

Can Microsoft really build a better browser? - MicahNance
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/can-microsoft-really-build-a-better-browser.ars/

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barrkel
The elephant in the room here, and one that is completely ignored by this
article (AFAICT) is corporate web apps.

A constantly moving target, which auto-updates silently, is anathema to the
average half-baked corporate web app. They're half-baked for a reason: they
have a limited budget, a limited customer set whom they mostly trust, and need
to be maintained in parallel with lots of other apps by understaffed
development teams working in companies whose main business is not software.

Perhaps MS needs two browsers, or some other solution. But I can't see them
moving to a fast-iterating model without a radical shift in where they make
their money - i.e. their business model.

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riobard
I think that's the "compatible mode" (i.e. an old IE6 engine) ?

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dustingetz
it doesn't work all that great on my corp intranet.

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latch
You can [sadly] substitute IE9 for quite a few different products from MS
where the demo come out so early that by the time of release, competition is
well ahead.

ZuneHD was initially announced cheaper than the comparable iPod touch - by the
time it shipped (9 months later), apple had dropped the price on its product.
HP Slate announced before iPad but available after.

Microsoft really doesn't understand how to market themselves.

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isleyaardvark
They do understand how to market themselves. They try to appear more
competitive than they really are.

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thingie
And why not? IE6 was released in August 2001! Its competition was something
like Netscape 4.8. Mozilla was barely alpha, and not really usable yet. In
this light, IE6 was a good browser, better than any competition back then. Of
course. IE6 was mostly irrelevant few years later, but that wasn't because it
was crappy browser, but because it was simply obsolete (but without a
replacement from Microsoft).

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dhyasama
Microsoft decided to kill IE, with 6 being the final version, in order to
integrate the browser into Windows. Five years and a few major court cases
later and they changed their tune and began work on IE7.

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stanleydrew
Wow, this is very interesting if true. Is there public information backing up
the assertion that Microsoft wanted to kill IE as we know it and integrate it
into Windows?

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dhyasama
I heard it from Molly Holzschlag during a presentation at Microsoft Mix last
week. There were members of the IE team all over the place and I think someone
would have called her on it if it wasn't true. Or maybe Microsoft leaked the
fake story as a cover for an outdated browser :)

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chaosprophet
Yes, Microsoft can definitely build a better browser. They just need to put
their hearts to it. And cut off all support for IE. They envisioned a Chrome-
OS like system before Google did, and I think they even have a team to work on
it (not sure though).

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JarekS
I agree that they have envisioned a Chrome-OS like system before Google (right
after Netscape mentioned that they will turn Windows into set of poorly
debugged device drivers). But this vision was not "Wow! Let's do that!" -
instead it was more like "Oh my God! If this ever going to happen it will kill
our business. Let's kill Netscape then.".

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chaosprophet
No, I wasn't referencing that. I was talking about the Gazelle project[1],
which if I remember correctly came about a very long time after Netscape's
death.

[1] <http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/79655/gazelle.pdf>

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code_duck
I hope not.

For them to kill Trident and move to WebKit would be a git from heaven. of
course it will never happen, though. Having a top-notch browser doesn't fit
their corporate plans at all. The web platform is a threat to Win32 as it
always has been, more now than ever, and it would practically be disregarding
shareholder interests to promote a standards based web app platform.

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lmkg
To be perfectly honest, I don't want IE to iterate very quickly, because then
there would be 30 quirky, borked versions of IE to code around rather than 3.
Granted, the last few may actually be standards compliant, but dealing with
the 25 intermediate stages that aren't would be the seventh circle of
development hell. Even though conditional stylesheets means you wouldn't have
to rely on CSS selector hacks, that would make QA an order of magnitude more
onerous than it already is.

I guess it's a chicken-and-egg problem, they aren't compliant because they
don't develop iteratively, and they can't iterate often until they're more
compliant unless they want to saddle everyone with a dozen inconsistently non-
compliant browser versions. Even if they tried, all but the very largest web
properties probably wouldn't QA for all versions of the browser. The drop in
IE support from websites would result in a worse experience for their users.

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vital101
I think having a more iterative release cycle for Internet Explorer would put
Microsoft in a better position. Having small releases adding new functionality
would be much better than having to wait 2+ years between browsers. This
tactic seems to work in the Windows & Office world, but not so much in the
quickly changing browser market.

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ZeroGravitas
Does it even want, or need, to? That's probably a more interesting question,
though this is still a fairly sophisticated argument he's making, not the
"Microsoft sucks!" article that you might guess from the headline.

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pavs
Since MSFT entered the Web search market, it is in their interest to maintain
a solid presence in the browser market. The only way they can achieve this
(besides having a large OS market) is by making a superior browser.

As long as they adopt open standards I have no problem with it.

Personally, I will never use IE browser even if it is the fastest, most
compliant browser around. IE have scarred me too much during my web design
days to ever fully trust them. I will stick with Chrome & Firefox.

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known
Microsoft can build better browser. But it will be zero-sum for them.

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Kilimanjaro
Yes they can. No, they don't want to.

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yanw
Microsoft doesn't want to follow standards, their browsers are made to access
stuff built by software they license and the only reason they are willing to
adhere to some standards now is because they have fallen behind. So in essence
their shitty browsers are a kind of DRM.

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rbanffy
Their browsers have to be as broken as to make companies dismiss web
applicatios as immature and unfit for the enterprise, but not broken enough as
to make companies ditch IE in favor of other browsers.

It also has to be broken enough so that stuff built with their development
tools work better with IE and developers have to choose between supporting IE
and supporting other browsers.

To be fair, it's a very difficult task to maintain IE in the just enough
broken zone.

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roschdal
No

