OStatic

Why Did Microsoft Change its Mind?

Once upon a time, there was a company named Netscape. Netscape's Web browser, called Navigator, wasn't the only one of its kind. But it was by far the most popular Web browser, becoming the de facto standard in the early days of the Web. Unfortunately for Netscape, Microsoft decided to enter the browser market, and the rest is history: Internet Explorer has been the dominant browser ever since, and Netscape no longer exists.

Well, that's not completely true: Netscape doesn't exist as a company, but its browser software has become the open-source Mozilla project, whose star product is Firefox. And while Firefox doesn't have more than about 15 percent of the browser market, the people who use it tend to be developers, designers, and other Web big-wigs. These people often use Firefox because it works on operating systems other than Windows, and because of its numerous plugins, and because they might like its features. But they also like Firefox because it tries to implement and adhere to numerous Web standards, particularly in the areas of HTML and CSS.

By contrast, Internet Explorer has traditionally valued backward compatibility, mixed in with a good deal of unilateral Microsoft decisions about which standards are and are not important. In particular, CSS works differently enough on the two browsers that good Web designers need to use a fair number of tricks in order to ensure that pages render similarly, or at all, on both browsers.

Microsoft had recently announced that IE 8 would continue in this tradition, offering a choice between the default behavior and a more rigid standards-compliant mode. They even announced that there would be a "super-compliant" mode, for particularly rigorous adherence to standards.

And then, on March 3rd, Microsoft reversed itself, saying that IE 8 would now "by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can."

This is a victory for Web standards. It means that developers and designers will have to spend much less time tuning their pages for multiple browsers. (There will still be differences, of course, but the number of differences will shrink considerably.) This means that sites will take less time to develop, which means that they'll cost less, which is good for both producers and consumers.

Now, why mention this on OStatic? After all, Internet Explorer isn't exactly an open-source product.

Simply put, I think that Microsoft underestimated how seriously people take Web standards. And people only take Web standards seriously because there's at least one popular browser (Firefox) that has implemented those standards, demonstrating that it's possible to do so. It's naive to think that people will abandon Internet Explorer in droves if it fails to comply with Web standards; most people neither know nor care about these issues. But the people who drive the market, namely the developers and designers, do care about such things -- and they have been increasingly moving to Firefox as their browser of choice.

• firefox
• standards

by on Mar. 05, 2008

Microsoft's "embrace and extend" policies have made such decisions to be 'strategic' imperatives.

To break Netscape, back in the day, Microsoft just had to wean developers away from writing JUST for Netscape, by introducing enough hooks that would increase the work in developing software by causing people to write 2 versions, basically. Been there, done that. Once that number grew large enough, they knew they could out maneuvre Netscape with their other developer products like Visual Studio.

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by yurr_a on Mar. 05, 2008

Here's what ARS has on this topic:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080303-sanity-prevails-ie8-will-d...

Personally, I think it's a last-ditch effort by Microsoft to force hardware or OS upgrade cycle to increase its sales. Perhaps they think that more non-IE sites would force more people to upgrade. There's little point, however, in it, since it would be their last such cycle. There's no shortage of standards-compliant browsers out there.

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by on Mar. 05, 2008

There are two reasons, why Microsoft did this.

First, a small reason but still: It's a PR dream. I can't remember a thing that created so positive comments for Microsoft.

Secondly, and much more important, this change in strategy has a name: Ray Ozzie

He's been hired to replace Bill Gates and eventually Steve Ballmer, because he gets what they don't: "the internet"

He knows that IE won't be able to replace Firefox (or Safari or Opera) again like they did with Netscape.

He knows that going forward, IE needs to be able to run sophisticated web projects quickly (like Meebo, Zimbra or Yahoo! Mail).

Even more important is that this much better and faster IE8 shows that Microsoft wants to compete in the web world much better. (For that to work, they need a better browser for their stuff to run in!)

So I'm looking forward to years of competition between Firefox and IE and Google and Microsoft.

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by samdean on Mar. 05, 2008

I agree that this is "a victory for web standards." Also, if Microsoft does indeed acquire Yahoo, it's going to have no choice but to open up to many kinds of open source applications, open APIs and standards. That definitely includes new openness for Internet Explorer.

Sam

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