IE is dead! Long live IE!

[(Shovel)]

In fact, no, IE is dead and they're not bringing a new one. Embattle linked a few weeks ago to the death of IE on the PC (to be replaced by an integrated system in Windows Longhorn in 2005(!)) but now the Mac has snuffed it too:

http://212.100.234.54/content/4/31205.html

 

[Jonty]

Sad news indeed

Yeah, I was reading about this on Zeldman.com. As you say, it's bad news, especially considering IE5/Mac was such a cool browser.

Jeffery Zeldman
The rumors flew all day, but we held off writing about this until we had it from an unimpeachable source. Jimmy Grewal is a key member of the Mac Internet Explorer team and a stand-up guy. He confirms that IE5/Mac is dead.

There is much that could be said. IE5/Mac, with its Tasman rendering engine, was the first browser to deliver meaningful standards compliance to the market, arriving in March, 2000, a few months ahead of Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6. On a mailing list today, Netscape’s Eric Meyer said, “ I don’t think people realize just how much of a groundbreaker IE5/Mac really was, and how good it remains even today.” IE5/Mac introduced innovations like DOCTYPE switching and Text Zoom that soon found their way into comparably compliant browsers like Navigator, Konqueror, and Safari. And all but Text Zoom eventually made it into IE6/Win, Microsoft’s most compliant Windows browser to date (and the last one they will ever make).

Bafflingly, after attaining dominance on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms, IE stopped evolving. In the past three years, its existing competitors at Netscape, Opera, and the open source Mozilla project greatly improved their browsers, and new competitors flooded the market, but IE/Win and IE/Mac stayed as they were.

This might sound like the complacence of victors after throttling an opposing army. But inside Microsoft, nobody was slacking off. Our friends there, we knew, were working on improvements, particularly in the areas of CSS and DOM support. Yet no significantly new browser version ever came of their activity. IE6/Win still had trouble with parts of CSS1, still did not support true native PNG transparency, and still did not incorporate Text Zoom. IE5/Mac, which had worked well in OS 9, became flaky under OS X, and a minor upgrade did not fix its problems. Even die-hard IE5/Mac fans began switching to Camino, and, when it arrived, Safari.

Those who switched may have done so on the basis of features like tabbed browsing or popup blocking. Some in the development community may have switched because of the improved standards compliance in Gecko browsers like Camino and Netscape. But mostly, we think, the switchers were behaving instinctively.

With Camino or Safari, you felt you were using a living product that was continually improving in response to user feedback. Microsoft’s browser engineers were busy working on something, but their activities took place behind a (figurative) corporate firewall.

Over the past weeks, the stories we and others have been covering (including the unavailability of an improved version of IE5/Mac outside the subscription-based MSN pay service, and the news that IE/Win was dead as a standalone product) painted a picture of a product on its way out. And now we know that that is the case.

We know that, after spending billions of dollars to defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively own the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer interested in web browsers. We know that, on the Windows side, it will eventually release something that accesses web content, but that “something” will be part of an operating system – and that operating system won’t be available until 2005, and probably won’t be widely used before 2007. Whether the part that formats web pages will be more or less compliant with W3C recommendations than what we have now, we don’t know. Neither do we know whether the unnamed thing that handles web browsing will support CSS3 and other specifications that will emerge during the long years ahead in which Microsoft offers no new browser.

From here, as it has for several weeks now, it looks like a period of technological stasis and dormancy yawns ahead. Undoubtedly the less popular browsers will continue to improve. But few of us will be able to take advantage of their sophisticated standards support if 85% of the market continues to use an unchanged year 2000 browser.

But enough, and enough, and enough. We are glad of the latest versions of Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, Safari, and Omniweb. But on this grey and rainy day, this news of a kind of death brings no warmth.

Kind Regards

 

[(Shovel)]

My honest opinion is that, as web developers (hobbiest or otherwise) there is a very real need to push people away from IE.

The fantastic thing about most of CSS, for instance, is that unsupported elements don't cause anything nasty to happen in old browsers. On my next major website I'm certainly going to stick a plug in for Mozilla and Opera, and providing screenshots of "what this page is supposed to look like" type things. The idea in turn, is that the pages should remain tidy and fully functional on IE6.

 

[Jonty]

I agree that IE's death, at least in terms of its rendering technology, is disconcerting, to say the least. However, I still believe it's unlikely IE will lose all that much ground in the time running up to Longhorn.

Opera is cool browser, but its user base is still very small, and the use of banner adverts and fees puts a lot of people off (a sad truth ). Mozilla was always aimed at power users, and was a little too unwieldy to ever gain mainstream recognition. Firebird is probably the way forward, and is now my default browser, but it's only at version 0.6 and still contains many bugs which prevent it from being adopted en masse. Netscape Navigator still uses the Mozilla 1.0.1 rendering engine, which is very good, but now a little aged. And AOL, as we all know, now have a seven year deal to use IE, and also seem keen on cutting funding to its subsidiary Netscape, whose engineers also comprise the largest part of the Mozilla team.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that 99.29% of all webpages on the Internet are not standards compliant. If this figure remains so high then Joe Public will have no reason (apart from more advanced features, like pop-up blocking and such) to switch from a browser that does everything they need it to, like IE. I guess it's our job to educate people hee hee.

Kind Regards

 

[(Shovel)]

When I say Mozilla, I tend to mean Firebird - I use the core Mozilla at the mo, but since they are merging Firebird at version 1.5/1.6 people will end up switching whether they like it or not... heh

 

[old.Kez]

It troubles me, because IE6 still fails to incorporate any sensible DTD handling, and many of the better elements of stylesheets.

Worse still, is that it doesn't affect us now; we've been coding for incomprehensible browser considerations for ages. It affects us years from now, long after Longhorn is released, simply because there's a stagnation of code.

This does mean however, that should they want to, both Opera and Apple can push their browsers in a way not seen since the battle of Netscape vs IE. Only this time there can be only one winner, in terms of market share gain.

(I single out Opera and Apple because both of them are profitable companies with money to expend, where-as opensource initiatives rarely have any sort of monetary flow)

 

[Embattle]

I read the other day that IE is the Standard, basically because of it smarket share

 

[Jonty]

It's very true that IE's market share is just phenomenal. Depending on which statistics you believe, it hovers around 85-95% (and such figures are from independant agencies with large samples, as opposed to Microsoft affiliated companies). Whether this marke tshare will decline signficiantly, however, I'm really not sure.

Just for those who really like their browsers, Eric Meyer has compiled a list of some interesting facts about IE5/Mac, a truly brilliant browser which tends to get slated by those who don't use it. Be sure to check out his Hail and farewell post.

Kind Regards

 

[PR.]

I've been using Mozilla for the last few weeks for my remote desktop sessions from Work to Home. I have it configured to disable images and a tab plugin to open all new windows in tabs. This makes it sooo much faster to render over a modem connection to my works machine, much more so than IE.

But I agree its a power users toy, its still more unstable than IE6 and I have had problems with some websites.

Also I'm used to my IEspell checker and Mozilla doesn't seem to have anything like it? Or does it?!

Thanks

 

[MYstIC G]

tbh as long as they keep working on keeping the fucking holes in IE plugged, I'm happy to let Firebird take its place on the desktop.