Microsoft Killing the Web?

June 14, 2003 | 3 Comments

Well, now IE/Mac is dead. The big boys across the lake in Redmond must really have it our for our beloved WWW. First we find out that support is going to stop for IE/Win as a stand alone product after an already stale 2 years of nothing new. What does that mean? Well, that 85% of our users are going to be using it for quite a long time which in turn means we’re effectively stuck with it. Not that it’s all that bad, it’s just that it could be better, lots better.

There are alternate browsers, I just don’t see the average user picking them up. Which is too bad. For us and them.

I use Safari at home and I can tell you that, even though it’s Beta, and even though it’s buggy, it’s a far offers a far superior browsing experience than IE/Win. It’s too bad the masses don’t get to experience tabbed browsing for the foreseeable future.

For more on this issue, I refer you to the following quality posts:

R.I.P - with great insight as usual by Jeffery Zeldman

The Disturbing Trend in Browsers by Todd Dominey

Some good discussion on The Way Forward with Dave Shea

The reason monopolies are a bad idea from Simon Willison who makes some great points.

A bit of eulogy from Eric Meyer

Filed under: Web General

Comments

1. -b- said:

Selfishly, I was glad to read the reports on IE/Mac. I thought, there’s less work for me! I don’t have to test on it, develop for it, nor care anymore. I’ll just drag that icon right off my dock and watch it poof in a smokey puff. Now, I understand the greater impacts, but still there was a moment of good for me! A year ago, I made a decision that I would ignore Opera. For the most part, pages I code render in Opera. If they didn’t, whatever.

What fascinates me about these recent IE stories is that MS has always insisted that IE was not part of the OS, now it clearly is.

Posted on June 15, 2003 08:54 AM | #

2. Nollind Whachell said:

There are alternate browsers, I just don?t see the average user picking them up. Which is too bad. For us and them.

I still think word of mouth is a pretty powerful thing. If enough people find true value in a product and spread the word then I think others will seriously consider it and follow. Obviously the key factor here is in finding value in the product. As many people have said before, if you want me to go to a new product, then it has to have a lot of features that my previous product has plus more. In otherwords, the old embrace and extend philosophy.

In my case, I’m on the PC platform, previously running IE6 on WinXP. When I heard word of Mozilla Firebird, I was somewhat skeptical but gave it a try. After some tweaking, I’ve got the browser running pretty damn good for a 0.6 version. Even better, I like the new features that the browser gives me over IE, such as tabbed browsing, popup killing, ad image killing, and so forth. In other words, it provides basically what I had before and extends upon those features to offer me something more.

The only serious impediment to a casual user that I see Mozilla Firebird having is that it doesn’t handle mime types properly yet, similar to IE. However, if someone made a simple and easy site on how to configure a very simple Firebird browsing experience similar to IE then I think people would flock to it in droves. However, the simplicity has to be there. If the average person has to configure a mass of stuff they aren’t going to make the switch because of the inconvenience and frustration.

Posted on June 15, 2003 10:42 AM | #

3. Brian said:

It sounds like MS is moving IE to MSN. What has been missing from a lot of the online conversation, is the death of IE for Mac comes less then a month from the birth of MSN for Mac.

The word on Win IE is the same deal, MS will have several versions of MSN for Win over the next years, but no new IE until Longhorn, which will be embedded not a standalone browsers.

Maybe MS figured they don’t what to give stuff away for free anymore. And what has 85% browser dominance given them except bragging rights? If they kill IE for Win, then AOL would be SOL as the biggest single user of IE.

And isn’t AOL customers where the money is at?

Posted on June 16, 2003 02:38 PM | #