[The following column was turned down by The Times Online because they suggested I had a conflict of interest. Of course that’s their prerogative, but given that my employment is posted at the bottom of every article I write for them, it’s not as if people don’t know where I’m coming from…]
In the next week or two, both Microsoft and Mozilla will be releasing major updates to their browsers – Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. Tech journalists the world over are surely at this very moment dusting off their tired “browser war” headlines from the late 1990s, and conducting detailed comparative reviews which they will all release at the same time as the software, having cheated by basing their work on the beta versions.
“Tabs? Check. Phishing protection? Check. Feed reader? Check. Spell checking in form fields? Ooh, advantage Firefox. ‘Protected mode’? And it’s back to neck-and-neck…”
But I suggest there is another way to compare the two contenders aside from a feature-by-feature tick-list. It’s in the attitude the two organisations have shown to the users of their products.
Way back when in the late 90s (are you sitting comfortably?), Netscape and Microsoft were fighting over the growing browser market. These were the days when Java was the next big thing, <blink> was cool, and the HTML for the websites of major companies was still coded by hand.
Both browser makers burned the midnight oil to cram in more features. But, just as haste in placing the bottom bricks comes back to haunt you when you try and make your tower reach the ceiling, software has a limited ability to absorb quick-and-dirty changes and hacked-in enhancements before it becomes an unmaintainable mess. And Netscape’s tower topped out first.
Netscape 4 was inferior to IE 4, let alone IE 5 or 6, and the creaking codebase couldn’t be extended any further without disproportionate effort. So through a combination of monopolistic behaviour by Microsoft and suspect business decisions by Netscape, a victor emerged. As the nascent Mozilla project set off on a four-year odyssey rewriting the browser from the ground up, they ceded the field to Microsoft.
But how did Microsoft respond to this victory? Basically, they did nothing. Their market share was somewhere north of 90% and growing. This was job done as far as they were concerned. Through the wilderness years of the early part of the decade, as popups, spyware and viruses made the lives of web users a misery, Microsoft produced the bare minimum of security patches but nothing more. Why should they? Almost everyone used their product regardless. They had no interest in evolving the browser to meet the changing needs of the web’s growing population.
Then back came the Mozilla project with Firefox, a browser for the web as it is today. This coincided with the rise of rich web applications, which threatened to make the operating system irrelevant and turn the browser into the platform. After all, if your mail is from Yahoo and your word processor is from Google and you manage your photos with Flickr, does it really matter if you are doing it on Windows or Linux? (Ironically, the core technology which made this possible, the ‘XMLHTTPRequest’ object which lets web developers easily update pages without a reload, was invented by Microsoft for IE 6 [Correction: IE 5].)
Only at this point, when Microsoft felt threatened, did Bill rebuild the browser team to make IE 7. He needed to arrest the market share decline, and find a way to make the web experience best with proprietary Windows-only technology. So the creation of this new version is not motivated by his desire to provide a better surfing experience for their users, but his desire to keep control of the web and make sure it doesn’t threaten Microsoft’s platform hegemony.
Firefox, on the other hand, has been user-centered from the beginning. The original developers’ misery at having to produce Netscape 6 drove them to produce software they thought everyone else would want to use. The extension mechanism provides a safety valve through which the geekiest features can be pushed out and only installed by those who need them, allowing a relentless focus on usability and simplicity. Firefox is a browser made for you.
Yes, Microsoft have got off their backside and improved their product, and that can only be good for web users and developers. Yes, competition is good. But before you consider IE 7, ask yourself this – if Microsoft dumped you before, why won’t they do it again?
Well, it’s not too hard to see, why it was turned down by the Times Online. Don’t get me wrong, what you write is almost exactly my opinion, but I wouldn’t want to read it in that way in any (online) news paper. It almost reads like a mozilla ad.
Sounds about right, although I can see why the Times weren’t especially up on it.
One small factual error: XMLHTTPReqest was first introduced in IE5.0, not 6.
Great read! I needed some inspiration to keep pushing Firefox to my friends :)
Just a few hours ago I had a discussion with a guy who was in love with IE7. But he understood that there wouldn’t be an IE7 for him if it weren’t for Firefox. :D
And some inspiration:
An American girl studying here in Sundsvall (Sweden) pointed at my t-shirt and said “That’s the internet, isn’t it?”.
We must have done something right :)
It felt impartial until near the end… but you could equally well attribute the IE stagnation as a commercial company responding to the utter failure of both later versions of Netscape and the original Mozilla browser to produce a worthwhile competitor.
Will Firefox dump on us like Netcape did?
Isn’t that what I said? They didn’t care about the users, only about whether there was any competition.
What do you think? What were Netscape’s motives for abandoning Netscape-the-browser? Could the same apply to the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox?
And other newspaper articles are consistently free from bias? I think it is an excellent article; obviously pushing an argument but not an unexpected one. Furthermore, unlike most things journalists write about, both products under discussion are freely available (MS EULA not withstanding) for people to try out and make their own comparisons.
