Should Microsoft ditch IE?

James A has written a great article on Firefox and Microsofts attitude to open source.

I cant help but respond :-)

I agree with James that Firefox has added a bunch of features that IE didn't have at the time (tabbed browsing for one), and yes IE 7 is coming, but you can get tabbed browsing now with the MSN Desktop Search. 

Do I agree that "MS should have dropped all further development for IE, lost their fear of Open Source, and made a massive contribution to the Firefox project by implementing stuff like ActiveX and extending the browser features so that it can interoperate with IIS and Windows like IE does"?

Well to answer that - I want to point out a few things.

1. Microsoft does not fear open source.  I dont know the official standpoint, but I suspect we have a neutral stance.  We have in fact encouraged OS projects in the past while I'm sure we've discouraged others.  An example of encourangement would be DotNetNuke - a project that has had strong adoption/fostering inside the ASP.Net and IIS teams - in fact unlike any other external project ever has (check this edition of DotNetRocks for some more details).  BTW - you could argue that DNN actual competes in some respects with Microsoft Content Management Server too.
2. James - you say Firefox has leap frogged Internet Explorer.... but yet the market share is still easily in IE's favour.  Some pages will have higher FF hits than IE - thats to be expected.  However, it looks to me like Firefox has been harder on IE competitors than IE.  But - perhaps you mean leap-frogged in terms of features.  Leap-frogged is a strong word for this. 
3. How bad is FF for Microsofts revenue?  How much does Internet Explorer contribute to Microsoft's bottom line?  How badly is Microsoft really affected by the uptake of Firefox?  Given that IE is free, there is no real revenue risk here.  The IE market share is more about mind share than money.
4. Microsoft has made vast improvements in security across the board and Internet Explorer security is no exception..While IE does not historically have a great track record, this has changed this year.  Compare the number of vulnerabilities this year between IE and FF.  IE has had 8 security advisories this year where FF has had 15.  Compare the month by month charts for IE and FF at https://secunia.com/. 

What would probably be really useful would be an itemised list of features that you'd like to see IE also have so it can be submitted to the IE team.  When I did this (last year) I struggled to come up with more than tabbed browsing.  Sure you could ask for RSS (which will be in IE7) - but frankly I didn't like the RSS implementation in FF when I was using it anyway.  You could also ask for the extensible plugin support that FF has... which might be nice.  Some might argue that FF is faster, but I didnt really notice much difference.

Beyond these what is there thats so great about FF? Why should Microsoft ditch IE and take on FF?  I really dont see any good reason.

I know you better than that James - what do you have up your sleeve that will kill my argument? ;-)

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  My lord, some of you at MS really do drink the kool-aid. If you read pretty much any of the comments on any IE story posted any where you'll see a huge list of features people want. RSS support wasn't on any list I have ever seen.
  
  The number ones were always full PNG specification support and modern CSS support. As it stands now, IE is what's holding the web back. It's the LCD that web developers have to design to. And what a least it is.
  
  Web developers cannot use many of the advanced CSS features as IE has the largest market share and people with IE will visit their site. If it doesn't look correct, the web site owners lose potential revenue and/or visitors.
  
  For Pete's sake, IE's rendering capabilities haven't been updated in 4 years. The only reason IE has a market share is because of the MS monopoly. Windows Update requires IE, Active X requires IE. If developers want money, they have to code for IE. It's a vicious cycle.

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  Not that I don't like IE, I still think there
  are certain peculiarities (read "weirdness")
  with IE 6. One of which I'd like to point out
  is, sometimes when I try to save some pages
  with IE, it categorically says "This page can
  not be saved at this location" (or something
  to that effect) without any apparent reasons
  (e.g. I have correct permissions, disk space
  is not full)..which DOES NOT happen with FF.
  Could you please even try to explain why does
  that happen?

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  PS. I really didn't mean to use "ultimately" twice in the same sentence.

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  I use Avant at the moment. I moved to that from Firefox. The thing I liked the most about Firefox is that it's on your side. Whereas IE is firmly on the side of advertisers. Blocking ad servers is an important ability. FF has this, so does Avant. Popup blocking is very important, IE and Avant have this, but it doesn't work reliably. FF has this and works flawlessly.

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  Hi
  
  First can I say I'm not a developer or anything so knowledgeable but I will tell you why I don't use IE unless I'm forced to by a particular page. It's for the simple reason that when I use FF all day I never get any tracking cookies, data miners etc etc. If I use IE for even 5 minutes my anti-spyware software throws up at least one "something" that has snuck onto my system. For the record, I'm actually a pretty happy Microsoft Product user but, like everything, there are some bits that I could do without, as it were.

• Anonymous
  June 26, 2005
  Some things other than tabbed browsing that I would like to see would be:
  1) Ability to have a priorised list of proxies.
  2) Gesture support. For example right-drag left for "Back". Should be able to define your own. I use this feature in Maxthon and it rocks.
  
  One other situation where IE is the better option is in an intranet context if the organisation is using Active X.

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2009
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• Anonymous
  June 01, 2009
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