Microsoft Corp., bowing to federal government demands, will make it easier for computer users to substitute rival Web browsers for the company’s Internet Explorer, people familiar with the matter said.
Microsoft will Ease Access to Rival Browsers
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That’s all i’ve got.
i thought they fixed this in sp3 for win2k already? (and xp sp1 anyone?)
I never use internet explorer because it lacks many modern features. There are no tabs, nothing to stop pop-up and pop-under adds, nothing to stop a script from resizing my explorer window, etc. I think it IE provides a terrible user experience.
Most people use it because they don’t know any better. I think if OEMs could remove IE and install a decent browser (there are a number of them) then people would start to wise up.
Having said all that, whoever thinks Microsoft will implement these changes in a way that benefits anybody but themselves, stand on your head.
everyone will use Mozilla or other Free/OSS browers when everybody uses Linux. IE is far too entrenched now, I used to be optimistic but now I’m just realistic.
No Mac users, Safari is not open source nor free, despite what you might think.
Depressing, but at least the IE team appear to have decided that maybe standards are useful after all. They still suck at it, but at least they’re trying now.
Well I’ve cut off IE except for using it with certain office applications which won’t be mentioned that absolutely need it. When I see these browsers work with Microsoft Office or so then I’ll be happy. However 98% of my boxes are IE free even some old copies of Win98 have IE stripped in favor of Mozilla (Phoenix on older systems).
Personally I’ll see it when I believe it that MS will have to strip IE. Isn’t that essential for Office 2003 to work?
Opera and K-Meleon are the only browsers you need. I feel Mozilla is too slow and too fat to be considered.
built in –commecial interests
I’m a bit suprised that they haven’t deployed tabbed browsing though. I’ve been using phoenix since last october and only use ie when I’m force to updating my win machine.
I use some MSN Groups.. I note when using Opera or Mozilla the style sheet intentioanlly makes links hard to see ( blue text on blue background whereas in IE the text is white )
PAssport login for IE gets a pretty page, for Opera it looks crap. You can only sign up for a hotmail account with IE ( try viewing http://www.hotmail.com with opera – all you get is a login prompt )
I complained to Groups.. they thanked me for writing and did nothing. Fiends.
You mean they’re going to let us browse Microsoft webpages w/out Internet Explorer? Just the other day I had to use Internet Explorer simply to view Windows Media Player 9 content (Apparently their coding is so bad that only Internet Explorer is able to properly display their pages). I can’t use Windows Update w/out Internet Explorer, either. I can’t get a lot of my other programs to simply use the browser and media player I tell it to (It’s quite understandable for developers to not re-invent the wheel and instead call upon ‘ol reliable, unremovable Internet Explorer [Thank you Windows 98!]. Honestly though, would it be so hard to allow users to link Internet Explorer to their browser of choice? Just move iexplore.exe and make a shortcut named iexplore.exe to whatever .exe specified in a configuration).
If Microsoft ever wants to get any respect from me for allowing choice, they’ll unbundle all their software and make a modular operating system for desktop computers and corporate workstations (Unfortuantely, Microsoft seems to believe that it’s only the server admins who need a modular operating system that doesn’t have every part of the system groping the other parts every second).
P.S. — XP SP1 and 2k SP3’s capability to set what you use for e-mail, media, and web is a joke.
No doubt the IE situation hurt some companies. No way did it hurt real player. I think real player needs to accept they have built one of the most evil/anoying applications ever for windows. No one wants to install it because of that. Some companies have been hurt by MS’s doings, others were hurt due to their product (such as real player) not being good and they try to pin their failings on MS.
>>Well I’ve cut off IE except for using it with certain office applications which won’t be mentioned that absolutely need it. When I see these browsers work with Microsoft Office or so then I’ll be happy.<<
It’s just a matter of setting your defaults. When i click the web from a MS word window it opens in Phoenix not IE. Clearly you can have IE never open. I haven’t used IE in months. If seen others have trouble with this, I don’t know what i set to do it but i know it wasn’t anything past basic stuff in settings panels.
Quote from penismightier.com
” Friends don’t let friends install RealPlayer ”
nuff said I’m sure. I wouldn’t allow a disk containing Realnetworks software within 20 metres of a PC I owned, too afraid of contamination.
About Safari, i think the parts that are important are free.
I’m sure you could careless about how its interface is coded, or how they designed it to write out bookmarks.
