Somehow, it doesn't compute in my mind. Unless MS wants to ditch IE eventually... or base it on Firefox in a future iteration.
Andy Freeman
· 3 years ago
One side effect of regularly "dealing with the enemy" is that Microsoft will be/is better at it than any one else.
Tim Courtney
· 3 years ago
@brem - Makes perfect sense to me. It's a strategic move for the Windows team, not for the IE team. And like Robert posts, I see it as MS wanting to do the best thing for themselves *and* the best thing for the users by sharing knowledge of their OS.
brem
· 3 years ago
Tim: I fail to see how helping Firefox get better will help the IE team. I can see how it can help MS as a whole, but that's like fixing the roof of a house while the foundation is rotting. If you catch my drift.
:)
Chris
· 3 years ago
I've always said, and will continue to say, that when it comes to courting developers....nobody does it as well as Microsoft. It's not glamorous, but I (along with millions more) appreciate it. It's win/win for Microsoft and developers.
A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of rage brought on by Apple's pathetic attempt at documenting the QuickTime API, I posted this. Did I overreact, or am I just spoiled by Win32/.NET/MSDN/Channel9? ;)
Alex
· 3 years ago
I think Microsoft is well on its way to taking over the world.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Alex: Alan Cooper said "Microsoft is the sea we all swim in." That was back in the mid 1990s.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
>>Tim: I fail to see how helping Firefox get better will help the IE team.
The IE team is part of Windows. If more people use Windows it helps the IE team immensely. It's pretty hard to switch people to IE if they use Macintoshes.
A rising tide raises all boats.
One thing I'm noticing is more and more Web sites only really support Firefox. That's a trend that the IE team should be greatly concerned about.
Anne van Kesteren
· 3 years ago
I suppose they're doing the same as (we) Opera did there...
IE has been a dead horse for years. Just bury it already.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
TomB: why don't you add something to the conversation instead of being religious? Between 50% and 85% of humans use IE. Even on sites that suck for IE (Zooomr, for instance, is broken in IE but a large percentage of the people visiting that site use IE, according to Thomas Hawk).
Doug Karr
· 3 years ago
Perhaps they heard about CSS and wanted to know how to support the latest standards?
it's not "religious" to observe that microsoft neglected IE for years and that the only reason they're working on it now is because of safari, firefox and opera nipping at their heels.
microsoft got big because it pushes people around and restricts them. do you think they're successful because of great UI design or something, robert? in a cro magnon age they are neanderthals.
Ross
· 3 years ago
"Firefox team members can even work with IE team members to help make sure that both products work the same"
And now I have coffee all over my new Mac. *Why* would the FF team want to have FF work like IE? Surely it is up to Microsoft to catch up, not for the FF guys to slow down ;)
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Ross: Microsoft is now adding new features to IE too. You think they are just gonna copy Firefox forever? Again, you're demonstrating your religion.
It's better for all of us if these two teams (and Opera and Safari too) get along and make sure their new features work the same in the future. Otherwise they'll both bring new stuff to the market which will make us design another version of our Web site to get it to work on both browsers.
brem
· 3 years ago
Robert: doesn't the IE team resent their "bosses" for courting with Firefox? Surely the manager cannot be too happy about that.
TomB
· 3 years ago
"TomB: why don’t you add something to the conversation instead of being religious?"
If MSFT were really into supporting the product, instead of dropping the Mac version (which hadn't been competitive since the days of Netscape 6), they would have ADDED a LINUX version. As "fatalist" puts it, I can recognize neglect when I see it.
Also, I was using features like tabs and pop-up blocking in Firefox years before Gates even mentioned these features in public.
Plus, there are nasty IE bugs that make me crazy; sometimes I hit particular web pages that don't let me select and "copy" text; I've never seen this problem on Firefox for Windows.
randymorin
· 3 years ago
I heard their gonna buy Firefox and redirect scobleizer.wordpress.com to blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn in both IE and FF.
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
In a perfect world, your niceish 'let's all get along' platformish hippie idealism would work wonders. "I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company..." Unfort. for that fairy tale storybook narrative, past and current history doesn't match up.
"Play-nice" isn't the mindset, you only go in with your eyes wide open, and your lawyers, armed and ready, trigger-happy at that. Microsoft wants to dominate (or steal), that it can't on several fronts (Search, IPTV, Video Games, ERP, Photo/Video software and hardware, Database, AntiVirus and etc.) is only on account of their own ineptness per products, marketing and legals; for example, look at all the now abandonware generic castle-storms against Adobe.
You really think they'd give an iota of a care if Firefox didn't have serious marketshare?
Handshake with one, knife in the other...no different than most of the Fortune 500, just developed into an art form at Redmond.
Ross
· 3 years ago
Robert you accuse me of showing my religion. Problem is, I don't use Firefox except very occassionally on Windows (I even made a fuss on C9 to get the guys to help me stop using it). On the whole I use Safari or Camino.
