In a recent developer conference in Sydney, someone asked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer why they’re spending so many resources on their beloved browser, Internet Explorer:
Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?
According to Techworld, this was his reply:
Ballmer began his answer philosophically, saying Microsoft will need to look at what the browser is like in the future and, if there is no innovation around them, which he thinks is “likely”, Microsoft may still need its own browser because of proprietary extensions that broaden its functionality.
“Open source is interesting,” he said. “Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.”
So now if we can imagine Microsoft actually swallowing its pride to rework IE to use the same code Apple is using with Safari, and Google with Chrome, we’d have 3 competing browsers by 3 technological giants using the same foundations for building a browser. It would seem like good news for those who’ve spent sleepless nights keeping websites from breaking due to IE’s numerous bugs, although I’m not quite sure why have to have 3 different derivatives of WebKit in the first place—which is an issue for another day.
I want to go back to the question of relevance. Ballmer didn’t exactly defend IE’s relevance, even saying that there is likely to be “no innovation around them”. Are you sure? Mozilla definitely thinks otherwise. So does Google.
Add to that Microsoft’s foray into the “cloud” with Windows Azure. Google, which wanted to make sure its web apps provided the best experience, created its own web browser. IE has been around for years now, but what could be crucial to next-generation platform computing seems to be an afterthought, or is just playing catch-up.
If we were to actually take Ballmer’s words to heart, we can expect that either way, web browsing should improve for the better: either through a Webkit-based IE, or the death of IE.
It may very well be the latter, if we’re to believe this comment on the article at the AppleInsider forums:
The IE team was dismantled except for a core team called IE SE – which translates to “IE Sustained Engineering”. What this means… is a product is dead and the SE team simply puts out hot-fixes for any pertinent issues. This all happened during that great legal battle that Microsoft had with the States.
I know we can accomplish a lot more by not waiting around for IE (and Microsoft) to get its act together, but here’s yet another reason web designers and developers are in a rut.
If the company behind Internet Explorer does not believe in it, why should we?
Philipp Lensen of Google Blogoscope shares a comic about Google’s open source web browser called Chrome. TechCrunch has posted leaked screenshots too. I suggest you read all those links as they explain very nicely the many, many features Google Chrome has, then try it out for yourself.
With all the revolutionary new features planned for this web browser, do the rest of the factions of the more-than-a-decade-long Browser Wars stand a chance? Let me run through several points that may or may not convince you that the ‘Wars are over:
Reworking web browser concepts
“Chrome”. Google Chrome is so named because the developers wanted to weed out all the unnecessary interface elements that get in the way of an optimal user experience. Google is pretty good at this—see Gmail.
Omnibox. I’ve complained about this before. We have too many blank bars in our browsers, why not stick to just one? Combining the ambitiousness of Firefox 3′s “AwesomeBar”, search keyword shortcuts, and Google’s mighty search engine, users might not need any other button in the toolbar.
Independent tabs and sandboxing. Chrome runs tabs as separate processes to isolate any unruly behavior, whether it’s a memory leak or malicious code.
Using Google’s assets
Webpage testing. Google will use its large—an understatement—collection of crawled websites to test if their browser is working properly on them. It will prioritize by popularity to be efficient in testing the millions, billions, and trillions of pages, of course.
Search and anti-phishing. I’ve mentioned the Omnibox. Google will incorporate its search into the singular browser bar to make finding websites a breeze. (I think AwesomeBar sounds better though.) And since Google is a pretty good keeper of blacklisted sites, Chrome also detects when a website is potentially harmful.
Google Gears. Another obvious move. Google Gears was created to make web browsing more responsive and efficient by linking together the online and offline, so it’s mandatory for Chrome to incorporate this feature.
Inspired by the best of other worlds
WebKit. WebKit is possibly the fastest and smartest browser rendering engine out there. It powers Safari and several Mac OS X applications, as well as Google Android and now Google Chrome.
Privacy Mode. Microsoft is set to introduce a history-free, cookie-free browsing feature in Internet Explorer 8 called InPrivate (though everyone else calls it “porn mode”). Now Google follows suit with “incognito browsing”.
