May Contain Nuts

I’ve been ruminating on this for a while, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Microsoft still isn’t taking Internet Explorer very seriously. Sure, they’re taking it seriously enough to continue development and make overtures to improved standards compliance, but let’s face it: Microsoft is not funding IE’s development because it wants to make the web a better development platform. Microsoft is funding IE only because browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome are starting to seriously erode the monopoly that Microsoft held over the browser market for the better part of 5 years, and they want that share back. The problem is, this is precisely why Microsoft is still losing ground in the battle for browser market share: they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. In fact, Microsoft – and especially cheerleaders for the company -have been taking what seems to be an increasingly hostile role towards web developers who dare to argue that Microsoft isn’t doing enough to satisfy their needs. The attitude seems to be one of “you’ll use it and you’ll like it, now STFU!” This from the company whose CEO famously leapt around a stage screaming “DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!” Blamer had it exactly right… the way to build a platform is through developers… nobody will buy it if it won’t do what they want. What boggles my mind is that they’ve let other companies and organizations completely trounce them when it comes to the web as a platform.

WebKit and Gecko have been blowing IE’s Triton engine out of the water for years now, and despite Microsoft’s best efforts to play catch-up, the gap is widening. Gecko and WebKit already support several components of the HTML 5 specification, such as the <audio> and <video> tags, as well as offline storage databases and numerous portions of the CSS 3 spec, most notably stuff like border-radius, @font-face (for reals, not the proprietary MS implementation), and text-shadow. They seem like such minor things, but they really can make a world of difference in a web design, and doing them with CSS rather than Photoshop makes it so much more flexible and compatible.

Meanwhile, the IE team gives us dubiously-useful Web Slices, occasionally-useful Accelerators, tab grouping (which I find both useful and supremely annoying), and the bare minimum of CSS 2.1 and HTML 4 compliance. Their JavaScript engine is orders of magnitude slower than every other competitor, no matter how they care to doctor their statistics on the matter, and still lacks some DOM selection and manipulation methods. And while their Developer Tools are certainly much appreciated, they’ve driven me up the wall more times than I care to count because of how poorly-written they are, especially compared to Firebug, which is pretty much the gold standard for browser developer tools.

It’s really no wonder that developers and designers are starting to actively revolt against Microsoft’s browser platform. We were ignored for almost five years, and have been getting pretty marginal improvements at a dreadfully slow pace since development started up again in the face of an impending Firefox Apocalypse. Even today, Microsoft is still more concerned about making sure the HTML file you saved to your hard drive in 1997 will render properly than they are in ensuring that their browser can compete in the current fast-paced browser market.

This brings me back to my main point, namely that Microsoft isn’t taking IE seriously. (Or perhaps, that Microsoft isn’t taking the web seriously. Still.) There seems to be a fair amount of schizophrenia at Microsoft about how to handle the web, and it doesn’t help that they’re a massive company trying to compete against all comers. The simple existence of Silverlight as a Flash competitor is evidence that they’re dealing with a relatively fragmented web strategy aimed at dominance rather than support. It also, I think, hampers efforts to ensure that IE supports the latest and greatest HTML/CSS standards, because the counter-argument (which I’ve actually heard a few too many times by now) is simply “do it in Silverlight”.

Further, even the Windows Mobile team isn’t taking IE seriously. They shipped Windows Mobile 6.5 with Internet Explorer Mobile 6. And if you think the 6 is a typo, or somehow a misrepresentation of the IE version to keep it in line with the WinMo release number, you’d be sadly mistaken. Microsoft shipped the Internet Explorer 6 engine on a new product in the year 2009. It’s likely that release timetables kept them from even remotely being able to put IE 8 into WinMo 6.5, and it’s possible that architectural differences between Windows and WinMo prevented them from bundling IE 7, but simply put, it’s inexcusable and frankly embarrassing that an 8-year-old product has been bundled as the default browser on a new mobile OS in the year 2009. Blessedly, Microsoft has elected to provide proper 24-bit PNG handling and a more recent version of the still-glacial IE JavaScript engine for this build of IE 6, but Triton is still the same old non-compliant, glitchy, buggy POS that it’s always been on the desktop. If this situation doesn’t change with Windows Mobile 7, it will be just another nail in IE’s coffin of obsolescence. But hey, at least they’ve finally gotten away from IE Mobile 4…

What I’m most interested in seeing is what they do with the browser in the forthcoming touchscreen Zune HD. The Zune folks (like so many at MS) seem to be big believers in NIH, judging by the fact that the Zune desktop software and Windows Media Player development continue apace simultaneously for no apparent reason. As a result, any number of things could happen with this new Zune. They could go with the WinMo build of IE Mobile 6, and be an utter laughing stock. They could go with a third-party browser, like Skyfire or Fennec (though given Fennec’s current level of development, that seems unlikely). They could even build their own browser based on WebKit or Gecko (or, quixotically, the latest version of Triton). It’ll be interesting to see which possibility wins out, though I’d personally put more money on the IE Mobile 6 possibility than anything else, with a home-grown Triton-based browser a close second.

The really bizarre part of this whole escapade is that the IE team themselves seem fairly committed to reaching feature parity with other browsers’ rendering engines, and other departments within Microsoft are actively promoting the expiration of IE 6 support in future releases (like SharePoint 2010, which is opting to focus on ensuring broad compatibility with IE7 & 8, Firefox 3, and Safari [and speaking as someone who has the IE Tab Firefox extension installed just to deal with the slow-ass SharePoint 2007 at work, this is a welcome development]).

It may be a furtherance of the schizophrenic behavior I noted earlier, but some portions of MS seem to be trying really hard to embrace the modern, open web, and all that that entails, while others are still clinging – either through neglect, laziness, or stubbornness – to the outmoded days when IE 6 controlled about 98% of the browser market. As a whole, I really don’t think Microsoft is willing to put the sort of serious effort into Internet Explorer that would actually make it a modern, first-rate, first-class browser. It may be because there’s no profit engine behind such a move when other proprietary technologies like Silverlight can be used to much more powerful effect to control the web rather than operate within it, I don’t know. But I do know that Microsoft is starting to turn off wave after wave of their vaunted developers with their ongoing antipathy toward pushing Internet Explorer into the same category as Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of them trying to turn that ship around, and because of it, their market share will continue to decline, to the betterment of the rest of the web.