Microsoft helping Firefox team?
There’s a minor dustup because it’s been reported that the Firefox team was invited to visit Microsoft up in Redmond. Lots of conspiracy theories.
But this demonstrates that the religious don’t understand how Microsoft works and why it got big.
I remember visiting with developers from all of Microsoft’s fiercest competitors at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. Google. Oracle. Sun. Apple.
This isn’t the first trip that members of the Firefox team have made to Microsoft, either. I remember being in some top secret and high-level meetings that I wish I could tell you more about — but my NDA still holds.
Anyway, the reason Microsoft does this? Because by helping its competitors it helps itself. Think about this: if Windows is the best place to run Firefox, won’t you be more likely to use Windows?
And, for the Firefox team (or any team, really) they get some deep technical help from people who really understand Windows, plus they can go visit the developers who work on Windows and build relationships that are invaluable to understanding things.
Oh, and Firefox team members can even work with IE team members to help make sure that both products work the same, which makes our lives better.
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August 22nd, 2006 at 8:17 am
Somehow, it doesn’t compute in my mind. Unless MS wants to ditch IE eventually… or base it on Firefox in a future iteration.
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:19 am
One side effect of regularly “dealing with the enemy” is that Microsoft will be/is better at it than any one else.
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:52 am
@brem - Makes perfect sense to me. It’s a strategic move for the Windows team, not for the IE team. And like Robert posts, I see it as MS wanting to do the best thing for themselves *and* the best thing for the users by sharing knowledge of their OS.
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:53 am
Tim: I fail to see how helping Firefox get better will help the IE team. I can see how it can help MS as a whole, but that’s like fixing the roof of a house while the foundation is rotting. If you catch my drift.
:)
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:55 am
I’ve always said, and will continue to say, that when it comes to courting developers….nobody does it as well as Microsoft. It’s not glamorous, but I (along with millions more) appreciate it. It’s win/win for Microsoft and developers.
A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of rage brought on by Apple’s pathetic attempt at documenting the QuickTime API, I posted this. Did I overreact, or am I just spoiled by Win32/.NET/MSDN/Channel9? ;)
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:09 am
I think Microsoft is well on its way to taking over the world.
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:10 am
Alex: Alan Cooper said “Microsoft is the sea we all swim in.” That was back in the mid 1990s.
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:12 am
>>Tim: I fail to see how helping Firefox get better will help the IE team.
The IE team is part of Windows. If more people use Windows it helps the IE team immensely. It’s pretty hard to switch people to IE if they use Macintoshes.
A rising tide raises all boats.
One thing I’m noticing is more and more Web sites only really support Firefox. That’s a trend that the IE team should be greatly concerned about.
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:21 am
I suppose they’re doing the same as (we) Opera did there…
http://my.opera.com/olli/blog/show.dml/417961
http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/08/opera-vista
August 22nd, 2006 at 9:44 am
IE has been a dead horse for years. Just bury it already.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:46 am
TomB: why don’t you add something to the conversation instead of being religious? Between 50% and 85% of humans use IE. Even on sites that suck for IE (Zooomr, for instance, is broken in IE but a large percentage of the people visiting that site use IE, according to Thomas Hawk).
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:55 am
Perhaps they heard about CSS and wanted to know how to support the latest standards?
http://www.douglaskarr.com/index.php?s=microsoft
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:12 am
it’s not “religious” to observe that microsoft neglected IE for years and that the only reason they’re working on it now is because of safari, firefox and opera nipping at their heels.
microsoft got big because it pushes people around and restricts them. do you think they’re successful because of great UI design or something, robert? in a cro magnon age they are neanderthals.
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:15 am
“Firefox team members can even work with IE team members to help make sure that both products work the same”
And now I have coffee all over my new Mac. *Why* would the FF team want to have FF work like IE? Surely it is up to Microsoft to catch up, not for the FF guys to slow down ;)
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:31 am
Ross: Microsoft is now adding new features to IE too. You think they are just gonna copy Firefox forever? Again, you’re demonstrating your religion.
It’s better for all of us if these two teams (and Opera and Safari too) get along and make sure their new features work the same in the future. Otherwise they’ll both bring new stuff to the market which will make us design another version of our Web site to get it to work on both browsers.
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:33 am
Robert: doesn’t the IE team resent their “bosses” for courting with Firefox? Surely the manager cannot be too happy about that.
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:52 am
“TomB: why don’t you add something to the conversation instead of being religious?”
If MSFT were really into supporting the product, instead of dropping the Mac version (which hadn’t been competitive since the days of Netscape 6), they would have ADDED a LINUX version. As “fatalist” puts it, I can recognize neglect when I see it.
Also, I was using features like tabs and pop-up blocking in Firefox years before Gates even mentioned these features in public.
Plus, there are nasty IE bugs that make me crazy; sometimes I hit particular web pages that don’t let me select and “copy” text; I’ve never seen this problem on Firefox for Windows.
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:57 am
I heard their gonna buy Firefox and redirect scobleizer.wordpress.com to blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn in both IE and FF.
August 22nd, 2006 at 1:04 pm
In a perfect world, your niceish ‘let’s all get along’ platformish hippie idealism would work wonders. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company…” Unfort. for that fairy tale storybook narrative, past and current history doesn’t match up.
“Play-nice” isn’t the mindset, you only go in with your eyes wide open, and your lawyers, armed and ready, trigger-happy at that. Microsoft wants to dominate (or steal), that it can’t on several fronts (Search, IPTV, Video Games, ERP, Photo/Video software and hardware, Database, AntiVirus and etc.) is only on account of their own ineptness per products, marketing and legals; for example, look at all the now abandonware generic castle-storms against Adobe.