The important part – the KHTML which does the page rendering is free and their fork of it puts all of its changes back into the orignal KHTML code base.
If you absoultely need to have an open source gui to make an OS browser fine. But in my opinion the render engine makes the browser not the pretty window it displays in, since thats the part that IE used to make standards bend to their will.
Couldn’t you just write an executable, call it iexplore.exe, and just have it call your browser of choice, passing any command line arguments to it?
Crimson Editor provides a drop in replacement of Notepad. Whenever anything calls notepad.exe, I get Crimson Editor (for those of you who have not tried CE, give it a shot! http://www.crimsoneditor.com Simply the best Windows text editor I’ve ever used.)
Just a thought.
I think the big thing is that all components respect the user preference of the default browser. I know that there were some problems with XP not respecting a change in the default browser to open html with. Provided a user can *easily* change their file associations for URLs, html, css, etc. through normal means(ie. the same way that they would change file associations for any other program) than I think that MS has complied with the justice department. As long as most people have never heard of mozilla or opera I don’t see a big swing away from IE in the near future.
I most certainly could, but we’re talking about Microsoft enabling choice here, not users fending for themselves. It shouldn’t be my responsiblity to do Microsoft’s court-ordered work.
P.S. — Metapad is my favorite Windows text editor. It’s a drop-in replacement, too, in the sense that I get to delete notepad.exe and rename metapad.exe to notepad.exe.
bowing to federal government demands
That’s so nice of them.
Lol me, that slipped past, well, me.
One word.. MyIE2
Sits on top of IE and has tabbed windows as well as pop up blocking capabilities. Funny thing is, there are two reasons why I don’t use opera regularly.
1. Poor support for I-frame
2. Managing favorites sucks my left nut.
There are solutions out there people. just open your eyes once in a while instead of being some anti MS whore.
Anti-MS whore? I’m sorry for having disdain for the embrace and extend practice that Internet Explorer made famous.
all loverly and wonderful when it suited “your” needs. It typical and natural. When something is deemed to have outlived its’ usefullness, it is discarded and frowned upon when used. It’s ok to be a bandwagoner..
… then offer a bone to the Anti-Trust division after you have abused your monopoloy power to destroy the competition.
and YES I am an Anti-MS whore…
because MS won the marketing war. That’s the name of the damn game; Win!! or do you strive for losing instead?
— “No Mac users, Safari is not open source nor free, despite what you might think.”
No, but it IS 100% standards complient (or will be at least, still in beta you know). That, by far, is more important.
Oh, and Windows Media content has always played perfectly within Mozilla for me. Ive been visiting MSNBC for news about the war for a while now.
— “There are solutions out there people. just open your eyes once in a while instead of being some anti MS whore.”
So, if I go for the browser that has all that stuff built-in already, plus more, and does it faster and better, that makes me an anti-MS whore?
Yet, if I take the lesser choice, and hack it up with third party utilities to add functionality that should already be there in the first place, thats the logical choice?
You need to take another look at that reasoning.
— “No Mac users, Safari is not open source nor free, despite what you might think.”
PIECES of Safari ARE indeed 100% open source, although not necessarily free. Open source does NOT always mean free (even though it DOES often times mean free, just not always)
The pieces of Safari that are open source are the html rendering engine. The gui & prefrences for Safari arre NOT open. That said it is nice that the most crucial piece of Safari is based on open source. Apple has been very good about contributing changes it makes back to the Konqueror people (who maintain KHTML which Apple is using for the rendering engine for Safari)
If you want to test your GPL / LGPL IQ go to:
http://www.gnu.org/cgi-bin/license-quiz.cgi
KHTML is LGPL which means while the KHTML changes must remain open, you can use KHTML in a program and keep all the pieces of the program closed except for the KHTML pieces…
“bowing to federal government demands”
Would be more accurate if it were “creating a demo of bowing to federal government demands”
Note that in Microsoft-speak a demo is something which appears to perform a function, however, actually does virtually nothing.
I believe the demand was to remove the software rather than put a virtual sheet over it.
It’s possible to rid Windows of IE and other bundled software manually or try products available (or soon to be available) at http://www.litepc.com . If you want to see XP without IE and Media Player, buy a copy of the Administrator’s Pak at http://www.winternals.com and build a bootable ERD Commander CD, to which you can add your own browser such as the one available at http://www.offbyone.com/ .
