Comments on: Microsoft Cutting Back On IE?

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:39:51 +0000

I was going to point out that unless they’ve tripled the team size in the last 2 1/2 years, there aren’t 180 contractors on the IE Team. Almost all of the contract workers are concentrated in QA and they only form about 35% of the team or so.

The MSN Internet group is on a separate subcampus and has nothing to do with IE, which is technically part of the Windows group.

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:21:43 +0000

@pd

You say they don’t need to have the dominant platform when there are a lot of developers out there willing to write code just for IE. True, there are many such developers – but only because IE *is* the dominant platform. If it ceases to be such, then writing sites and applications that work only on IE will not be sustainable. You can afford to ignore the other browsers when their market share doesn’t amount to much. But now, this report says those browsers make up nearly a third of the market – can anyone really afford to ignore so many potential customers? And if IE’s share continues to drop, below that 50% mark? Then what?

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:20:28 +0000

@Daniel Glazman: Interesting tidbit.

By: Daniel Glazman

Daniel Glazman — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:50:41 +0000

AFAIK, Microsoft cannot buy Opera. A reliable source told me long ago that the investors’ pact contains an item forbiding the sale of shares to Microsoft.

By: pd

pd — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:50:19 +0000

If MS choose a FOSS browser engine, does that mean they have to eventually release all code they write that integrates that engine with the Windows operating system? I’m thinking there’s a lot of funky glue over and above any or all of the standard Trident components such as the parser, layout and scripting engines. Can you really see MS adopting an FOSS engine when they would have to divulge all that ‘secret sauce’ glue?

How would they get around the ActiveX issue?

Surely they are smart enough to realise that Trident forms the core part of a developer API (both offline and online) that makes their platform a helluva lot more attractive? In that respect they’d be shooting themselves in the foot to abandon it.

Thirdly, let’s not forget the huge marketing/reputation hit they would take by adopting their first ever massive chunk of well-known FOSS code?

Unlikely.

They can wait for years after IE8, and probably will. They don’t necessarily need to have the dominant platform when there are a lot of developers out there willing to write code just for IE such as that on many corporate intranets.

I predict more of the status quo. Don’t get your FOSS hopes up.

It is folly to focus on the decline of IE instead of the strengthening of Firefox. How about focusing more on some unique features in Firefox? There’s been too few of those IMHO lately. At least, too few genuinely innovative ones. Off the top of my head, the awesomebar is the only recent unique feature I can think of and that has been copied already. Inline spell checking is good but not really earth shattering.

By: Marc Diethelm

Marc Diethelm — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:25:08 +0000

It could well be that MS is busted because of their promise of backward compatibility. They can’t go forward because Trident is basically legacy software and seemingly impossible to fix. Nor can they just ‘switch’ engines because apparently this would break existing MS ‘compliant’ sites and intranets too much. This is of course just speculation… Maybe they could just buy the internet

Anyway Mozilla.org did the right thing when they threw Netscape 5 out of the window and started (almost) from scratch. MS can’t do that now, it’s too late.

Possibly they could use an open source engine and code all the old IE bugs/quirks into it. I wonder how much work that would be. Certainly not a job anyone would like to take on. But then their standards compliance mode would actually be – standards compliant.

By: Gen Kanai

Gen Kanai — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:57:56 +0000

David Bloom has a great point. The other major point against MSFT buying/using Presto in the future would be the requirement for all of MSFT’s customers to re-do all of those webpages for Presto instead of Trident. I don’t see that happening.

By: David Bloom

David Bloom — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 03:16:29 +0000

The ideology of Microsoft and Opera Software is so fundamentally different that an acquisition would pretty much never go through. "We have been competing with Microsoft for a long time and I have not felt that they have always fought fairly. I would be disappointed if we were to end up in their hands and I find that very unlikely. I believe a lot of people at Opera would find them selves other work and that would include me." —Jon von Tetzchner

By: Robert

Robert — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:48:28 +0000

@Anonymous: Yes Microsoft needs IE. It’s Microsofts mechanism for allowing Windows users to utilize the Internet without freeing them from Windows. By having it’s own browser with proprietary extensions Microsoft ensures users can gain the benefits of the Internet yet prohibits them from becoming to OS antagonistic. This is critical since they sell OS’s not browsers.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:44:32 +0000

The question is why does Microsoft need IE? Just look at silverlight. It’s an alternative to flash / java. But most importantly it is an alternative to ActiveX. Does microsoft need html when it can use silverlight for everything? Some sites can’t even be accessed without Flash.