You really think they’d give an iota of a care if Firefox didn’t have serious marketshare?
Handshake with one, knife in the other…no different than most of the Fortune 500, just developed into an art form at Redmond.
August 22nd, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Robert you accuse me of showing my religion. Problem is, I don’t use Firefox except very occassionally on Windows (I even made a fuss on C9 to get the guys to help me stop using it). On the whole I use Safari or Camino.
So to accuse me of a bias is a little silly, but just because I don’t use FF doesn’t mean I don’t think it is streets ahead of IE 6 and 7.
August 22nd, 2006 at 7:38 pm
Interesting comments to which I can only add this: Microsoft should just drop IE and use Firefox as browser of choice, sure they coud give it a MS coat of paint, but it would certainly save Microsoft a pile of money, part of which they could donate to the Mozilla foundation for Firefox development, and certainly it would allow me to sleep better at night knowing that I no longer have to worry about making my website work in IE6 or IE7.
August 22nd, 2006 at 7:47 pm
I thought Microsoft gave up years ago on the practise of inviting other teams to “share” information with them, only to take what they could and leave. :)
As for the number of IE users. That’s a lot of Joe Bloggs, mom and pops, who don’t know any better and just run IE cause it’s there.
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:21 pm
it’s not “religious” to observe that microsoft neglected IE for years and that the only reason they’re working on it now is because of safari, firefox and opera nipping at their heels.
They didn’t neglect shit. As Robert said before, they *stopped* all work on IE in a littly wussy hissy fit over the antitrust suit because their widdle feewings were all hurty. That’s Ballmer’s leadership style. Screw professionalism, if we can’t get our way, we’ll just cry.
The IE team is part of Windows. If more people use Windows it helps the IE team immensely. It’s pretty hard to switch people to IE if they use Macintoshes.
Only because Microsoft killed IE Mac. That’s not to say they didn’t have a good reason, but they hadn’t done shit with it post - OS X other than a single performance upgrade from the release of 10.0 Microsoft has this bad habit of only tweaking IE when someone else has a competing product. If they don’t have competition, they get lazy as hell.
A rising tide raises all boats
If they really believed that, they’d have figured out a non-windows only solution for Active X years ago, and they’d fully support Mono. Microsoft, at least on the windows side, believes that a rising tide lifts Microsoft boats and hides the Microsoft torpedos that sink the !Microsoft boats.
When I see shit like Active X being reworked to not force IE Win lockin, I’ll buy that everything that Microsoft does outside of the Mac BU isn’t aimed at forcing you into Windows. Until I see real code, it’s all marketing fairytales.
August 23rd, 2006 at 3:42 am
@Chris, re .MOV-conversion: I guess you overreacted, as i just commented on your blog there’s FfmpegX, a GUI-wrapper for some OSS video tools. Posssible to use those too and make a GUI with AppleScript/Automator/Xcode?
August 23rd, 2006 at 9:34 am
they *stopped* all work on IE in a littly wussy hissy fit over the antitrust suit because their widdle feewings were all hurty.
Exactly, hereby allowing spyware and malware to become a COTTAGE industry…
They won, they beat back the DOJ, they won the web, and then because it cost them so much, they took their ball and went home. Unprofessional extreme, strategy taxed cooking on hissy fits. They are extremely lucky that their competitors are more than equally inept…Apple if it woulda embraced the OEM model could have ruled the world. But all so much ‘what if’s’…
August 23rd, 2006 at 12:46 pm
“One thing I’m noticing is more and more Web sites only really support Firefox. That’s a trend that the IE team should be greatly concerned about. ”
Seems that Apple should be concerned about it as well. There are many Web 2.0 sites that don’t work properly on Safari. :(
August 23rd, 2006 at 12:49 pm
“Interesting comments to which I can only add this: Microsoft should just drop IE and use Firefox as browser of choice…”
Interesting idea, but the hackers would immediately turn their guns on Firefox. And Firefox has plenty of holes, as the ever more frequent Firefox security updates prove.
August 23rd, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Microsoft did this for Opera too.
Opera devs had their meeting at Microsoft last week. You can read the accounts from Opera devs. Sounds like they had a good time; had lunch with IE guys, bought MS shirts at the Microsoft Company Store, visited the Space Needle, etc. (Oh, they also did real work, and visted an Opera user group meeting.)
See:
http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/show.dml/419834
http://operawatch.com/news/2006/08/opera-visits-microsoft-in-prepar...
http://my.opera.com/olli/blog/show.dml/417961
http://annevankesteren.nl/2006/08/opera-vista
August 24th, 2006 at 4:16 am
THe current release of Safari has numerous Javascript issues. The WebKit builds are much better, but who knows if they’ll be integrated into Safari pre-leopard
August 25th, 2008 at 6:15 am
@Robert, “if Windows is the best place to run Firefox, won’t you be more likely to use Windows?”
Windows has never been the best place to run anything, and has reached its apotheosis in the bloated DRM-encumbered resource hog that is Vista. Vista (aka 2003 in drag) is the culmination of all of Microsoft’s years of abusing its monopoly, being as it is the expression of a lazy, arrogant and incompetent company that has been isolated from real competition in a world of its own making. Now, with delicious irony and in a manner that is poetically just, Microsoft is going to be hoist on its own petard. It can’t come soon enough.