I've ranted about the Browser Wars many a time on this blog. Well, here's another rant. Hopefully this one will go a bit further than the ones in the past.
If you would like to read the goad that got this cattle moving, check out Developers gripe about IE standards inaction at News.com.
k. Now to the fray.
Microsoft has seemingly given up IE for dead. The browser war (in their minds) is essentially won. IE owns 90+% of the ground. Mozilla, Opera, and Safari's ground pale in size comparison. Their standards implementation is far superior.
Microsoft seems to be saving major browser changes for their Longhorn opporating system. A plot, perhaps, to make uninformed users upgrade to their new OS.
Here's the fun part. Longhorn is at least one more year away. In the mean time, IE will continue to age, and the web, Lord willing, will continue to develop. Macromedia and Adobe are both working on more CSS focused products. Web designers and developers will become increasingly aggitated by IE's antiquity.
That means, we have at least a year to change the face of the browser world. Pipe dream? Perhaps. But practical thinking is never a good place to start if your into radical innovation and world changing schemes.
BigBlueHat will take the open source browsers Mozilla AppSuite and MozillaFirebird along with the open source e-mail client MozillaThunderbird and offer them through it's web site. We have already begun to offer MozillaThunderbird as a multi-inbox alternative to Outlook. After offering them through the BigBlueHat site for some time, we will move into burning distributions on CDs as well as customizing installs for small and medium sized businesses.
The strategy is based on Microsoft's "Proliferate, Overwhelm, Destroy" tactics at the beginning of the browser war. Internet Explorer was everywhere. Users didn't know any better. Some of them assume that the little blue 'e' icon on their desktop is the Internet.
The one major feature that Mozilla software packages need is a "windows update" style web site. The Mozilla browsers get many updates. In its current state, mozilla.org simply provides download links to the latest browser. Downloading a 10 mb file over a dial up once is bad enough. Downloading a 10 mb every two months is unacceptible. But not an unsolvable problem in my estimation.
Let's change the world.
Posted by TheIdeaMan at October 13, 2003 11:07 AM | TrackBack