I never realy got the whole IE thing, I just went out and picked up Netscape. How hard is it to go buy another browser??
I mean I used IE for pages that required it, but that is all.
You need to take another look at that reasoning.
I ceratainly do not. I only offered an alternative. No more than what the rest of you do when you say “use opera” or “use phoenix” or what have you. Opera does have a lot of features. Features I don’t need/use. It still has quite a ways to go. That is why I use this 400k util to get the features of opera that I do like, with IE.
I offered an option to use with IE, you chose to ignore it. It’s the lack of seeing the available options that makes your reasoning defunked. What you reason with is pure preference and emotion. Not what I call accurate.
I thought they already had a patch that enables better support for other browsers. It shows up as a 5.3 Mb ‘critical update’ on Windows Update in XP, but has always failed to install correctly in all my attempts with it. More information about can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=810565
I can’t imagine computing without Internet Explorer. Unless it’s a different OS, on Windows, I will always use IE. Ahhh drag and drop menus….right click + delete favorites from the menu….what a convinience. If someone implements these features in a different browswer, well that is the only way to make me stop using IE.
Phoenix is the name. It does all that.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/
P.S. Download latest nightly.
If I’m not mistaken, there are browsers using the IE engine that have the features of Mozilla/Phoenix/Opera (tabs, pop-up killers, etc.) I plan to try a couple of them soon.
As for this article, who cares? MS rules the roost, so it doesn’t really matter anymore, IMHO. Maybe 4-5 years ago this would’ve made a difference.
How did MS win the marketing war? I wouldn’t call shoving your product into everybodies faces without any choice at all marketing. Using your monopoly to force users that don’t know more about computers isn’t marketing.
WOW I downloaded the latest nightly build of Phoenix and it really does it!! Thanks element. I can’t believe my eyes! There are still little things that need work like for example you can only drag web pages and not whole folders but I hope this gets fixed and also they need to add a “Sort by name” feature so when the menu is unorganized, it gets nicely and quickly organized. They are well on their way and I am DEFINATELY stareting to use Phoenix! As I said, that’s the only thing that keeps me use IE and now I finally have an alternative. That’s it guys! Make it easy, and we will use it. I don’t care who makes it as long as it is good. The tabbed browsing is a bonus!
but I hope this gets fixed and also they need to add a “Sort by name” feature so when the menu is unorganized, it gets nicely and quickly organized.
Under manage bookmarks, go
View->Sorted By ___
in the menu. I currently have the latest nightly, and I’m impressed. I’ve been using Phoenix since sometime last year, and it has grown tremendously. (In features and numbers of users).
By the way, go to this site for lot’s of cool tips and add ons:
http://texturizer.net/phoenix/index.html
“How did MS win the marketing war? I wouldn’t call shoving your product into everybodies faces without any choice at all marketing. Using your monopoly to force users that don’t know more about computers isn’t marketing.”
Some time ago I read an article stating that Microsoft has won the War, because:
– MS-DOS came preinstalled with all pc’s for free, alternatives costed money.
– Windows 3.1 only ran on MS-dos, not on DR-dos. It used special undocumented system calls for this, FreeDOS has almost found out how to run Win3.1…
So, if you wanted a GUI, you were forced to MS-Dos with MS-Windows, alternatives simply didn’t exist or were very expensive.
Some time ago I read an article stating that Microsoft has won the War, because:
– MS-DOS came preinstalled with all pc’s for free, alternatives costed money.
– Windows 3.1 only ran on MS-dos, not on DR-dos. It used special undocumented system calls for this, FreeDOS has almost found out how to run Win3.1…
So, if you wanted a GUI, you were forced to MS-Dos with MS-Windows, alternatives simply didn’t exist or were very expensive.
And that sounds to me like they won by shoving their products in everyone’s faces without any choice, bypassing the more fair game called marketing that everyone else has to play.
Does anyone else find themselves using Konqueror in KDE all the time, even though they kind of prefer Mozilla?
There were other GUIs available, Just a lot harder to find.
Gem, can’t think of any others.
MS fixed msdn after it became public that they served
Opera a faulty CSS, but they still haven’t fixed
http://www.microsoft.com/security;
Set Opera to report “Opera”, go to the site, click the latest bulletin on the right, try to “Get more technical
details about this update” on the bottom of the page.
Yupp! Buggs!
Peder