Eric

This may be the right forum, if not, please move...Thanks.....
Thought I'd share this article with you guys....

A New Culture At Microsoft? Only Time Will Tell
By Trevor Bauknight (c) 2005

It was like a refreshing breeze on a stifling summer day this
past Friday as news of Microsoft's plans for IE7 spilled out
onto the Web. An IEBlog entry by Chris Wilson, a member of the
IE development team, finally dropped two details that may change
website development permanently. That is to say, it's refreshing,
if you believe it, and it may change website development
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/industry-news/87150-new-culture-microsoft-only-time-will.html
permanently, if it actually happens.

The announcement that Microsoft would include proper (AKA the
way spelled out in the standard everybody else has chosen to
follow) PNG support and would remove the "major inconsistencies"
in its CSS implementation may actually, for the first time since
the divisive release of Internet Explorer, make it possible for
web designers to create a page that looks and works the same on
all browsers without resorting to crazy tricks to make it work.

The first beta version of the new browser is due out sometime
this summer, and Wilson states that he and the rest of the
development team are looking forward to the feedback they'll get
when they do the release. Judging by the feedback the brief
announcement generated, I can only say that I hope they get it
right with the release.

It used to be easier to be skeptical of Microsoft's intentions.
After all, IE6 is undoubtedly one of the most hated pieces of
software ever to be foisted on the Internet population. Its
inclusion as "part of the OS" in the initial release of Windows
XP in 2001 only served to muddy the waters of website development
and its widespread adoption-by-default ensured that creating a
website that conformed to the standards set forth by the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was useful to about 15% of the people
who might actually see it and that your work had just begun.

So What's Actually Happening?

We won't know until summer, it appears. A March 9 posting by
Wilson hinted that the development team would be posting some
details later and solicited feedback on specific things people
wanted to see. The 4,000-odd responses that generated (many of
them unhappy in tone) made it pretty clear that people wanted to
see a relatively small set of improvements. Almost everyone who
responded seriously asked for improvement to PNG support, so
that transparency would finally work and the Web could finally
move away from GIFs. Most also demanded changes to the support
of Cascading Style Sheets in some way.

So Wilson says that's what they'll be doing. Well, that's not
all. They do have a few small security matters to address; but
that should be child's play after nearly five years of what
looked for all the world like the abandonment of the program.
According to Wilson, the PNG fix is already coded. According to
Wilson, it had been "on our radar for a long time." Small wonder.
The first PNG standard was adopted nine years ago and was
supported by other browsers prior to the release of IE5.

Microsoft has the luxury of moving slow and doing what it wants
to do with respect to standards. They ship the browser with every
copy of the OS, and practically every PC maker ships a copy of
the OS with the hardware; so most people end up with IE by
default and moving over to something else has been a pretty big
hassle prior to the development of Firefox, the stand-alone
browser component of the Mozilla project that grew out of the
open-sourcing of Netscape. One begins to suspect that the recent
buzz about Firefox may be spurring action in Redmond; and like
another recent pleasant development, Microsoft appears to be
planning to retaliate by actually improving its offering rather
than by destroying the competition by sheer economic might.

Changing Culture At Microsoft?

A few months ago, at the height of the malware onslaught,
Microsoft bought a company called GIANT, which made what was
considered to be the top-of-the-line anti-spyware utility on the
market. MS rebranded the GIANT program, and released a beta
version to the public without announcing how future updates
to the program would be conveyed. There was a good deal of
speculation and skepticism surrounding it, and many (myself
included) wondered aloud if it weren't a cynical ploy to generate
income from a problem caused initially by the innate lack of
system security in Windows. But Microsoft came through, and
eventually announced that future upgrades to the program would
be free (at least to anyone running a legitimate copy of Windows,
which leaves out a lot of people).

Microsoft may have finally awoken to the realization that its
customers would be far better served by actually being able to
use their computers without having to pay for extra third-party
software to protect them. Maybe someone in Redmond is forced to
use an unprotected Windows box with an always-on, non-firewalled
connection to the Internet just to see how sick a computer can
get. Or maybe they just realized that the Open Source Software
community not only isn't going away, but is also releasing some
great software.

But whether it's the recent press about Firefox or something
else, this all seems like a positive development at this point.
We're just glad that the possibility of finally separating our
content from our style and being able to present it consistently
to visitors is just over the horizon. Moving the CafeID website
(http://www.cafeid.com) from tables to CSS was relatively easy.
Getting it to look the same in both IE and the family of Other
Browsers is still not fully accomplished. We're looking forward
to that day.

After years of ignoring the Open Source community (for fear of
giving them legitimacy, I suppose), Microsoft seems to have
finally realized that it has competition. Apple, while providing
much of the inspirational and R&D muscle in the PC industry, is
safely locked away on a different hardware platform (for now)
with no apparent intention of going head-to-head with MS. Only
Linux has presented itself as a legitimate alternative for PC
owners, and what little it lacks in usability it more than makes
up in reliability, speed and security. Firefox is just another
in a long line of Open Source projects getting it right, adding
polish to a solid core. And in spite of its 85% market share, MS
has an uphill road when it comes to making a better browser.

At the same time, it looks as if the sleeping giant may be
stirring. We just hope the new browser wars don't hold back the
Web for another ten years.

================================================== ==============
Trevor Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15 years
of experience on the Internet. He specializes in the creation
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=87150
and maintenance of business and personal identity online and can
be reached at trevor@tryid.com. Stop by http://www.cafeid.com
for a free tryout of the revolutionary SiteBuildingSystem and
check out our Flash-based website and IMAP e-mail hosting
solutions, complete with live support.
================================================== ==============

dpk87

I use the microsoft antispyware beta. I must say its VERY good.

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