After reading a few articles on the development of Internet Explorer 9, I still wonder why it is that Microsoft bothers, when it is clear that the company does not have its heart in the effort. It never has. The entire history of Internet Explorer is one of playing catch up, and trying to push aside competitors with an inferior product.
The article put forth today in Ars Technica is one that asks if Microsoft is capable of building a better browser. While I certainly believe that they can, I don’t think it will happen – the long line of “just good enough” is one that shows that there is no reason to believe that IE9 will lead across the board in the battery of tests that browsers must survive, along with the actual usage tests of customers.
The article tells that Opera made major improvements in less than 6 months with the jump from 10.1 to 10.51, and by the way, Opera Labs has a few orders of magnitude less resources to bring to bear on a problem than Microsoft. Still, the browser is the raison d’être for Opera Labs, whether for PC or mobile phone use, and must be motivated in that direction to survive.
Microsoft has no such motivation, as it has many more irons in the fire, and never has made any money from the browser. It is an afterthought, or at best, a weapon that it uses to bludgeon those competitors that might be a problem in some other area of the computer landscape.
The story on BetaNews, which at this point might as well be called BrowserNews, as the site has been a full-on browser bashing and testing effort for the last 9 or so months, with little else occupying its efforts or taking its attention, shows that the Microsoft effort, as released, is nowhere near what we might expect from an effort that Mary-Jo Foley spoke about long, long ago in her column on ZDNet. ( I haven’t looked up the exact story, but those of you that keep up should remember that it has been a very long time since he first word of Gazelle, and its typical FUD was brought up in an article there.)
A quick look at the chart given by BetaNews shows that, right now, the effort from Microsoft is a small bit faster than the Firefox Alphas, and not quite a fast as Safari, and nowhere near as speedy as Chrome or Opera. This sort of middle of the pack effort is right in line with the efforts of Microsoft for the past few years, and makes me think that when IE9 is released, people will download and use it, but only as a fall back, as the typical user knows that the guts are always there in a Windows install, so why not install the last remaining pieces?
Why will Microsoft produce a killer effort? Only Mr. Ballmer knows for sure, but the middle of the road effort, is all I will expect, and if IE9 does produce any speed, I will then be looking for the security problems – there always are a few right from the start, and others get uncovered as time goes by. It is a story seen many times before.
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Download Opera – A faster and more secure Web browser.
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Will I be soon be referring to this effort as Internet Exploder 9? Most likely…