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June 17, 2003
Down with King IE
Internet Explorer, the most prolific of the web browsers currently in use, may have just cried it's safety word. What would cause me to believe such a thing? Lets look at what has occurred in the last few weeks for Internet Explorer.
On May 7th, Brian Countryman (the IE program manager) stated Microsoft was beginning to phase out the standalone browser better known as Internet Explorer. Thus essentially making IE v 6, and all it's glorious bugs, the final "free" version. In many ways this makes sense, the browser war has long since been finished and Microsoft has proven to be victorious in it's pursuit. The historical view shows that Microsoft has never really been about giving away software, and it was well understood (although never publicly stated) that eventually Microsoft would charge for IE.
Now we see that Microsoft will be discontinuing Mac IE, a move that really isn't surprising. Macintosh users are not a significant share of the market, and more importantly Apple's own Safari browser runs circles around MacIE. So where is the death keel?
This maneuver places Microsoft into a bad position. It will now cost the average consumer a minimum of $200 USD to upgrade their web browser. The $200 USD being the average price of a Microsoft OS upgrade/release. This is a HUGE barrier to upgrading because not only does each new Microsoft OS cost an initial sum for the software, but there is almost always a hardware upgrade of unspecified proportions required (depending upon host machine configurations of course). With browsers like Opera, Mozilla/Netscape, KHTML costing significantly less to nothing, it stands to reason that Microsoft's dominance will disappear if angled properly.
Herein lies the challenge now for these alternative browsers. A flaw in the Microsoft armor has been discovered, and it is up to these alternative browsers to exploit this fact. When Longhorn is released, it is (currently) believed that a new version of IE will be included with this release. It is at this time that alternative browser users must push (extremely) hard onto the public psyche that you don't need to upgrade your ENTIRE OS just to get many of the new features. Once this meme is started, it will hopefully work it's way to become permanently ingrained. If this push is successful, there should be a slow but steady migration towards the alternative browsers with each Microsoft OS release.
There is a small problem with this path though, which is, what happens when some clever hacker (inevitably) discovers a way to upgrade IE v6 via patches? No longer would users feel a need to switch browsers, just apply the patch. The ensuing design issues would create a real hassle, potentially making web sites no longer work with browsers that they were "designed" for. With the ability to code on a per-browser basis would be destroyed, hopefully forcing a standards based approach instead making the web once again accessible to all.
Why has Microsoft made such a move though?
One word: control. With the ability to limit how IE is distributed, Microsoft can further integrate IE to the Windows operating system. This could be a really amazing bit of functionality if done right. Watching how the .NET architecture has been evolving, it seems safe to believe that Microsoft is about to make a major closing power play on Intranet services, which can in turn become a controlling stake in Internet services. The question I have yet to see a solution to is, how can an alternative browser disrupt this power play? AKA, is it possible to substitute in any of these alternatives and keep the same functionality as dictated by the Microsoft platform? My initial reaction has been to say that this just won't be possible, but having had to work with Mono in the past few weeks has really changed my outlook.
Posted by Dan at June 17, 2003 09:34 PM