Windows 7 without IE; one in the eye for Opera
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, operating systems, Windows 7, Web browser, Firefox, Internet, Google, Microsoft on
The ’screaming deals’ Microsoft is claiming for Windows 7 are causing a certain amount of screaming - from people upset that they don’t get a pre-order upgrade price for Ultimate. That’s probably because Microsoft thinks of Ultimate as a ‘niche’ version; I’m not sure that disk encryption should still be thought of as niche, but if they did include it in all versions, that would be something else the EU would suggest might be an abuse of the dominant position of Windows, the way it’s complained about the inclusion of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft’s response to the EU is to take IE 8 out of Windows 7 in Europe. That means ‘upgrade’ versions for end users are clean install versions at upgrade price (with limits on not moving them onto a new machine). The complaints for this will be aimed at the EU and Microsoft, with a few brickbats for Opera for causing all this trouble in the first place. The end result will be (we predict) a lot of people buying Windows 7 online from the US to save the trouble of re-installing all their apps, and a lot of small businesses deciding that as you can buy the Enterprise version of Windows 7 through Software Assurance for as few as five users, it’s time to switch to volume licensing - because SA versions of Windows 7 will allow in-place upgrades, on the grounds that when you have SA, you build an image with the components you want and if you don’t want IE you don’t put it in, so it was never forced on you and you don’t have to be given the choice. Microsoft is happy to use consumers for a game of brinkmanship with the EU over browser choice; businesses who mandate IE for internal use because they don’t want to rebuild line of business apps are too important to them for that.
What about the battle that really matters - what browser goes on new PCs? That’s up to the OEMs and they don’t care as much about choice as they do about cold hard cash, which is bad news for Opera again. Why so?
Well, OEMs have several browser choices. There’s the devil you know, the devil your customers know and the easy option - Internet Explorer and the Live Essentials (including the really rather good Windows Live Photo Gallery). Expect Dell and perhaps HP to offer this, along with a number of smaller ‘just hand me the CD’ OEMs.
There’s ‘we have a pot of cash and we’re going to use it’ Google; expect to see the Mountain View boys to pay to put their only-as-popular as Firefox 2 browser, Chrome onto the best selling version of Windows ever. There’s ‘would you like a nice deal bundling iTunes on your home PCs?’ Apple with Safari (currently neck and neck with Chrome). Firefox is free, which always appeals. And then there’s this little company in Norway that would like the OEMs to pay them money to put a copy of their Opera browser on new PCs. Sounds like Opera’s attempt to get more market share is going to backfire on them.
Taking a step back, do Europeans really need to have browser choice forced on them, at the expense of easy upgrades? Not according to the latest figures.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share - click through to see share by browser version
IE has more market share than Firefox in Europe - barely - if you group together all the versions of IE. IE 6 is slightly more popular than IE 8 (oddly - perhaps it’s all those IE 6 LOB apps). But the hand-down winner at nearly 36% is - Firefox. Perhaps Opera should complain to the EU about the Mozilla foundation?
-Mary
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No IE 8? No thanks (to the EU)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in support, Windows 7, operating systems, Web browser, Internet, Firefox, Microsoft on
I’ll admit it; I actually like IE. I’ve used it as my main browser for years because I know it will be the same on every system (although I have to supplement it with the IE7Pro tools to be really happy). I distrust Chrome slightly because of the Chrome teams’ initially disappointing attitude to user privacy and security (especially with Gears and the Gears features Google wants to see in HTML5). I would use Firefox, but almost everything I like about it is down to Greasemonkey, which is a security threat waiting to happen (and he author is now on the Gears team) - although Weave might change my mind. Opera can try to include every standard going, but there are too many sites that complain that I’m not using a ’standard browser’ - and the special pleading from Opera (to the EU in particular) doesn’t win me over either. Personally speaking, the way I see it is that thanks to the EU, when I install Windows 7 I will have to take longer to do the installation because I’ll have to take the time to install a browser; gee, thanks.
Professionally speaking, should I be pleased that the European versions of Windows 7 will be browser free? Not if you know what you’re doing. Organisations who want to install Windows 7 without IE can do it by customising their setup image; they’ll be doing that anyway and they can choose the components that go in the image, including whether they want IE 8 or not.
