The Death of Internet Explorer and the end of innovation

[adderslj]

Many of you know that, at home, I'm a keen Mac user. Part of this is an aesthetic decision: I like the industrial design of Apple machine far more than the beige boxes prevalent in the Windows world or, far worse, the horrible attempts some of the manufacturers have made to produce "trendy" computers. Let's not even talk about Dell's black bricks, either. I also find Mac OS X to be a more conducive and productive working environment than any flavour of Windows.

However, there's also a philosophical element to my decision, in that I'm adamant that one company should not be allowed to completely dominate something as important to modern life as computers and the internet. This article does a rather good job of explaining what the significance of the announcement that Internet Explorer for the Mac is dead, and the IE version won't be upgraded until Longhorn, the next version of Windows, ships. Oh, and it'll be built into the OS, so forget getting it stand alone for Windows XP or earlier.

Essentially, they've won the browser wars, got away with monopolistic behaviour in the US courts, and now they're stifling internet innovation until they can make a buck out of it by charging you for a systems upgrade. This is going to affect even those of us who don't use IE (I use Apple's Safari pretty much full-time now) because no web developer is going to use any new innovation in web standards that isn't supported by the prevalent browser. That, my friends, is going to be the current version of IE for a few years to come. Welcome to the stifled web.

Comments

[point5b.livejournal.com]

Eh.

In the first place, I've heard most of these warnings sounded every, every year since IE 1.0 came out.

In the second place, if Microsoft's really going to abandon IE upgrades until people go to Longhorn, Microsoft is basically staying out of the innovation game for the years it will take to get significant number of users to Longhorn. In that period, Opera and Mozilla (and probably mostly the latter) would have an open field. Not to mention Macromedia. Either Opera and/or Mozilla will jump ahead (if not ahead of IE), or else MS will change policy.

In the third place, people have been designing for IE for years. I don't know how many people really design HTML for IE 6, though. Every designer I've talked to still aims for IE 5 (and Netscape 4 compatibility, damn it all) for mass-public-consumption pages. Most web design doesn't really rely on bleeding-edge features.

[adders.livejournal.com]

>In the first place, I've heard most of these warnings sounded every, every year since IE 1.0 came out.

Yeah, but these aren't warnings or rumours. IE for the Mac is dead. Official word from the MacBU at Microsoft. IE6 SP1 is the last stand alone release of IE for the PC. Offiicial word from Microsoft.

Opera and Mozilla aren't really part of the discussion, simply because 80% of PC users have never and will never hear about them. A quick poll of my office yesterday suggests that this figure may actually be higher.

Face it, MS now controls the web.

[point5b.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but these aren't warnings or rumours. IE for the Mac is dead. Official word from the MacBU at Microsoft. IE6 SP1 is the last stand alone release of IE for the PC. Offiicial word from Microsoft.

No, not those. This:

Face it, MS now controls the web.

When the point is that Microsoft intends to cede browser development to everyone else for a few years, that's debatable. As for Opera and Mozilla (or Netscape 7, the name people would have heard of), more than 80% of PC users have never gotten very close to a Mac, either. There still seems to be some interest in them, though.

[adders.livejournal.com]

>No, not those. This:
>Face it, MS now controls the web.

Which, uh, wasn't in the original post?

> When the point is that Microsoft intends to cede browser development > to everyone else for a few years, that's debatable.

That's not the point. Microsoft's not cedeing development to everyone - it's just formally announcing what we already know: (1) there's no viable competition to IE any more (2)That it no longer needs to prop up Apple, now that MS has been convicted of being a monopolist...and got away with it.
> As for Opera and Mozilla (or Netscape 7, the name people would have
> heard of)

Oh, a few people had heard of it. No-one used it though, and several people said that it was "dead" or "Microsoft replaced it with Explorer, didn't they?".

> more than 80% of PC users have never gotten very close to a Mac,
> either. There still seems to be some interest in them, though.

Oh, yeah. All of 5 to 7% of the world's computer users are on Macs. That's what's called an insignificant minority, I'm afraid.

