Motivations and Bias

I've long been a Microsoft enthusiast, heartily embracing the platform and the development tools.

My first real professional development job was with Visual C++ Professional v1.0 (after years doing less professional work with tools like DJGPP) -- a product that came in a giant 50lb box full of huge reference manuals, along with a giant stack of floppies -- and my work and home life have predominately relied upon various incarnations of Windows throughout the years, from 3.11 to Windows Server 2003R2. I've personally pursued various certifications from Microsoft, and will be completing another hopefully in a few days. I've been developing in C, and then C++, and then .NET since the first beta, on the Microsoft platform, along with some deviant Win32-targeting object Pascal Delphi work, relying upon great products like SQL Server, or subsystems like MSMQ, ActiveDirectory, and DCOM, to build amazing solutions.

I've been branded a Microsoft astroturfer/paid-shill countless times on sites like Slashdot for speaking out against some rampant anti-Microsoft mistruths, and for defending some of Microsoft's actions (though I still haven't received a cheque from Microsoft for my volunteer advocacy...).

I've even written for Microsoft's premiere development magazine.

Yet I have zero personal interest in Windows Internet Explorer 7*, beyond professional observation. Perhaps it'll have some yet unannounced amazing new innovation when it's eventually released, but as it is it's nothing more than an also-ran, finally bringing functionality that competitors such as Firefox and Opera have had for years. Other functionality, such as the sandbox model IE will have on Vista -- which they've built for the inevitable exploits that will follow -- rely upon operating system shims that only Microsoft has the privilege of adding. Presumably this same functionality will exist for alternate software products as well, so there's no reason -- beyond the type that the Justice Department would take interest in -- that Firefox and Opera won't gain the ability to utilize the functionality.

Microsoft Abandoned the Browser Market

If users are waiting with baited breath, living with their half-a-decade old Internet Explorer 6 in anxious anticipation of Microsoft finally putting some care into their browser, they need to seriously ask themselves why they haven't considered or evaluated the superior alternatives that are freely available. IT departments that simply coast along with whatever their Microsoft rep has decreed as acceptable need to ask themselves the same thing, and blanket decrees such as a banning of Firefox on corporate machines need credible justifications, and not just some baseless fear-mongering by a group that doesn't want the bother.

Internet Explorer wasn't always such a boring product. The period of greatest innovation with Internet Explorer happened in the IE 4 and IE 5 timeframe, when we gained functionality such as XML, XML data islands, the foundation of AJAX (if you had the luxury of only targeting IE 5+, you could build web apps in 1999 that rival the most "innovative" Web 2.0 sites today), implementing advanced CSS and DOM functionality simultaneous with, or ahead of, competitors. This was when the team seemed to have free reign, and whose primary motivation appear to be creating a great browser, rather than the oft claimed conspiracy of building Microsoft tie-in -- in fact the product was cross-platform, bringing a great browser to the Mac, for instance.

Of course, then they were trying to win the browser wars, and the result was the quick decimation of Netscape's marketshare. Microsoft's best minds rapidly created a killer web browser to kill a competitor in the web browser market, and there is no doubt that they technically succeeded, evolving their browser much more rapidly than the quagmired Netscape browser.

Even with the first-rate team working on what was the premiere browser, the market still was still very slow to adapt: Microsoft had so thoroughly intertwined the browser in the operating system that it became a potentially dangerous operation upgrading. It's for this reason that old version of Internet Explorer lived on long past their presumed expiration date, with IT departments hesitant to upgrade. This system interweave yielded some advantages, such as embedded browsers in divergent applications such as Quickbooks, yet it came at the cost of greatly reduced agility of the foundation. Compare this to a product like Firefox that exists largely as a software island, where uptake of new, feature-enhanced versions happens at an extremely rapid pace. Taking advantage of the new functionality in Opera 9 or Firefox 2(*2) would be no more risky, for most users, than upgrading their copy of WinTetris.

Microsoft won the browser war, and seeing how this new platform could actually undermine their own business, and reduce dependency on the Windows platform, the team was dispersed far and wide. All work on Internet Explorer, outside of emergency security fixes, was stopped. The internet world that had now come to rely largely upon the rapidly evolving Internet Explorer now saw absolutely no progress, while inside Microsoft they strategized how best to build Windows-specific technologies to pull developers and users back (such as XAML and one-touch deployment), tying them once against specifically to the Microsoft platform.

Five years+ on, the tide is slowly shifting, and Firefox is rapidly gaining marketshare, and the capable Opera browser continues to idle at a low level. Among sites catering to the IT/software development market, Firefox use is dominant. Public websites that demand Internet Explorer are quickly going extinct, and cast considerable doubt on the prowess of their creators.

Insidious Motives

Even if Internet Explorer 7 were a much more exciting product than it has proven thus far, I would still advocate against it.

We saw previously how Microsoft used the browser market only while it was in her interest, and then promptly abandoned its users when it wasn't, and there is no reason to think the same won't continue. Having users rush to Internet Explorer 7, killing interest (and thus the speed of development for) competitors won't do the web any good when Microsoft promptly stops development again, enticing you to dump this crazy web thing and embrace the next evolution of fat apps. Given that the browser is largely contrary to Microsoft's business interests, it seems an outcome that is inevitable.

Indeed, Internet Explorer 7 was originally only slated to come out for Longhorn (now Vista), as a sort of carrot to interest users in the otherwise boring upgrade, however the endless slips of Vista, coupled with rumors of Google entering the browser fray (which they have indirectly through some healthy financial support of the Mozilla Foundation), led them to revise their plans. Yet it still remains that some of the most valuable improvements of IE 7 will only be available if you upgrade to Vista (so if you're running IE7 on XP, you're running a sort of IE7-lite). Compare this to Firefox, where the exact same browser, and largely the same set of superlative extensions, runs on a huge range of operating systems, from obsolete to cutting edge: Firefox has no agenda to get you to upgrade your operating system, so such a differentiation doesn't exist, and you can take advantage of advanced cavas elements and svg right now.

Why You Shouldn't Care About Internet Explorer 7

• The web browser is anathemic to Microsoft's core revenue, which is Windows, and to a lesser degree, Office. The more you browse the web, the less it matters what your underlying operating system is: Firefox is virtually identical in Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, and Windows. Microsoft can't be trusted to shepherd this, especially given flattening revenue that has seen that organization much more actively pursue unrealized revenue (such as Genuine Advantage, Software Assurance, Activation, and so on).
• Alternatives give you platform choices, which encourages competitiveness in the free market. Even if you don't run Linux, using and learning Firefox, and ensuring that all of your corporate websites work properly on Firefox and other options, ensures that if you wanted to it would be largely painless.
• Decoupling the browser from the operating system gives you a much greater browser agility, reducing the risk of upgrades to this quickly evolving platform.

*- Based upon the great success they had with the .NET marketing wave, Microsoft is now widely branding their products and technologies with the prefix "Windows", so instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), it's Windows Internet Explorer (WIE? WinIE?), or perhaps Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer. This is to try to get the unrecognized name "Windows" out in the marketplace.

*2 - Apart from Firefox extensions, which are becoming a bit of a problem with each new version of Firefox. The break rate of extensions is so high that it's creating the sort of resistance to change that used to happen with Internet Explorer. The Firefox team really needs to solidify their API, allowing new extensions to take advantage of newer interfaces without breaking the existing extensions.