Better JavaScript performance. Mozilla recently announced it was able to dramatically improve JavaScript loading by up to 37.5 times, a feature coming to Firefox 3.1. (Another comparable feature to Firefox is the previously-mentioned Omnibox.)
Speed Dial. Opera has sported this feature since version 9.2.
On to the questions…
Why? My answer? Because they can. Google’s answer? Watch it here. Google is the epitome of a Web 2.0 company, having revolutionized search, then e-mail, then every other activity that can be done online. It rehashed old elements of the Internet, and doing so on a browser feels like a natural extension of their work.
Does Google Chrome comply with Web Standards? Since Chrome is going to run on WebKit, can we trust that we won’t have to debug for yet another browser? Unfortunately, it failed the ACID3 test (which, on the other hand, Safari passed in version 3.2.1).
Will Google end its “search bar relationship” with Firefox and other browsers? Now that Google has its own browser, does it still need to push for the search bar feature in browsers like Firefox, IE, and Safari? Probably not. But most users will still use Google—the search engine—one way or the other. And if you’ve watched the video linked above, Sergey Brin says the general goal is to get people to use “alternative” browsers such as Firefox. (Of course, assuming that Firefox and Chrome remain minor players in the game.)
Is this a milestone in web browser history? Put another way, is this the best thing since tabbed browsing? I can’t really answer a resounding yes. Web browsers must pay attention to detail and reduce bloat—it’s a difficult balance. Google Chrome is a lean browser that contains only a few notable features. We’ll have to wait for a few more releases to see where they’re going with this.
Do you trust Google to browse in its browser? Between a proof-of-concept security flaw discovered hours after the browser’s release and a questionable (but recently modified) license agreement, are you confident in using yet another Google product? This is perhaps the biggest question of all.
Today, August 27th, marks the day Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) first came out. It’s a seven year-old browser. This little factoid is part of a battle cry by M. David Auayan to stop developing websites for IE6 by March 2009. Enter the IE Death March.
Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.
It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon… say like, March 2009. That’s roughly a little more than 6 months. Feel free to join me. If your company is dropping support for IE6, let me know and I’ll gladly post it up.
There have been tons of initiatives to finally ditch one of the most loathed software on the planet. You may have noticed some of these around the Internet:
So many parties are restless about the state of web browsing, and rather than wait for Microsoft to get its act together, they take it upon themselves to do something about it. It doesn’t really stop with the viral websites. Every few months or so you’ll find a blog post that details how the author has had it with IE (IE6 usually) and that he has resolved to drop support for the browser completely.
One must ask: are any of them making a significant difference in the market share of IE? Or IE6, specifically?
According to statistics from several prominent web counters, Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser at around 76%. Although it’s slowly going down by a few percent every few months, that’s still a high number. Even on sites that advocate web standards like W3Schools show that around half of the site visitors are on IE, a quarter on IE6.
The biggest agent of change was probably Google, since it actually paid people to download Firefox. But now that’s gone, will the ball keep rolling? Is it time to look at other, more drastic strategies the way Mozilla did recently?
It seems we’re all feeling a little desperate these days. After all, it’s been seven years.
In an interesting development regarding web standards and the browser wars, Ars Technica reports that Mozilla is taking Internet Explorer’s problematic webpage rendering into its own hands starting with a plugin for HTML5′s canvas element.
IE’s shortcomings won’t hold back the Internet for much longer, however, because Mozilla plans to drag IE into the next generation of open web technologies without Microsoft’s help. One of the first steps towards achieving this goal is a new experimental plugin that adapts Mozilla’s implementation of the HTML5 Canvas element so that it can be used in Internet Explorer.
Vladimir Vukićević says it’s “a very direct way of getting 2D (and soon 3D) graphics into web pages, and removes many of the barriers between developers and graphics rendering.” Here’s a screenshot of how it works:
HTML5 Canvas on IE, by Vladimir Vukićević
Mozilla doesn’t stop there, though. It plans bring its “next-generation JavaScript engine directly into Microsoft’s web browser” through a project called ScreamingMonkey. The plugin strategy will also be employed here.