So to accuse me of a bias is a little silly, but just because I don't use FF doesn't mean I don't think it is streets ahead of IE 6 and 7.
Duncan
· 3 years ago
Interesting comments to which I can only add this: Microsoft should just drop IE and use Firefox as browser of choice, sure they coud give it a MS coat of paint, but it would certainly save Microsoft a pile of money, part of which they could donate to the Mozilla foundation for Firefox development, and certainly it would allow me to sleep better at night knowing that I no longer have to worry about making my website work in IE6 or IE7.
Diego
· 3 years ago
I thought Microsoft gave up years ago on the practise of inviting other teams to "share" information with them, only to take what they could and leave. :)
As for the number of IE users. That's a lot of Joe Bloggs, mom and pops, who don't know any better and just run IE cause it's there.
John C. Welch
· 3 years ago
it’s not “religious” to observe that microsoft neglected IE for years and that the only reason they’re working on it now is because of safari, firefox and opera nipping at their heels.
They didn't neglect shit. As Robert said before, they *stopped* all work on IE in a littly wussy hissy fit over the antitrust suit because their widdle feewings were all hurty. That's Ballmer's leadership style. Screw professionalism, if we can't get our way, we'll just cry.
The IE team is part of Windows. If more people use Windows it helps the IE team immensely. It’s pretty hard to switch people to IE if they use Macintoshes.
Only because Microsoft killed IE Mac. That's not to say they didn't have a good reason, but they hadn't done shit with it post - OS X other than a single performance upgrade from the release of 10.0 Microsoft has this bad habit of only tweaking IE when someone else has a competing product. If they don't have competition, they get lazy as hell.
A rising tide raises all boats
If they really believed that, they'd have figured out a non-windows only solution for Active X years ago, and they'd fully support Mono. Microsoft, at least on the windows side, believes that a rising tide lifts Microsoft boats and hides the Microsoft torpedos that sink the !Microsoft boats.
When I see shit like Active X being reworked to not force IE Win lockin, I'll buy that everything that Microsoft does outside of the Mac BU isn't aimed at forcing you into Windows. Until I see real code, it's all marketing fairytales.
Udo Schmitz
· 3 years ago
@Chris, re .MOV-conversion: I guess you overreacted, as i just commented on your blog there's FfmpegX, a GUI-wrapper for some OSS video tools. Posssible to use those too and make a GUI with AppleScript/Automator/Xcode?
Christopher Coulter
· 3 years ago
they *stopped* all work on IE in a littly wussy hissy fit over the antitrust suit because their widdle feewings were all hurty.
Exactly, hereby allowing spyware and malware to become a COTTAGE industry...
They won, they beat back the DOJ, they won the web, and then because it cost them so much, they took their ball and went home. Unprofessional extreme, strategy taxed cooking on hissy fits. They are extremely lucky that their competitors are more than equally inept...Apple if it woulda embraced the OEM model could have ruled the world. But all so much 'what if's'...
Brewster
· 3 years ago
"One thing I’m noticing is more and more Web sites only really support Firefox. That’s a trend that the IE team should be greatly concerned about. "
Seems that Apple should be concerned about it as well. There are many Web 2.0 sites that don't work properly on Safari. :(
Brewster
· 3 years ago
"Interesting comments to which I can only add this: Microsoft should just drop IE and use Firefox as browser of choice..."
Interesting idea, but the hackers would immediately turn their guns on Firefox. And Firefox has plenty of holes, as the ever more frequent Firefox security updates prove.
Molly C
· 3 years ago
Microsoft did this for Opera too. Opera devs had their meeting at Microsoft last week. You can read the accounts from Opera devs. Sounds like they had a good time; had lunch with IE guys, bought MS shirts at the Microsoft Company Store, visited the Space Needle, etc. (Oh, they also did real work, and visted an Opera user group meeting.)
THe current release of Safari has numerous Javascript issues. The WebKit builds are much better, but who knows if they'll be integrated into Safari pre-leopard
Hugh
· 1 year ago
@Robert, "if Windows is the best place to run Firefox, won’t you be more likely to use Windows?"
Windows has never been the best place to run anything, and has reached its apotheosis in the bloated DRM-encumbered resource hog that is Vista. Vista (aka 2003 in drag) is the culmination of all of Microsoft's years of abusing its monopoly, being as it is the expression of a lazy, arrogant and incompetent company that has been isolated from real competition in a world of its own making. Now, with delicious irony and in a manner that is poetically just, Microsoft is going to be hoist on its own petard. It can't come soon enough.
All Comments
:)
A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of rage brought on by Apple's pathetic attempt at documenting the QuickTime API, I posted this. Did I overreact, or am I just spoiled by Win32/.NET/MSDN/Channel9? ;)
The IE team is part of Windows. If more people use Windows it helps the IE team immensely. It's pretty hard to switch people to IE if they use Macintoshes.