Have all the court cases forced Microsoft to clean up its act? Maybe. It always amused me when Netscape revealed their distribution figures as part of the DoJ case against Microsoft. Despite charging ISPs anything up to $20 per users to distribute the Netscape Navigator browser, Netscape distributed it to half as many people again as were online at the time (or to everyone online 1.5 times). Which says to me the reason Netscape didn’t succeed wasn’t lack of access to the market - it was lack of being a better browser than IE.
The counter-argument was that even though they got a copy of Navigator, IE users wouldn’t bother to install it because they had a browser they thought was good enough. Leaving aside the implicit criticism of users in that view, maybe a majority of people do use IE because it’s there and we’ll now see the true popularity (or not) of IE, but I think we’ll mostly see a lot more support calls. Perhaps Microsoft could suggest that some of the fines the EU is doubtless totting up could be ear-marked to pay for free phone support for all those users who are having trouble getting a browser installed?
-Mary
Rated: 40% (2 votes)
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In and out of the browser - how Microsoft and Google think differently
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Web browser, Privacy, Applications, People, Adobe, Firefox, Internet, Google, Security, Microsoft on
For years, I’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support (even on a netbook) is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own desktop OS (whatever people do with Android), but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.
Silverlight is a lot of things, from Microsoft’s answer to Flash to Microsoft’s answer to Web based applications. Leave aside the video plugin side of it; the fact that Silverlight 2 (beta 2 due at the end of this week) runs .NET and programs written in dynamic languages on Mac and Linux as well as Windows is the most interesting part. And it’s not just consumer Web apps; Facebook and Hotmail users aren’t happy with line of business apps in dreary basic grey when they get to work, and Silverlight is an easy way to spruce those up without slaving over a hot CSS schema for hours.
Adobe’s Air tackles much the same problem; how do you make powerful applications for the Web that work online and off, that look good and that work without installing anything (once you have the initial plugin or runtime). Air builds on Flex, so if you’re already writing Flash, you’ve got a head start. But there are a lot more .NET developers writing business apps, so although Microsoft demos consumer apps like the Crossfader social video sharing tool it talked about today, most Silverlight apps might show up at work, using Workflow Foundation and making data from SQL Server look good.
Silverlight is a subset of .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation, so developers are using familiar skills and Visual Studio plus Expression Blend for designers, who get to work on the live project, not in Photoshop mockups. The visual development tools also appeal to disenfranchised Visual Basic developers who’ve been wondering what Microsoft has done for them lately…. Microsoft VP Soma Somasegar said Crossfader is being built by six developers and two designers in three months, which is more like Internet time than standard Microsoft time scales.
If Silverlight’s so good, why would anyone be creating Windows applications at all? Bill Gates finished his Q&A trying to balance that question. “Yes, you’ll be able to do amazing things in Silverlight, but there will always be things that you can do in Windows Presentation Framework that you can’t do in Silverlight. Why is that so? Well, it’s so because with WPF we get to assume we have the full power of the PC; we’re not just running in a browser environment. So, take things like 3D type things, virtual world type things, take things like ink recognition or playing video back at arbitrary speeds. WPF will, because it can connect in to all of Windows, expose those services and let people do new things.
“We need to keep the Silverlight download to be fairly modest. So, if you think of what that will be versus the entire Windows environment, we have a much bigger runtime to call on. So, we’re not saying that those get absolutely merged, but we will have exactly the right relationship. And even as you’re in Visual Studio or in the Expression tools, you’ll be able to say I want to author for the Silverlight piece and to let you know that if you’re sticking to the things that work in that world.
“Silverlight will probably have almost everything WPF has today, but WPF will keep getting richer and richer as we go forward.”
That’s the Microsoft dream and it’s one direction things could go. Google is pushing in completely the other direction. Last week at Google IO, Chris Prince and Aaron Boodman (better known as the designer of the Greasemonkey FireFox extension) was explaining why they don’t want you to think of Gears as taking Google applications offline. Yes it does that, but actually Google wants it to give Web apps to have access to all the capabilities of your PC the way desktop apps do. Why shouldn’t the browser get the power of your 2GHz processor and your 300GB hard drive? Why shouldn’t they be able to send you notifications in another window or show a progress bar? Why can’t you access USB drives from inside Gears or use a GPS to tell the Web app where you are?
