Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Look, this is Microsoft's way of doing things. It always were. It's the only way they can keep their huge number of junkies paying. It's the same as Apple does, but it's on the software level, not on the hardware one. There are no surprises here. All commercial software developers try to keep their apps as proprietary as possible. (Just look at what Adobe is doing to PDF, for example.)

It's like with Java and .NET. You can program for the one that you prefer, just don't expect it to run on the other's virtual machine. Everybody is defending their own turf. It is what I learned to expect. No surprises.

Microsoft stopped playing with their stupid NetBIOS only when they realized that there is a bigger thing than them, and it's called Internet. Only then did MS accept TCP/IP as a networking "standard". People have to figure out a better way of coercing Microsoft into respecting W3C standards, because they have really no incentive to do so.

IE won't become standards-compliant because 15% of the end-user market is playing with alternative browsers. Microsoft doesn't make its money from desktop Windows, but from Office and the server products, i.e. corporations. And the corporate world is very happy about having ONE browser platform, called Internet Explorer, and really don't care about Firefox, Opera and their third-party standards. I have seen plenty of intranet sites that work perfectly in IE, while nobody cares about the rest of the browsers, for the simple reason that security is not as paramount as on the Internet.

So, yes, IE is already THE standard, and corporate developers program (almost) only for it, the same way they program with ActiveX and Windows in mind.

What's Microsoft advantage in not supporting W3C standards? A huge one: it's more costly to switch browsers, i.e. operating systems. It's another method of vendor lock-in.