Blog FeedSomething Wicked this Way Comes
I started using alternative browsers before it became cool. My first regular switch came with Opera 5 which was way faster than IE 5 especially on my old and busted dial up connection. Then when Mozilla (not Firefox) came out with 1.0 I switched yet again, and then I switched to Phoenix when it was at .5 or so. Phoenix became Firebird and Firebird became Firefox and I went from a Windows user to a linux user to a Windows on the desktop and Linux on the laptop solution. The point is to show that I’ve been away from IE for a long time but for a brief trip to a computer lab where my browser choice is out of my hands; therefore it may come as some surprise to you I’m quite interested to see what happens when the empire strikes back. Of course I’m talking about the impending launch of Internet Explorer 7.0.
I’ve always been first and foremost interested in features and compatibility. Firefox, has won my heart because I think it has the best features and it’s compatibility is as good where there are no Active X controls. Furthermore you can add to Firefox since it’s open source, if you’ve not checked out any of the awesome downloads at http://mozdev.org, now would be as good a time as any. There are tons of useful packs there to be downloaded and easily installed ranging from skins, to control panels for media players to adblocking software. Will Microsoft be able to match this and provide a bunch of functionality to IE? I’m not so sure they will, or that they’re even really trying. That having been said, nobody has ever been as good at borrowing(or stealing) ideas as Redmond so i’m fairly sure we’ll see several components added to IE 7. Mozilla’s big killer app (which they borrowed from Opera in turn) tabbed browsing has already been announced.
Compatibility of course will have a slight edge to Redmond however, as MS defines how people program for the web. You can live without every other browser but if IE can’t view your site, it’s not good for traffic to say the least. Their market share has dipped below 90 percent across all platforms but it’s still riding high enough to be the big kid on the block. That having been said several larger sites are promising Firefox functionality. I can’t wait till they get launchcast working right on Yahoo myself.
Then there is the security argument; as a home user I don’t pay all that much attention to this but it may be the best chip in the Mozilla/Firefox column. The real install base multiplier aren’t guys sitting around at home but rather bussiness. If Firefox can convince big bussiness that their data is safer on their browser then prepare for some real paradigm shifts in the browser war on the level of IE3 shipping with Windows. That having been said Firefox has security issues as well they’re just not hunted as much as Windows. Furthermore, Security through obscurity is really a poor argument that’s short sighted if I ever heard one. If a bunch of people switched browsers because of this argument you’d just create a scenario where more people hack Firefox. The best thing about Firefox is they do fix their troubles with a sense of alacrity compared to Microsoft who seems to take forever after an exploit is discovered.
Well I guess it would be premature to declare a winner now but the ball lies squarely in Redmond’s court. They’ve been outdone, now it’s time to see wether they can return serve; or is it an open source future for browsers? One final caveat: this article was written from the perspective of a user not a programmer. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about any kind of programming; if I left some critical point out from a web coders perspective I’d like to hear about it.
19th June | Reply
I am highly against IE for one major reason (and a bunch of minor ones): there is no version for the Mac. This wouldn’t be a problem unless IE was so dominant that there are many web sites (particularly banking ones) where you cannot use it unless you use IE, which rules me out unless I buy Virtual PC. As such I hope that IE is soundly thrashed so that sites are either designed to work with all standards-compliant browsers OR will work with a browser that is available for all major OS’s (insert own definition of major OS here).
Aside from this I don’t have too many complaints about IE. I’m not a fan of its interface, its favourites/bookmark management leaves something to be desired, it doesn’t cope with network changes (proxy server changes in particular), and it lacks some of the features of browsers that have seen some investment in the last few years. The security for IE is a bother but some of the stuff added in Windows XP Service Pack 2 drives me nuts. My biggest gripe at the moment is that every time I open an XML file in IE I need to “unblock” the active content that allows branches of the XML file to be expanded/collapsed. I have to do this EVERY SODDING TIME…!
Currently I’m really happy with Safari RSS since it renders pages pretty fast, it’s bookmark management is excellant and the RSS features are really great. Firefox is my backup browser at the moment for sites that won’t render correctly in Safari and when I want to view XML files on the Mac (note to IE: Firefox doesn’t complain every time I open an XML, so why must you?). Aside from this I haven’t seen anything from Opera that would justify buying a license, although I keep getting tempted to try OmniWeb since I use a couple of other applications from OmniGroup (OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner) and both are excellant.
19th June | Reply
Can’t you still use IE5 for macintosh?
19th June | Reply
IE 5 for Mac is seriously outdated, and it’s actually very different from IE 5, 5.5, or 6 for Windows. It isn’t supported by Microsoft anymore, though ironically, it has slightly better CSS support than any of the Windows IE versions. But other issues means that it’s just not a viable option to use on the modern web anymore. Web designers generally hate having to code for it, as it’s just yet another browser that displays things differently.
As for IE7, the MS developers have stated on their IE Blog that IE7 will feature much better CSS support, but it will still maintain backwards compatibility so it doesn’t break older sites. What this means is that they’re still not going to be a generally W3C-compliant browser, because they screwed everyone over too hard with previous versions of IE, and they can’t just throw all the poorly skilled “web developers” into the deep end with a fully compliant browser.
As for funtionality, their tabbed browsing implementation is set to be, err, interesting. To maintain compatibility, speed, and stability, extra toolbar addons will now have their own instance in each tab you have open. If you want to see what I mean, this place has some projected screenshots of what it will probably look like. Not pretty at all, and I for one value my screen real estate very highly. Good thing I won’t use extra toolbars. Better thing - I won’t use IE.
If 90% of the web used IE7 instead of IE6, that would be an improvement, but at least for the first 18 months or so, it’s going to be a big pain having to design for compliant browsers (Safari, Firefox, and Opera) as well as both IE7 and IE6, which I dare say will have some different issues between them. Hopefully IE7’s better CSS support will make this issue a minimal one though, and it’ll still jsut be IE6 that’s the pain.
20th June | Reply
Well I personally have never had any trouble with IE. But saying that, I do mean trouble that I have noticed. I could have hundreds of viruses and my hardrive slowly being wiped out and I would not notice.
20th June | Reply
Security is definitely a big problem for IE. I installed the Yahoo! Toolbar a few months ago complete with its Anti-Spy function and was shocked to discover the amount of spyware kicking around my office PC after only about 6-months of use.
I hope that Chris is wrong about IE ensuring that it is backwards compatible with its buggered brethren since it will ensure that I can continue to look forwards to “Best Viewed With IE Since We Can’t Be Arsed To Make It Compatible With Other Browsers” messages and other annoyances…
20th June | Reply
Well, I’ll let you make of it what you will in their blog post here.
Another thing that has ticked me off about IE is that they don’t try to support standards until they have become official. In that link above they allude to not giving a damn about adding CSS 3 support for IE7, because it’s not actually a standard yet. It’s just in development.
This was largely the case when IE6 came out. It supported CSS1, but only a couple of CSS2 commands (and not properly, at that). This meant that by the time CSS2 was standard, IE was completely unprepared for it, and after all this time we’re still waiting for them to catch up. Meanwhile, Mozilla makes sure that it implements what standards it can quickly, so that when the standards become official, they already have a browser that is capable of rendering pages with it.
The IE development team seems to think that playing catch-up is impressive enough, when it’s not.