.
So my message to the Firefox team is quit with the zealotry, remember grandma and grandpa want to be able to use all the cool stuff and not worry that their browser cannot display it. Support all the features of IE, cross platform. Who knows, maybe that would finally lead to Linux gaining some ground on the desktop...
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