Thanks for publishing it here.
Given that your column is labelled ‘Our Man from Mozilla’ I don’t see why it shouldn’t contain pro-Mozilla opinions. In some ways it would be even odder for it not to do that.
Newspapers often contain articles written by (or at least with bylines of) MPs. These are not fair and balanced, but then they don’t have to be: because they are labelled as whose views they represent readers can see this is one side of the argument.
And I’m sure many of your previous articles have been pro-Mozilla anyway. Not as explicitly, but merely being in favour of software libre or usability or openness or any of the things Mozilla stands for could be just as much a conflict of interest.
Unlike IE7, Mozilla products don’t require an “upgrade” to a product that requires more computing HP than I have. Mozilla products don’t force me to abandon my DOS software to meet minimum requirements. Mozilla products don’t have an unconscionable license agreement. Mozilla products don’t require that I continue to do business with a convicted monopolist. I can upgrade to Firefox 2 at no cost, something I can’t do with IE7.
I think this line of reasoning is unnecessary. I’ve seen IE7, and IMO it’s safe to let it compete with Firefox 1.5, let alone 2, on a feature-for-feature basis. IE7 is _closer_ to feature parity with the other major browsers than IE6 is, but it’s still playing catch-up. Yes, it’s finally got tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and proper PNG support — welcome to the state of the art of 2001. It does *not* have bookmark keywords, convenient zooming of images and text, the ability to easily open a collection of pages in tabs at one go, a good way to manage downloads, or anything that can even remotely compete with the DOM Inspector, Web Developer extension, and Javascript debugger.
That’s just the user-centric stuff. Web content developers are utterly fed up with the inadequacy of IE’s CSS implementation, which has not improved noticeably from IE6 to IE7 and indeed has now developed *new* bugs we have to work around. (I just got finished spending two hours at work yesterday working around one, and I ended up having to do it in a way that causes the site layout to differ in IE from how it looks in every other browser.) With as many web pages as there are demanding users to install the Flash and the Adobe Reader, I’m surprised more don’t simply tell IE users their browser is unsupported and that they should get Firefox. It’s sorely tempting.
“It does *not* have bookmark keywords”
– It has a registry key where you can specify query URLs for the same effect, but this feature is mainly of use to geeks on places like Bugzilla anyway.
“convenient zooming of images and text”
– Huh? IE7 has a zoom function. Firefox only has the ability to change text size.
“the ability to easily open a collection of pages in tabs at one go”
– Right click a folder in Favourites, and select Open in Tab Group
“a good way to manage downloads”
– Arguably, neither does Firefox. If your idea of ‘managing’ downloads is simply to list them all in a single window instead of separate windows, I don’t really care about it.
“or anything that can even remotely compete with the DOM Inspector, Web Developer extension, and Javascript debugger.”
– There are tools available to do these things (IEInspector, Visual Studio), but perhaps you don’t consider them competition. Most users won’t care though, as they don’t use these things.
Honestly, I agree with their call on not running it as a column, but it’d make a damn good op-ed piece.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not going down this path because I think Firefox can’t compete otherwise. It definitely can. This is just one more reason to prefer it over IE.
> “convenient zooming of images and text”
> – Huh? IE7 has a zoom function.
I stand corrected. It does. I had failed to find it in the Beta (either because I simply overlooked it, or because the UI was not evident), but I do see it now in the final release.
> Firefox only has the ability to change text size.
I keep forgetting that Image Zoom is an extension. It certainly _should_ be native functionality. But in any event the UI for it is very convenient.
> “the ability to easily open a collection of pages in tabs at one go”
> – Right click a folder in Favourites, and select Open in Tab Group
I’m not seeing that option, in the latest version of IE (for Windows Server 2003) that I downloaded and installed a few minutes ago on our testing/training server.
> “a good way to manage downloads”
> – Arguably, neither does Firefox.
Okay, it could stand to be improved. But it’s better than what IE has.
> “or anything that can even remotely compete with the DOM Inspector,
> Web Developer extension, and Javascript debugger.”
> but perhaps you don’t consider them competition.
I don’t consider them part of Internet Explorer, certainly.
> Most users won’t care though, as they don’t use these things.
Granted. Perhaps my examples weren’t very good. Some of the other features are more end-usery. Nonetheless, IE7 *just* came out, and Firefox is, feature-wise, already ahead of it. Where do you think Firefox will be, feature-wise, when the _next_ version of IE comes out? (My guess? Firefox will be obsolete by then, and something else will have taken its place. But that is abject speculation.)
I don’t think it’s a problem of convincing people who know about Firefox and IE as to which one is better. It’s more a question of whether people know or care what web browser they’ve got in the first place, or are even aware that there are choices. (Fortunately, the people who have to be convinced do not have to always be the end users; it can just as well be their system administrators, computer-geek nephews, OEMs, and the people who put together ISP software CDs — anyone who makes decisions about what software is installed.)