Google filed its name off Gears so that it has more chance of becoming a standard, either as part of HTML 5 or by becoming ubiquitous as a plugin in its own right. Personally, I’m not going to be installing it on any machine I use.
It’s not just because it has no way to limit the amount of disk space it’s going to take for its local database (used by MySpace to give you search across the whole site without having to take up space on their data centre for those pesky index files). It’s only partly because it’s going to be able to use your GPS or other tools to get your location and there is currently nothing to warn the user and no options for choosing if and when Gears can get your location. Google seems committed to harmonizing with whatever standards HTML 5 includes for the things that Gears does, and I’m not the one who will have to detail with duplicate APIs from Gears and HTML 5 to do the same thing – that’s a problem for Web developers to juggle. And the fact that Web sites like YouSendIt already have real progress bars without needing me to download a plugin is a quibble rather than a complaint.
Mainly, I won’t use it at this point because of how Chris Prince explains why he thinks Web apps are so good in the first place. “Everything in the browser is inherently safe,” he said at Google IO. “There is no cost to install a Web app, you’re not afraid to click a link, and you can navigate away with no fear it will take over your machine.” Compared to the near-paranoia that’s is Microsoft’s attitude to the Web, from the phishing filter to the way IE doesn’t get the same privileges as a desktop app to the security-first attitude that permeates the company, calling the browser ‘inherently safe’ seems a little laissez faire to me.
Adding binary data files to JavaScript will certainly make for more powerful apps. Some of them might be Trojans; if Gears gets everything Google talked about that would be able to scrape files off a USB stick, record you talking with the audio APIs, add in your physical location and do whatever you can think of with it all. If I’m not too busy playing with whatever features the Web app disguising the Trojan has I can navigate away from it – but if it’s using Gears to run offline, has it gone away?
The browser sandbox limits the features on my system that Web apps have access to. That’s a pain when you want to build a better app in the browser – but it’s a security measure if you want to build a better way of attacking my system. I asked Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer dev team if I was being paranoid – he was the one who’d raised the issue about privacy with the GPS location in Gears at the end of the session. Maybe, he suggested - but with the number of security issues it raises, Gears isn’t going to be installed by default with IE any time soon…
-Mary
Rated: 60% (1 votes)
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Internet Explorer has fewer security holes than Firefox
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Web browser, Firefox, Security, Internet, Microsoft on
You type most of your passwords into it - and you type your credit card details into it every time you shop online. It’s how you unlock an iPhone so you can install applications on it. It’s the home of many of your applications and it’s the first avenue of attack for most malware. Really, if you wanted to be secure, you might never use a Web browser again.
You don’t have to be a hacker in the criminal sense to want to get around some security lockdowns. The latest iPhone cracker uses an image security issue in the Safari browser to open the system up. If you have a Buffalo NAS box you can use a security hole in the Web administration interface to make yourself root to install Perl so you can run SlimServer and get music onto your Squeezebox. I’d like to run SlimServer on something other than our main server - but I’m not cracking the security on our backup and media store to do it.
I’ve never switched away from IE to Firefox; originally it was because I had to have IE on my system for work and didn’t want the hassle of managing two browsers. Since IE 7 came out and I found IE 7 Pro I just haven’t bothered. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for me. Given that it took me five hours of browsing dubious sites and downloading known spyware to infect a machine running XP SP2 when I tried a few years ago, and given that everything that interested me in Firefox turned out to be Greasemonkey scripts (and I’m probably unfair to carry on thinking of that as a security problem waiting to happen, but I do), I’ve been assuming the security (dis)honours are about equal.
Jeff Jones at Microsoft has done another vulnerability survey, this time for IE and Firefox. Since Firefox 1.0 came out in November 2004, Mozilla has patched a total of 199 bugs: 75 high severity, 100 medium severity, 24 low severity. Microsoft has only patched 87 IE bugs in the same time (and we’re assuming fewer bugs patched is a good thing rather than avoiding the problem): 54 high, 28 medium and 5 low severity. Honours are more equal comparing just Firefox 2 and IE 7 for known bugs that haven’t been fixed: eight high severity bugs for Firefox versus ten for IE, 15 medium severity bugs
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