I rarely agree with Dvorak- I think he uses his pulput to bully and taunt, but this is… weird.
First, it needs to face the fact that this entire preoccupation with the browser business is bad for the company and bad for the user. Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.
That column makes a sort of sense, but without a rhetorical thrust: Microsoft is distracted by browsers, so it should give up on its own and, more or less, contract Mozopera to develop one for it.
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Why not just spend that money on its own browser? The smart part of the column may be that IE consumes a large amount of attention at MS. Maybe. But who cares how many engineers and money MS throws at a project: they are made of engineers and money.
As for the attention, well, I think MS figures (I’d say rightly) that leaving browser development entirely in someone else’s hands is (how to put this?) Really Stupid.
The problem is the browser is THE MOST IMPORTANT APP ON THE COMPUTER! I am somewhat indifferent about my word processor most of the time. I use the web browser, well, among other times, right now. And all the time any other time, too.
The worry for MS is that something will crop up in how browsers work that make it very important that MS have deep expertise in browsers, and (maybe) a way to set the standard.
Apple, after all, went the other way, from relying on others for web browsing to rolling their own (for the second time: remember Cyberdog?) because the providers of Mac browsers weren’t keeping up, because their interests diverged from Apple’s.
Can you see any way in which the interests of Mozopera would NOT diverge from Microsoft’s?
This shouldn’t be taken as a pro-IE or pro-MS rant. My browsers of choice are Safari and Firefox, to the point that I run FF at and IE side-by-side at work, the latter only because of an ActiveX-dependent “web” application (crappy-ass Remedy Magic grumble grumble), and that’s the only thing I run in IE all day. But pro-MS or not, I recognize where the rational self-interest of MS lies, and I don’t see Microsoft’s security issues as being some sort of browser anomaly.
Heck, if MS gives up on IE, and successor Mozopera turns out to have its own security issues, who will be blamed? Tie goes to the large corporation
Stop reading Dvorak. Cringely’s insane speculation is more fun.
Ryan- thank you for your interesting comments.
The thing is that browsers have come a long way since Mosaic, but they’re still just a viewer app. A window through which you look at other information.
Sure, there’s a huge difference between Mosaic and FF1.5, but then again, is there?