A rising tide raises all boats.
One thing I'm noticing is more and more Web sites only really support Firefox. That's a trend that the IE team should be greatly concerned about.
http://my.opera.com/olli/blog/show.dml/417961
http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/08/opera-vista
http://www.douglaskarr.com/index.php?s=microsoft
Sorry, couldn't resist.
microsoft got big because it pushes people around and restricts them. do you think they're successful because of great UI design or something, robert? in a cro magnon age they are neanderthals.
And now I have coffee all over my new Mac. *Why* would the FF team want to have FF work like IE? Surely it is up to Microsoft to catch up, not for the FF guys to slow down ;)
It's better for all of us if these two teams (and Opera and Safari too) get along and make sure their new features work the same in the future. Otherwise they'll both bring new stuff to the market which will make us design another version of our Web site to get it to work on both browsers.
If MSFT were really into supporting the product, instead of dropping the Mac version (which hadn't been competitive since the days of Netscape 6), they would have ADDED a LINUX version. As "fatalist" puts it, I can recognize neglect when I see it.
Also, I was using features like tabs and pop-up blocking in Firefox years before Gates even mentioned these features in public.
Plus, there are nasty IE bugs that make me crazy; sometimes I hit particular web pages that don't let me select and "copy" text; I've never seen this problem on Firefox for Windows.
"Play-nice" isn't the mindset, you only go in with your eyes wide open, and your lawyers, armed and ready, trigger-happy at that. Microsoft wants to dominate (or steal), that it can't on several fronts (Search, IPTV, Video Games, ERP, Photo/Video software and hardware, Database, AntiVirus and etc.) is only on account of their own ineptness per products, marketing and legals; for example, look at all the now abandonware generic castle-storms against Adobe.
You really think they'd give an iota of a care if Firefox didn't have serious marketshare?
Handshake with one, knife in the other...no different than most of the Fortune 500, just developed into an art form at Redmond.
So to accuse me of a bias is a little silly, but just because I don't use FF doesn't mean I don't think it is streets ahead of IE 6 and 7.
As for the number of IE users. That's a lot of Joe Bloggs, mom and pops, who don't know any better and just run IE cause it's there.
They didn't neglect shit. As Robert said before, they *stopped* all work on IE in a littly wussy hissy fit over the antitrust suit because their widdle feewings were all hurty. That's Ballmer's leadership style. Screw professionalism, if we can't get our way, we'll just cry.
The IE team is part of Windows. If more people use Windows it helps the IE team immensely. It’s pretty hard to switch people to IE if they use Macintoshes.
Only because Microsoft killed IE Mac. That's not to say they didn't have a good reason, but they hadn't done shit with it post - OS X other than a single performance upgrade from the release of 10.0 Microsoft has this bad habit of only tweaking IE when someone else has a competing product. If they don't have competition, they get lazy as hell.
A rising tide raises all boats
If they really believed that, they'd have figured out a non-windows only solution for Active X years ago, and they'd fully support Mono. Microsoft, at least on the windows side, believes that a rising tide lifts Microsoft boats and hides the Microsoft torpedos that sink the !Microsoft boats.
When I see shit like Active X being reworked to not force IE Win lockin, I'll buy that everything that Microsoft does outside of the Mac BU isn't aimed at forcing you into Windows. Until I see real code, it's all marketing fairytales.
Exactly, hereby allowing spyware and malware to become a COTTAGE industry...
They won, they beat back the DOJ, they won the web, and then because it cost them so much, they took their ball and went home. Unprofessional extreme, strategy taxed cooking on hissy fits. They are extremely lucky that their competitors are more than equally inept...Apple if it woulda embraced the OEM model could have ruled the world. But all so much 'what if's'...
Seems that Apple should be concerned about it as well. There are many Web 2.0 sites that don't work properly on Safari. :(
Interesting idea, but the hackers would immediately turn their guns on Firefox. And Firefox has plenty of holes, as the ever more frequent Firefox security updates prove.
Opera devs had their meeting at Microsoft last week. You can read the accounts from Opera devs. Sounds like they had a good time; had lunch with IE guys, bought MS shirts at the Microsoft Company Store, visited the Space Needle, etc. (Oh, they also did real work, and visted an Opera user group meeting.)
See:
http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/show.dml/419834
http://operawatch.com/news/2006/08/opera-visits......
http://my.opera.com/olli/blog/show.dml/417961
http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/08/opera-vista
Windows has never been the best place to run anything, and has reached its apotheosis in the bloated DRM-encumbered resource hog that is Vista. Vista (aka 2003 in drag) is the culmination of all of Microsoft's years of abusing its monopoly, being as it is the expression of a lazy, arrogant and incompetent company that has been isolated from real competition in a world of its own making. Now, with delicious irony and in a manner that is poetically just, Microsoft is going to be hoist on its own petard. It can't come soon enough.