A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

Browser Trends: Business Models

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Commercial web applications must overcome a vexing business dilemma: how to make money in the face of so much free competition. This is a symptom of the VC-fueled internet economy that has prevailed since the dot com days. Venture capital firms provide companies with money based on some woolly half-baked ...

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 7, 2008

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Microsoft ships XP Service Pack 3 with continued support for Internet Explorer 6. Firefox wins favorite browser in the LinuxJournal Readers' Choice Awards with 86% of votes cast. John Resig implements a complete HTML parser entirely in JavaScript. Multiple interfaces are provided including SAX and a DOM builder. Amazing. Flock wins a Webby ...

Memo to Microsoft: Buy Adobe, Not Yahoo

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

If nothing else, Microsoft's prolonged attempt to acquire Yahoo has added some zest to the tech news echo chamber. The ongoing saga has provided seemingly endless fodder for mainstream news outlets and blogs to speculate about the financial merits of the deal, the strategic implications for Microsoft and Yahoo's allergic ...

Deconstructing Rich Internet Applications

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

A post by my Prism partner in crime Mark Finkle sent me spiraling back in time along an interlocking blogathon of attempts to nail down the term Rich Internet Application. Intense speed-reading of so many mammoth posts can scar the psyche, so let me paraphrase them and save you the ...

I’m Not Sure Microsoft Gets This Open Thing

Friday, March 7th, 2008

I went to download a whitepaper about one of Microsoft's new web browser extensions and was presented with the following message: To download the file you must agree to the following license: Microsoft Public License ...

Microsoft, Good Standards Citizen

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

In response to widespread outrage at their decision to make the Internet Explorer 8 handle web pages by default in the same broken way as IE7, Microsoft has now announced that they have seen the light: Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” ...

Do We Really Want the European Commission to Regulate the Web?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie continues to promote and defend his company's legal action against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices with a guest editorial in The Register. One thing seems incontrovertible: Microsoft should not be allowed to tie Internet Explorer to Windows and strong-arm hardware manufacturers into refusing bundling deals with ...

Why Doesn’t Dell Bundle Firefox?

Friday, February 1st, 2008

A tad less than a year ago Dell launched a forward-thinking customer feedback website called IdeaStorm, modeled on social news sites like Digg. The site appears to be a thunderous success (as its name would suggest), and one of the most popular requests, shipping machines with Linux preinstalled, has already ...

Håkon Wium Lie on Microsoft and Acid2

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Last month, Microsoft announced to general astonishment that the upcoming release of Internet Explorer will pass the Acid2 test of standards compliance. They even went as far as to publish a video containing interviews with leading members of the IE team and a fascinating inside look at their Acid2 quest. ...

Is Web Standardization Obsolete?

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Most people seem to labor under the misconception that web standardization is a well-regimented, orderly process with a clear set of rules. In particular, the uninitiated believe that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the anointed standards body for the web. Vendors get together, agree on some new markup ...