Why do the Browser people (MS, Mozilla, etc.) want my business so much? What do they get out of it? It’s free. ???
The non MS people want a world where using the internet is not tied to Microsoft. Microsoft wants a world that is tied to Microsoft. There are a lot of business applications that are run via extensions to MS explorer. The businesses must use Windows and probably use a lot of other Microsoft programs like office.
I presume Microsoft wants to embrace, extend, and extinguish. Opera wants to make money. Apple wants to satisfy its OCD and won’t stop until every particle in the universe looks like OSX. Google wants its web apps to work better. Firefox, as an open source project, probably does it Because They Can.
The real browser war was the one between netscape 3 and IE 4. MS won that one. Then they sat on their arse long enough for the competition to run past them.
Right now, there isn’t any point in having an argument about it. Either Microsoft gets their browser up to scratch or they’ll be out of the game completely. There’s just too much competition for them to ignore it.
As for the non-IE browsers; the differences between them aren’t all that interesting. And google (right now) doesn’t care at all what you use as long as it isn’t IE.
There’s a lot of money in browser dominance even if the consumer doesn’t see it. That money isn’t always tied directly to the browser either.
For example, Microsoft FrontPage used to have many features that would only work with Internet Explorer and with web servers that supported FrontPage extensions. So if they saturate the market with IE, people will want to develop pages that use IE’s features. That means they need to pay for FrontPage and for IIS.
Then there are implementation of standards for HTML, Javascript, Java applets and ActiveX. If developers find that they can’t design a site that works in every browser (and this is pretty common), then they have to pick which ones they will support. They make that choice largely by looking at what people use. A browser that doesn’t fight for their user base will find their user base shrinking even more. You really need a certain critical mass.
Until fairly recently (and post MS “winning” the previous browser war) it wasn’t that odd to see web developers advocating designing only for IE, and companies testing only against that platform. The site might work in a non-IE browser, or might not…
More recently developers started advocating following the web-standards, and then tweaking for IE (still the largest user segment). This was a major shift in thinking and policy. Project managers began to get told that the project was X hours + Y hours of “MS tax”.
And once developers were doing “additional” work to make sites run in IE it began (at least within the web development community) to move from being the default platform to a necessary evil.
Don’t think of it as pushing a piece of software. Think of it as pushing technology and name branding. Microsoft wants dominance because they want their own technologies to become standards. They want more than just Web 2.0, they want their technologies that work only with their operating systems so people would have to buy Windows machines and use their browser to see pages that use Microsoft web technologies. Think ActiveX controls and DHTML (Dynamic HTML), both Windows-specific technologies. DHTML was the bane of the internet in my view; only Explorer could render pages with DHTML content, and it was slow and crappy anyway. Fortunately web developers have long since looked past that boat anchor of web technologies and gone with more standardized things.
Mozilla (and browsers based on it) is pushing for more open standards using open source and full, standardized HTML compliance, but it also wants to push technologies such as its extensions architecture, its web rendering engine, its Java engine (which is one of the fastest around) and so on.
Yeah, a lot of it is dick measuring and politics, but there are some legitimate concerns about content involved here as well – how its rendered, what technologies are needed to render it, and so on. Microsoft has been steadily losing ground over the years to Firefox because it has insisted on pushing its clunky web tech for so long, and Explorer has become the symbol for how not to make a web browser. (Believe me, the latest IE in Windows 7 still sucks. It actually screws up the Windows Explorer kernal when it misbehaves.)
They may be free, but they represent fundamentally different philosophies in how you browse the web – and how each company wants you to view the web. Kind of like the old AC vs. DC electricity wars, or metric vs. imperial, or beta vs. VHS.
Um, no. DHTML is a generic term for client-side scripting behavior, and is not restricted to Windows, or even IE. The pioneering browser was Netscape 4, although IE4 later the same year pushed it forward considerably. The drive towards a standardized DOM (domain object model) was largely to make it easier to write DHTML across lots of platforms. This bulletin board uses DHTML, and so do most sites.
Perhaps so, but the Mozilla Foundation is almost wholly funded by Google.
Given that Google has their own browser (Chrome), I would have thought they’d want us to use that.
But how can they make money from their browser? It is free just like the others.
Well they make a lot of browsers. They make the browser for the wii console. I assume Nintendo paid them. They also sell browsers to a lot of other companies that want and embedded browsers.
Most of the companies that make browsers either offer a search engine that they can coerce people into using by having it set as the browser’s default (Google Chrome and MS Internet Explorer), or they can have search companies pay per search referred from their browser (Firefox and their Google searches). Mozilla reportedly made $72 million off Google searches alone one year, but a board member refuted that claim (saying it was still in the millions though): http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=182
Another aspect is that MS certainly would not want lots of applications to run off of a browser. If that happened, the Windows OS would become irrelevant and MS would lose its monopoly power. People would just run their word processors and spreadsheets off of a browser which could be ported to Windows, Linux, Apple or whatever. See wiki link in post #3.
What they want is to get rid of the automatic assumption that PC == MS Windows and move more and more applications and data onto the web, since that is where they can make money off it. Having different browsers that work reliably according to the standards is very important to them. Chrome is just a small part of that, and they also sponsor Mozilla/Firefox. See also: Android, ChromeOS.
As far as I can see, google’s long term strategy is not to outcompete Microsoft, it’s to make operating systems so ubiquitous and cheap they’re irrelevant.
I’ve tried the other browsers and, honest to God, I cannot tell what advantage any of the competition gives me IE doesn’t. For a normal user like me IE is perfect. The time I spent installing Firefox et al. was time wasted.
I’m sure someone who knows the technical details can say that this or that browser works better with FTHGAFHTML and whatnot, but to the average slob, they all look the same.
There isn’t, right now, a compelling reason for the average user to not use IE (at least if you’ve got all your security updates and have some decent anti-malware). But the only reason that that’s still true is because almost everybody building complex web applications is spending an amazing amount of extra work to make sure that their stuff even runs on IE - and believe me, it is bloody annoying to code stuff that pretty much just works on Firefox, Opera, Safari & Chrome and then having to spend at least the same amount of time on the Internet Explorer “hacks”. At the same time, the average user could switch to FF** or Opera or Safari with little to no problems.
With some of the new technologies that are available pretty much everywhere except on IE this is going to change. Again, google is pushing hard in that direction: Youtube is discontinuing support for older Explorers, and Google Wave will not run on any Explorer (unless you fake it by installing the Chrome-browser-in-IE plugin). If Wave gets really popular it could knock IE’s market share down a hell of a lot.
** For me, Firefox with AdblockPlus is reason enough - last time I used a non-blocking browser I was astounded at the amount of crap people are apparantly willing to tolerate on their websites.
Oh I forgot a link: Google's Plan to Kill Internet Explorer? Google Wave | Mashable
To truly hate Microsoft, one must be a developer.
My biggest beef with IE is that the debugging tools suck. Firebug which is a FireFox add-on has it’s quirks, but is a lot easier to work with. From a user perspective, one thing that used to be a big problem was security. I don’t use windows except to test pages that I am working on, so I don’t really know the issues or if they have been addressed.