Mixed reactions
Reactions from the crowd range from amusement to confusion to outrage. On the one hand, this move from the makers of the record-making Firefox browser is commendable. It shows that in the midst of IE’s dominating market share and FF’s sheer drive to beat it, Mozilla still wants the Web to work, one way or the other. Even if it means having to “drag IE” itself. Indeed:
Is it a sad or happy day for Microsoft, when their competitors get bored with beating them, and instead try to improve the Microsoft products to make them competitive – for free?
And what does Microsoft have to say about this? Isn’t this an insult wrapped inside a well-meaning gesture since it is coming from a competitor? Anything that gets Microsoft’s attention to hurry things up in the web standards compliance department is okay by me.
Try Adobe
But it’s not just about the browser vendors but the users themselves. How many of them will take the time to install this not-so-popular plugin? Do they care enough to see the advantages? Ars Technica thus wonders if Adobe could have been the better messenger, since Flash is ultimately indispensable these days:
This is purely speculation, but If Adobe decided to ship Screaming Monkey and the Canvas functionality as part of the next major iteration of the Flash plugin, it would rapidly accelerate adoption and get it onto lots of computers.
Cross-browser nirvana? Not quite
News of this plugin suggests that it’s taking a so much effort to make IE play nice that even competing browsers have to step in. And we’re only talking about the HTML5 canvas element here, a far less common feature, or should we say issue, than things like the double-margin bug or pixel font sizes.
There are so many wrong things about the branding of MobileMe, Apple’s latest product announcement, that it’s distracting me from seeing how good it could be.
From .Mac to MobileMe
First, the name. MobileMe is a new spin on .Mac, but its new name shows clear focus—mobile. Okay, fair enough, but it’s like no effort was put into coming up with the name. Apple is supposed to be hipper than that. MobileMe has this bad dot-com naming vibe surrounding it. You know, all those names filled with pronouns (I, me, my, you, your, we, our) that stroke the ego.
Then again, Apple is the poster child for that naming strategy. But they could have gone the tried-and-tested “iRoute”. From iMac to iTunes to iPhone, why stop prepending i’s now?
Me vs. ME
Here’s something more disturbing. Why does the MobileMe logo look so strikingly similar to that of Windows ME?
Whether or not this is a coincidence, Apple should be criticized for allowing itself to be associated with an operating system people considered crappy. It’s the last thing you want to do when building your brand.
For those who want to defend Apple by saying “but the handwritten me of MobileMe does not look like the one on Windows ME, it looks better”, I’m not hearing you. They still look too much alike.
Microsoft is too much of Apple’s competition to have this similarity. If Apple drew inspiration from, say, Starbucks, Disney, or Nike, we probably wouldn’t mind—except that you’d think Apple had enough creativity to do more groundbreaking design to take a cue from someone else. Since when does this company listen to anyone else? If Apple is doing this on purpose, then it’s an even lower blow.
Any designer worth his salt would not want to be mistaken for plagiarizing something, much less something not worth copying in the first place.
Attention to detail, lost
No matter how you look at it, the choices made with MobileMe’s branding just aren’t right. They’re sloppy at best. Apple is known to pay painstaking attention to detail, but I can’t see it with MobileMe.
It seems the online world is the perfect place for all the madness taking place every April 1st, but I’ve noticed some of the pranks circling the Web today are really good ideas and worth discussing here on Wisdump.
Gmail users have long wanted a send email in future time feature to avoid unnecessary follow-up and back-and-forth emailing, but Google spins it around. In addition to “never delete another email again”, there’s “never send another late email again”. You can send an email timestamped as far back as April 1, 2004, which is when Gmail was launched and a clue right there how legit this feature is.
Many people would love to have custom time/date stamps on their emails—I know I would. But it becomes a case of deception versus productivity. Will Google continue to draw the line? Do you see this happening in the future? If you can do it with blog posts, why not emails? If you’ll remember last year’s prank, Gmail Paper, it’s another great idea that asks “why not?” too. (And, if anything, testimonials don’t make a product believable.)
