<i>There's nothing particularly bad about the current state of browser technology--that is if you are frozen in a time warp, circa 1999. But for the rest of the Internet-surfing inhabitants of planet Earth, Netscape these days survives as a desolate outpost in the vast AOL Time Warner empire, something akin to banishment to Irkutsk.
Internet browser design stopped being interesting years ago. That's simply because Microsoft no longer faces any challenge that forces it to innovate</i>
BZZZZ wrong.
a.) Netscape hadn't changed its browser at all while it was sitting on the throne. It went from bad to worse in 4.x and just kept declining while MS IE went from 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x
Now, even you staunch ABMers must admit that there was marked improvement from IE 2 to 5. Whether you think IE is good or not, it certainly has improved while Netscape had gone nowhere. Even now it uses Mozilla because it couldn't produce Netscape 5.x.
b.) <i>because Microsoft no longer faces any challenge</i> Oh God, not this BS again. Give me a break. There's plenty of challenges. But let's examine the facts:
1.) Every time MS tries to innovate, the world scremes bloody murder.
2.) There's only so much that you can do to improve rendering markup to the screen and the saturation limit has been met. The only thing left to do now would be something more active like Flash. And if MS tried that (remember, they did, actually... remember Corona?), then they'd get sued for competing with Macromedia.
The fact is, MS <b>CAN'T</b> innovate in these areas because when it does, there's AOL/Netscape/CNN/Time/TimeWarner/WarnerBros to throw the book at them and bog MS down in 5-year, multi-million dollar court cases.
The biggest innovation that has been introduced to the web recently is Flash. Tabbed Browsing is a dud, IMHO and won't catch with the masses. Pop-up filtering is going to be in the next versions, from what I understand, so that's taken care of, but seriously, what more revolutionary things are there to do?
Perhaps the largest change I can see is to get rid of the ghastly abortion that is JavaScript and get a real, full, rich Object-Oriented scripting language for the browser (based on .NET please!! :)
But then you have to deal with the "Other" guys like Mozilla who move like a 3-toed Sloth on valium, not to mention the W3C which trails behind it panting like an old man.
So MS is stuck between being the "big mean evil guy trying to drive out competition" and being the "big mean evil guy who has no competition and sits on his pile of gold not innovating"
You ABMers can't have it both ways and you have to reconcile your duplicitousness soon or MS is going to revolutionize the web and leave everyone else out.
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