Nothing you've said changes my core point that no web standard can now develop without MS's say so. Unless they support it in IE, it's pointless using it. So, MS now controls development of the web.

They'd been trying for over five years. Thanks to the US's DoJ, they're now able to take that final step.

[point5b.livejournal.com]

"Face it, MS now controls the web"
Which, uh, wasn't in the original post?
It's the essence of what you said was your "core point" and what I understood to be your core point in the first post.

Here's the way I look at it:

The point of the Mac reference was that the non-IE browser market, particularly Mozilla, has far more ability to grow than the Mac market. It's application vs platforms, a far more fluid situation. If your coworkers wanted to use another browser, they could download Mozilla or Opera and use either fairly easily. A Mac requires an investment of money and time to learn that's sufficient to put off anyone without enough motivation.

Not that someone will really download and use another browser without at least some motivation, if only an idle interest. But that's the point. You should see the proportion of older versions of IE and Netscape I see on server logs at work - and the correlation of Windows version to IE version. By and large, people didn't (and many haven't yet) upgrade to IE 6.0 until they upgraded to XP, which had it pre-installed. You'd be surprised how many are still running Win98, for that matter.

Most users don't tend to try all sorts of different browsers, nor do they even bother to upgrade their own browser all that often. Why? Because it takes some tiny bit of effort, and they don't feel any pressing need to do so now - and will only do so later if they think they're missing out on some new thing. This would be true even if Microsoft wasn't dominant - this is just consistent with human nature (witness all the folks still using Netscape 4.x versions). For that matter, it would be an even bigger point with less IE domination.

To try to put it clearly, if some new web standards don't offer anything to users that would motivate them to download another program or even just bother updating their own browser, then they just aren't that big a deal. This isn't Microsoft's doing or fault - for that matter, with the upgraded browser versions for each version of Windows, they've basically been shoving new web standards down the throats of their OS-upgrading customers.

So, I'm not concerned that MS isn't going to upgrade pre-Longhorn IE. If IE 7.0 were released normally, I'd be surprised if the vast majority of IE users would intentionally upgrade before going to Longhorn. Further, if 7.0 supports something new that's actually compelling, being Longhorn-only will become a detriment when Mozilla and others support the same thing. "Gee, do I pay to upgrade to Windows 2003, go through the hassle of installing, and deal with all the new bugs in order to see this neat new thing or just download Mozilla for free?" In fact, that's why I think this policy won't last, but that's beside the point.

I'm going to upgrade and, if need be, adopt new software because I'm interested in some of the new standards. I suspect some will be compelling enough to encourage a lot of people to do the same. But if you're right, and people overall will only go to these standards if Microsoft drags them bodily, then it's just not as bad as you think.

[vocis.livejournal.com]

Sorry about the late reply, but I have a bad habit of ignoring LJ for days at a time.

This is going to affect even those of us who don't use IE (I use Apple's Safari pretty much full-time now) because no web developer is going to use any new innovation in web standards that isn't supported by the prevalent browser.

I wouldn't necessarily say that, though I can understand the fear. That may well happen with regard to private/personal webpages, but I don't think actual developers would produce sites that don't support multiple browsers on multiple platforsm. I'm sure some are more conscientious about it than others, but I don't think that's going to go away. At least, not any time soon. (I suppose after a number of years, when it's safe to assume that no PC users are still running Win 95 or 98 anymore, that pages that don't support IE prior to v6.x will be more common, for example.)

Plus, MS doesn't yet control the W3C, which sets the standards for HTML, CSS, etc, so as long as people write pages that adhere to these standards and browsers that correctly interperate them, it shouldn't be a big deal. Of course, that hasn't been the case so far, but hopefully people have learned from previous browser versions that developing proprietary tags just makes people (both people making webpages and people trying to view them) hate you.

It's not easy for me to be optomistic, but while I think your concerns are valid ones, I just don't think it will be that bad. It's just not good business sense to alienate a consumer base - even a small one - when it's that simple for your competitor to reach them.