The browser wars have returned in earnest. Firefox market share has been growing steadily and it is making inroads in Internet Explorers market with a superior product, aggressive marketing and a loyal fanbase.
Seeing their stranglehold on browsing slip, Microsoft has been forced to pull the IE7 team back together and set them to work on a next version. The team has been given a surprisingly candid blog to get feedback on their efforts and they have recently released beta builds which do most of what Firefox does but much less usably.
This is bad news for web standards.
The producers of real browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari) have good track records with web standards and are quite keen to go on developing the next versions with support for stuff like: CSS3, SVG, XForms and HTML5.
IE7 has a horrible record on web standards and it is now claiming an undeserved and unproven credibility by implementing a set of features present in real browsers two years ago. Stuff such as the fixing of bugs (imagine that!), partial CSS 2.1 support, RSS and basic security.
This announcement is a very effective measure to halt the landslide adoption of standards driven browsers. Just the announcement of a next version is enough to stop people and companies thinking of switching to Firefox.
The announced feature list for IE7 is only very barely adequate. Paying lip service to standards for now is one thing, it remains to be seen if they will keep it up. I do not doubt the dedication of the team, but they are not the ones that make the strategic decisions.
My guess is they will only release the next set of features after a similar amount of arm twisting. It is in Microsoft’s best interest to stall the market at this outdated status quo.
Microsoft’s strategy is two part. They not only want to halt the adoption of Firefox as an alternative browser but it is also in their best interest to sabotage the maturing of the web into a sane platform. Even with their recent announcement of Windows Live, Web 2.0 is not a space Microsoft is well positioned to compete in.
The Web (2.0) platform is characterized by small innovating players, that use open stack technology (LAMP, Ruby, PostgreSQL) to build open user centric services. These are all the things Microsoft is not about.
Microsoft has its own proprietary offering which it is eager to push. It has been long touting their .NET Windows Forms applications which can use all of the possibilities Windows has (within reasonable security constraints) and can be easily deployed over the network. In short everything that Java Webstart should have been.
The amount of tooling they have lined up for developers to effectively use these new technologies is impressive and the ease of use of developing in Avalon, Winforms or Indigo is something most AJAX developers can only distantly dream of.
Microsoft is betting big on that either web applications are a fad, or that they can be converged and the distinction between the(ir) desktop and the internet can be blurred. IE7 is just a filibuster until Microsoft gets its developers, tools and installed base (Vista) aligned and deployed wide enough to enable it to make the next step in their effort to dominate the applications market.
