Manni Wood

I was reading Ars Technica’s description of the ballot page Microsoft’s operating systems will use in the EU, and I started wondering…

With the browser wars heating up again, and Microsoft having to pour resources into a product it gives away for free, when does it become cost-effective to abandon IE and let the better browsers take over?

Back when Microsoft won the first browser war around 2001, it stopped improving IE6 so that the internet would languish, and people would realise that the Windows desktop was where all new applications should be developed.

This did not work out exactly how Microsoft wanted. Instead, the internet continued to become popular, becoming as good as it possibly could under the limitations of IE6. So, I guess you could say Microsoft slowed down the development of the internet, but did not stop it.

Now, Microsoft is moving more of its own stuff into the cloud, realising the internet is here to stay. (Even MS Office is moving into the cloud.)

I wonder if IE isn’t now holding Microsoft back? It’s well known that a large portion of every web-based company’s budget is spent on supporting IE. If IE disappeared tomorrow, every web-based company would instantly become more profitable, because it would cost less money bringing new features to market on the remaining browsers, which are all standards compliant.

The funny thing is, I think this cost now affects even Microsoft. If Microsoft wants to compete in the cloud, they too need to leverage the best attributes browsers provide. Supporting IE must be a pain point for even Microsoft.

I think Microsoft is still living under the delusion that it can steer the internet in a direction more amenable to Microsoft’s goals, and that is why they persist in developing newer versions of IE, which is now pretty much permanently in a trailing position (feature-wise) behind every other browser. So Microsoft continues to spend money making a browser that makes their cloud division spend more money supporting it.

If this didn’t affect the rest of us, I’d laugh. As it is, I feel more like crying.

But who knows? Maybe one day, after hemorrhaging enough money, Microsoft will take the Google route, and base its browser on a real rendering engine. I never thought Microsoft would contribute code to Linux, and that happened last week…