| Wednesday, April 26, 2006 |
11:30 - Feeding the albatross
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,193058,00.html
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Dorky one-sentence-per-paragraph writing style aside, this Dvorak column seems to have at least a grain of sense in it. That being: Internet Explorer is, and has always been, more of a detriment to Microsoft than an asset.
Of this I can assure you: People will not stop buying Microsoft Windows if there is no built-in browser. Opera and/or Firefox can be bundled with the OS as a courtesy, and all the defaults can lead to Microsoft.com if need be.
That's probably right. And thinking about all the late-90s portents of having IE bundled into the OS, it doesn't seem that any of them have come true, have they? The Web hasn't standardized on any proprietary MS-HTML language. ActiveX controls have not become so ubiquitous as to force Mac or Linux users to switch to Windows just to get full access to the Web. Certainly there's nothing of 1996's breathlessly predicted "Internet Appliance" platforms, whether embedded in IE or using Java, the great perennial almost-ran of the tech world. "Push" technology and Active Desktop died a mercifully quick, but insufficiently painful, death. So Microsoft hasn't even gained any benefits from its hubristic and legally vulnerable bundling effort.
Contrary to everyone's predictions, the Web pretty much stopped developing around 1998. Sure, everything's become more CSS-driven since then, but Flash is now the platform-agnostic application platform of choice, and it doesn't depend on any magic next-generation hocus-pocus like Java or jealously guarded corporate holy-water like ActiveX. All those wondrous layout technologies like multi-column flow and on-demand fonts that I remember seeing marvelous demos of circa 1998 seem to have vanished through lack of interest, and the only efforts that seem to have a stake in the Web's potential future are things like high-DPI rendering. And in the meantime, the basics of the Web are still perfectly serviceable using the technologies we all had available to us ten years ago. Which means open-source Web rendering efforts like Mozilla and KHTML (hence Safari) can efficiently do the job that corporate development can't seem to handle, on the same model as has made Wikipedia a respected information source and allowed Apache to trounce IIS and other corporate Web servers right up to the present day: if the feature set is known and established, the open-source community will make it asymptotically approach perfection.
If Microsoft's business is based on selling more copies of Windows and Office, then Dvorak's right: they don't need to worry about making sure everyone's using IE. It doesn't help them, and it's only hurt them and only continues to do so. But even if their goal is mindshare and corporate goodwill, IE fails to gain them anything there either—it's been a source of nothing but pain, both to them (in security holes) and to Web developers (who try to do awesome CSS stuff that every other browser supports, like alpha blending, the min-width/min-height properties, dotted line styles, and a host of other features that would make layout a joy if only IE supported them). If the goal is to make people look at the blue "e" logo with fondness, it's not working.
I wonder if it would speed up Vista development if Microsoft dropped IE? Or if anybody would notice?
Via JMH.
UPDATE: Via Steven Den Beste, a MetaFilter post explaining Microsoft's rationale for making IE: in short, not to advance the state of the art on their own, but to prevent anyone else from doing so.
It's a move you'd have to be a MSFT shareholder to love. Not that such folks are loving anything today.
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Brian Tiemann
