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But what says MS has to follow the standards? IE is the leading web-brower on the market. If web-sites want customers to their sites they want their site to look good at the brower that has the biggest market-share. Why bother to code for the rest if that cost extra money and don´t give so much in return?

There is a reason why there is a web standard, to ease development of website on any browsers. Did you see how the source codes of particular beautiful website were a mess, hard to maintain? Updating these pages take a lot of times.

For me IE is safe as long as I visit sites like my internet-bank. My point is that it is up to the user how safe IE will be.

In that case, you, as user, should put a pressure for your internet-bank managers to redesign their website to be standard complain instead of doing nothing.

I use IE because the online-help for my CAD-program doesn´t look good in Opera or FF. And as I wrote.....IE is safe for me for those sites I visit.
The reason is CAD program is optimised for IE.

But what says MS has to follow the standards? IE is the leading web-brower on the market. If web-sites want customers to their sites they want their site to look good at the brower that has the biggest market-share. Why bother to code for the rest if that cost extra money and don´t give so much in return?


The problem is that they stopped developing IE when they thaught they controlled the market. To make things worse they totally abandoned first the Solaris/sparc platform (not that many people ever used it) and then MacOS-X, and they still don't have a Linux port That left room for new competitors.

The competitors went for the w3c standard, and the standards of w3c makes up very cool, well thought out things, that is rather hard to outcool. If you do similar things without following the standard, you get the question - Why didn't you do it in the standard way as people tend to like standards as they give a sense of stability.

If you really need to outcool the w3c standards, very much could be done by using Flash or Java. Both these technologies are cross platform cross browser solutions that keeps development costs of a website down. If Microsoft should have a chance to win people over, they would need to significantly outcool both w3c standards, Flash and Java. To do that could be very expensive.

All of a sudden the competitors not only followed the standard better than IE and created a better user interface such as tabs, and not the least important, a much better reputation for security, mostly earned on the fact that Microsoft security was appallingly low.

The abandoned MacOS-X users were people who wanted the best and were willing to spend money to get it. If you want to sell something through your website, you want them as visitors and potential future customers.

Some windows users changed to Firefox and other as well. If you sell or promote something on the web you want them too to visit your site as they act as trend leaders. Just like the Mac users they tend to be more educated, have a higher level computer litteracy than the average user. This often translates to higher saleries, so if you can get them to your website the chances are that they have more money to spend.

This means websites will be developed in a way that they look good in both IE and Firefox and Safari.
The easiest, and least expensive, way to do that is to follow the standard and keep it simple, and above all not use extensions that any of theese browsers might offer.

I would also suspect that IE7 will have about the same standard compliance and feature set as Firefox 15 when it arrives. This creates another problem for Microsoft. It will only run on XP and Vista hanging users of older windows versions out to dry and probably contributing to raising the Firfox, Opera, Safari,.. to even higher levels.

The only area where Microsoft could benefit from adding more non standard features, would be for intranet use. In a controlled environment it is much easier to write applications that take advantage of such features as you don't have take other browsers into account.

However, even here, Microsoft will find hard competition. Even in Firefox 1.5 it is possible to use plugins for things like XForms and can use AJAX and SVG to create highly interactive cross platform web applications. Active-X has a much weaker case in the intranet than it had a couple of years ago. By the time IE7 is released Firefox will be at version 2 with even more goodies to catch up with.

Remember that 10 years ago Netscape had the same hold over the market as Microsoft has today. By not being present in growing markets such as MacOS-X and Linux they expose themselves to competiton that once again could change the browser landscape.