The First Step Is For Microsoft To Admit It Has A Problem

from the hi,-my-name-is-Microsoft-and... dept

Ars Technica brings word of a pair of interesting efforts underway over at the Mozilla Project -- both aimed at improving Internet Explorer, whether Microsoft likes it or not.

You may have heard of the first one already: ScreamingMonkey has gotten some press. It aims to make the core of Firefox's next-generation Javascript engine (originally developed by Adobe) available in IE, providing advantages in speed and standards-compliance.

The other project is a bit more recent, and a bit more far-out: it's an IE plugin created by Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukićević that implements the HTML5 <canvas> element -- something that IE's never gotten around to supporting. Canvas allows Javascript to draw 2D graphics on the client-side. You may have stumbled across it in the form of one or another nifty in-browser FPS demo. It's a potentially powerful tool, but, as Ars notes, one that hasn't achieved widespread adoption by web developers due to IE's lack of support for it.

Both of these projects are impressive pieces of technology. But unfortunately both attempts to improve IE are unlikely to succeed in the ways that their authors would like -- and it's easy to see why. It's safe to say that IE users tend to be among the web's least technically sophisticated. These are exactly the people who can least reasonably be expected to install modular improvements to their browser's underlying technology. It's hard to imagine anyone finding it easier to do this than to simply download and begin using Firefox -- a task that's already clearly too complicated for many people. And that's to say nothing of the difficulty of getting the word out in the first place.

The right solution is the same as it's always been: for Microsoft to fix its abysmally noncompliant browser. They wouldn't even have to do it themselves! As Tom Raftery suggested some time ago, Microsoft could simply open-source IE. Superficially, this seems like a good fix: it's not as if IE is a profit center for Microsoft, and Apple has already shown the viability of the approach with its open source WebKit HTML rendering engine. A bold step like that could go a long way to bolstering what has thus far been a fairly anemic stab at open source on Redmond's part.

But of course it will never happen. As some of Raftery's commenters pointed out, IE probably couldn't be open sourced without revealing critical -- and valuable -- Windows code. More to the point, Microsoft wants a broken browser. Not supporting <canvas> means that no one will rely on it, which in turn means less competition for Microsoft's rich client library Silverlight -- created to solve the problem of missing <canvas>-like functionality (among other things). More broadly, a world of webapps that are perpetually forced to accommodate IE's underachieving status means less time spent by users in the cloud, and consequently a bit more relevance for MS. Put simply, IE's awfulness isn't a bug, it's a feature.

This is hardly an original observation, but that doesn't make it any less true. And that means that the answer to IE's persistence is the same as it's always been: for Safari, Opera, Firefox et al to consistently provide a better browsing experience and thereby compel Microsoft to fix its mistakes -- as it at least began to do with IE7. Unfortunately, that's something that they're going to have to do for themselves.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

32 Comments | Leave a Comment..

The Browser Is The New Operating System

from the local-storage dept

A couple of weeks ago TechCrunch had a good write-up of the move toward open local storage APIs in web browsers. As websites have come to look more and more like applications rather than static pages, they've begun to bump up against the limits of what today's web browsers can do. Developers have responded by using a variety of proprietary plug-ins and workarounds to expand the browser's functionality. One example of this is local storage. There aren't a lot of good options for applications that want to store significant amounts of data client-side in a way that will continue to be available if the Internet connection goes away. Google has Google Gears, while Adobe has Flash. Each offers local storage, but neither is compatible with the other, nor are their APIs likely to be adopted by other browser vendors in the future.

Luckily, as part of the HTML 5 effort, it looks like the major browser vendors are moving toward a set of open APIs for local storage that will (theoretically, at least) enable developers to write an application targeting this functionality and have it work on any modern browser. It appears that the latest versions of Firefox largely already support the API, and support has been added to recent builds of WebKit, the foundation of Apple's Safari browser. The big laggard is Internet Explorer, which has some but not all of the functionality. But even IE users have the option of installing Google Gears, which has promised to add HTML 5-compliant local storage APIs. The broad support of these APIs by other browsers, along with the fear of giving the edge to its arch-rival Google, will put a lot of pressure on Microsoft to jump on the bandwagon.

What's really interesting about this is that browsers are starting to resemble operating systems in their own right. One of the most fundamental features of operating systems is to provide a consistent interface for data storage. OS developers call it a file system, rather than "local storage," but the concept is the same. And as websites come to increasingly resemble full-blown operating systems, I think browser vendors are increasingly going to have to solve the same kinds of problems that operating system vendors do.

For example, it has become increasingly common for my browser to slow to a crawl because one poorly-written, JavaScript-heavy website is sucking up all the CPU. Just as operating systems have preemptive multitasking to prevent one application from bringing the whole system to a crawl, browsers should have mechanisms to prevent one misbehaving website from bringing my browser grinding to a halt. Safari has an extremely primitive version of this - I'll sometimes get a dialog box informing me that a particular website's Javascript is creating problems and asking if I want to stop it - but there's a lot of room for improvement. The browser should automatically limit the amount of CPU one website can use when others are waiting. And I should be able to call up a "task manager" that shows me all the websites I've got open and gives their CPU and memory usage. When websites begin to resemble full-fledged applications, browsers are going to start behaving like full-fledged operating systems.

In a sense, this is the belated fulfillment of Netscape's "middleware" strategy to make the web browser the new operating system. As detailed in the Microsoft antitrust saga, Netscape's hope (and Microsoft's fear) was that the browser would supplant the operating system as the default platform for user applications. That's now starting to happen, although it didn't happen fast enough to save Netscape.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

49 Comments | Leave a Comment..