"Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1161169164.339998.244350@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[snip article summary, basically Firefox team criticizing Microsoft (their
criticism are very valid, though)]
>
> There's no mention of corruption of standards and making
> the Web saturated with proprietary technology that perils
> rivalry.
Maybe because it'd be unfair? Back when IE was innovating, it was in
competition with Netscape Navigator. BOTH browsers were "corrupting
standards" and saturating the web with "proprietary technology". The W3C was
established mainly to fix this mess and create a single HTML standard. In
the interim, Netscape gave up, and Microsoft dropped development on IE.
IMHO,
Microsoft should be criticized for:
* Dropping IE.
* Not fixing the standards compliance problem once W3C published their
documents. (But this is really part of the first problem of having dropped
IE).
* Shipping something which doesn't meet Sun's Java compliance test, and
yet using the trademarked name "Java" to promote it. There's a lot of
evidence that this was a mean-spirited strategy (i.e. immoral) in addition
to being illegal.
Microsoft should NOT be criticized for:
* Adding proprietary tags. Both browsers did it, because it was an
innovations war. A lot of the tags (e.g. Frames) were eventually added into
the W3C standards. Others weren't (e.g. Blink). They couldn't have predicted
the future and know which one would have made it in the standards, and which
ones wouldn't.
It's arguable whether or not Microsoft should be criticized for:
* ActiveX. It was a bad idea. I don't know whether Microsoft knew it was
a bad idea when they made it (doubtful), but when they realized it was a bad
idea, they quietly dropped it.
- Oliver
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