| Sunday, July 11, 2004 |
16:25 - Browser insurgency
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1089566561.shtml
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So it seems that MSIE is starting to lose a little bit of market share to Mozilla/Firefox. Dean Esmay has an essay in which he appears to be calling the browser war back to arms.
Firefox is clearly a better web browser for most internet users. It's faster, it's easier to use, it's more easily extensible. Most of all it's more secure. Your system is significantly less likely to be invaded by spyware and web-based viruses with Firefox or Opera than with Internet Explorer.
I remember when Microsoft decided to take over the web browser market. It was clear to me back then that they were making a technical mistake: they decided to integrate the web browser so closely into the operating system that it was a fundamental part Windows itself. From day one I thought this almost certainly meant that Microsoft's operating systems were going to be unusually vulnerable to security exploits over the internet, and sure enough they are. It's pretty apparent to me that this is not just because Microsoft has such a larger market share, either, but because certain design choices they made with Internet Explorer meant it would always be more vulnerable to attack.
In addition to worrying about the technical dangers of what they did, I also just hated the way Microsoft behaved. They quite intentionally and maliciously decided to crush the folks who had truly innovated the web browser market, Netscape Communications. And they did things that tended to lock consumers into using Internet Explorer, by creating non-compatible standards so that web sites designed just for Internet Explorer would not work in competing browsers. And they pretty clearly did this for no good reason other than to try to destroy competing browsers. In doing so, they hurt consumers, including users of competing, non-Microsoft platforms: Macintosh users, Linux users, users of other browsers on Windows, and so on.
I lost a lot of respect for Microsoft for the way they did the internet community with Internet Explorer. It was an open attempt to lock everyone into using their product, and I was never comfortable with it even though I used many Microsoft products and continued to use them on a daily basis.
When it became apparent which way the wind was blowing, I just gave up and used Internet Explorer as my main browser. I did that for years, just because it was easier. "Microsoft won, okay, whatever, I won't get emotional about it, it's just a web browser" was how I felt about it.
But I take pleasure in the thought that finally it's truly started to backfire on Microsoft. We now have a product that's clearly superior in just about every way to Internet Explorer. I hope more people switch--and I'm pretty sure they will. Today, as it stands, Internet Explorer is an inferior product. It's slower than other browsers. It's got a lot more security problems than any other browser, problems that can cause serious damage to you while you carelessly browse the web. It's also not as smooth and elegant as its competitors. And, the more people switch to alternatives, the less control one company (Microsoft) has over the internet. A control that Microsoft doesn't need to keep in order to stay profitable anyway.
A case can actually be made for the Web being a natural monopoly, just like a similar case can be made for computing platforms in general—it means software/site developers only need to be concerned about coding for one runtime standard, and that can halve your development costs. But as long as there is any way in which the monopoly (e.g. Microsoft) is dropping the ball, there will always be alternative platforms trying to elbow their way into the market, and there will always be a market segment catering to it, and so nobody will ever be able to fully realize the benefits of the true natural monopoly. There will always be customer pressure on software companies and websites to make their products cross-platform; even if those companies don't comply, they still feel the pressure, and they stand to lose business to anyone who chooses to compete with them on the basis of "We're cross-platform and you're not".
And that's in the case where the monopoly company is almost perfect but only falling barely short of the mark in a few key areas. Microsoft is hardly anyone's idea of a perfect natural monopolist. They're not behaving like any kind of specially anointed bannerbearer whose output should be held to a higher standard. They're doing the absolute minimum they can possibly get away with; and as the free market dictates, if they're a monopoly, on the desktop or on the Web, that amount is zero.
It's only in the last few weeks that it's been announced, for example, that the MSIE group is getting back together to work on a new version of the browser. The group has been disbanded ever since the release of IE6. That's three years. Three years during which Microsoft has put zero effort into improving its browser, except to grudgingly plug security holes, the most egregious of which are now causing CERT so much exasperation that they're actively encouraging MSIE users to switch to something else.
Perhaps people are taking that to heart. (Yeah, right.)
In any case, Dean suggests that Firefox is pretty darn good on the Mac; I've tried it, and it does seem solid. But Camino is almost identical in rendering behavior (it's the same engine, after all), and it incorporates Mac OS X-native widgets (buttons, form controls, etc), whereas Firefox uses the rather scummy-looking platform-agnostic Mozilla widget set. Plus Camino has much more "Mac-like" behaviors in things like text input boxes, where pressing Down moves the cursor to the end of the line, and Up moves it to the beginning, like in all other text-input widgets on the Mac (and let me tell you, it is infuriating to use a system where that doesn't exist). Besides, Camino has a more OS X-like Preferences panel, and is generally better integrated into the Mac OS X environment. Safari is still the most polished Mac OS X browser by far, but it's far slower than Camino in table layout and navigation within complex pages, though it is a lot faster to load. Safari's still my choice; at least if you were to rank all the Mac browsers by quality, you'd go through a list of five or six now before you even got near IE.
What we're witnessing right now are market forces in action. Microsoft is proving that even if the web and/or the desktop are natural monopolies, Microsoft is not a suitable company to fulfill that role; evidence of that is in the existence of these energetic companies and open-source communities dedicated to serving the customer better than Microsoft does. If Microsoft were dedicated to solving customer problems above reaping profits, this situation wouldn't exist.
Perhaps no company in the monopoly position would behave any differently from Microsoft. But if that's true, the Web and the desktop are not, in fact, natural monopolies. If we can accept that conclusion, we'll start to have real competition again on both playing fields—the Web and the desktop—and everybody, as is the norm in this sort of situation, wins.
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Brian Tiemann
