Microsofts Scoble in an opinion piece titled “Nigel says that Microsoft hates the Web”:
I’m running Mozilla’s Firefox on Longhorn just fine.
Good for you, Robert, but it’s beside the point. You running Firefox does nothing to show what Microsoft plans on doing, neither does it refute that Microsoft would prefer to see standards dying off so proprietary technologies could take over and customers get locked into a monthly subscription cycle.
Here’s a post about why IE sucks. Here’s another. A third post is titled It’s not my fault IE sucks - get a real browser. There are a few thousand more too.
Finally, there’s a list of things actually implemented in Firefox. When do we see actual improvements from the IE team? We don’t need a list of things that IE can’t do. There are plenty of those already.
Oh, and everytime I talk browsers with someone (which is quite often) I suggest that they flee from the legacy application known as IE. That is affecting them, and someday hopefully that will affect browser vendors too.
Personally, Robert, if you want to prove that Microsoft really cares about web standards start nudging the webteam to learn what a doctype is, have the Word- and Frontpage teams learn that HTML is a standard - not just something IE can render, and have the IE team actually produce something.
Without actions it is really hard to not believe that Nigel McFarlane is spot on.
Since Microsoft has focused their attention on a sort of “overnet” that’ll ship as a part of Longhorn we’ll not see much in the way of improvements to IE6. It’s in maintenance mode until it gets abandoned, sort of like what’s happened to some of the other free and popular MS products (NetMeeting, MS Chat). Even if Microsoft does go down the route of the proprietary web, I’m hopeful it’ll fail sort of like AOL’s custom content services (and Compuserve’s). While big media might buy in, I think it’ll be a much harder sell to the “smaller” folks who make up so much of the rich content (and, to be honest, the crap). That’s at least my hope.
— Katz