Also check out Google’s other pranks for this year:
- Virgle (see also Larry and Sergey’s video), the first human colony on Mars
- gDay, which lets you search content on the internet before it is created
- Google Wake Up Kit, a system that sends increasingly annoying alerts (SMS, water bucket, bed-flipping device) to wake you up – it’s potentially a good idea, but it’s not as subtly executed as Gmail’s pranks so I won’t elaborate on it
Whew! Google’s been busy this year!
Darren Rowse on ProBlogger has launched a way to monetize Twitter with PayPerTweet. This totally makes sense because we’ve long wondered how Twitter could possibly be penetrated by advertisers, and we get a pretty viable answer.
Problem is, Twitter is a pretty trustworthy environment right now—you follow only whom you want to and the second they start spamming you, “unfollow” is always one click away. PayPerTweet is not just a prank but an addressing of the question we’ve all had on our minds: who will cross the line and bring advertising to Twitter? Are we there already? Will you tolerate it? Perhaps fake tweets like announcing PayPerTweet and other pranks—rickrolling is such a big thing these days—is the closest thing we’ll ever get to sneakiness (read: sponsored tweets) on Twitter.
Another great thing about the PayPerTweet announcement is that because it’s a blog-based prank, the comments section clearly shows who got punk’d and who managed to call BS. And you can discuss in a follow-up post the success (or failure) of your prank. We thus find out that PayPerTweet came from an actual proposal to advertise via Twitter for $20. Darren Rowse refused the offer.
Renowned information design expert Edward Tufte joins SlideShare’s board of advisors to help guide people in presenting visual information the proper way. The online slideshow service will employ technologies that automatically eliminate bullet points, chartjunk, and other distracting elements from presentations.
Even if you’re remotely interested in design, you probably believe the world will become a better place by throwing out crappy PowerPoint slides. But is Microsoft to blame for all the ugly, overloaded, and difficult-to-read slides? Can and should software encourage and impress upon its users the principles of good design? And since we know that PowerPoint, as well as Word, was made for business, should we expect people in non-design industries to have rudimentary design sense (i.e., should it be part of their job description)?
Darren Hoyt releases a WordPress theme that showcases the hottest web design techniques ten years ago. How nostalgic! When you click on the preview image, a JavaScript alert comes up, saying, “Happy April Fool’s — seriously, you were gonna download this?”
I wonder how many people actually clicked, or if Darren Hoyt kept track of how many did. Using this theme would be a really good April Fools’ prank; too bad no real theme files were created. Update (April 7, 2008): Somebody actually did a similar prank! Jasongraphix redesigned his site with the “90s look” on April 1st! There’s always the possibility that somebody out there actually finds this theme attractive. This got me thinking: did you really think that old school web design was tasteful back then? Do you think the current web design trends will be considered attractive in the future?
In 1998 I was a freshman in high school and we were supposed to create webpages on a slow, 16-color (yes, literally 16 colors only, not 16-bit) computer, with no graphics program, and had to make do with whatever images were installed on the PC. My geekier-than-thou classmates were fooling around with DHTML alerts and scrolls, and I was too flabbergasted at the limitations of the computer I was using to even see how it was possible to create a decent-looking website. Today, I see people worship the Apple aesthetic, but bash rounded corners and other bright, shiny, glassy Web 2.0 looks, then proceed to play tug-of-war between light, clean, grid-based minimalism and dark, dirty, anything-goes maximalism.
Update (10:48 PM):
The Serif announces that FontFont will release a Helvetica Serif, which is a digital recreation of the sketches by Max Miedinger’s granddaughter.
If the little nuances in the image above don’t already give away the impression that this is a less than spectacular typeface and couldn’t possibly match the sans serif that is Helvetica, that’s okay. But know that having a serif version of Helvetica is a really big deal, quite an impossible one actually. (Update 04/02/08: Stephen Coles of Typographica.org reports in the comments there’s Helserif by Phil Martin.) Helvetica stands for everything a serif typeface isn’t. Do you think Miedinger would come up with a serif typeface just for the heck of it? Do we need a Helvetica Serif? Who should be tasked to create it?
I hope you’re having as much fun this April Fools’ as I am. Don’t forget to check out the most popular April Fools’ Day pranks on the web then go vote for them here.
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