IE : Updates or Upgrade?

Despite all appearances, Microsoft insists it hasn't lost interest in Web browsers. It has been years since Microsoft declared victory over browser pioneer Netscape Communications, and a long time since it last released a full upgrade to Internet Explorer (IE). Now critics say the company is fulfilling old predictions that it would embrace the browser and extend its capabilities, only to extinguish it.

Microsoft's last major browser release was in August 2001. The company in the summer of 2003 discontinued its browser for the Macintosh and said it would issue no more standalone versions of IE. Last month, the company released new IE security features in its Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the Windows XP operating system, but said only XP users would get those improvements.

Once praised for its standards compliance, IE is now denounced by Web developers as outdated. Meanwhile, there has been an outcry over the browser's lack of standards support for basic Web technologies like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) image format, and for its lack of popular features like tabbed browsing.

At the heart of the controversy is Microsoft's longtime insistence that the browser isn't a standalone piece of software, as it is most commonly thought of, but merely a feature of the Windows operating system. In future releases of Windows, starting with the long-awaited Longhorn, Web browsing functionality will be embedded deeply within applications, reaffirming the Windows interface rather than the browser as the center of the computing experience.

Microsoft, which makes most of its money from sales of its Windows operating system and Office application suite, refuses to characterize the Web browser as a threat to those businesses. But years ago, the computer industry and Wall Street alike saw that a highly functional Web and browser could indeed reduce the importance of both the OS and desktop applications, drawing consumers away from them.

That potential has been realized in some areas of computing, for example, Web-based e-mail. Microsoft anticipated that threat early with its 1997 purchase of Hotmail.

More comprehensively, the software giant met the Web threat embodied by browser start-up Netscape, which once commanded better than 85 percent of the market. Microsoft acquired browser technology from Spyglass that it turned into Internet Explorer. Through a relentless campaign that was later found to have violated antitrust law, Microsoft made quick work of Netscape, to the point that IE amassed by many estimates better than 95 percent of the browser market.

Critics in and out of court complained that Microsoft's quest for browser dominance was an effort to neutralize the threat of an open Web though an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. By extending the technology beyond industry standards, the company could compel Web developers to code their sites to IE rather than to those standards. As a result, competing browsers would fail to render significant sites and remain marginal competitors.

IE defectors
Microsoft weathered vociferous campaigns by Web developers to support standards published by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Now many of those same developers are urging surfers to dump IE in favor of standards-compliant browsers like the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox.

Perhaps worse for IE's reputation, security advisers including the U.S. government's CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) have warned against using Microsoft's browser. (CERT praised SP2's security improvements, but half of Windows users can't access them without paying for an upgrade to XP.)

If you are using IE as your primary web browser and you need the latest support for new technologies, such as CSS and PNG, you should upgrade your operating system into windows XP and apply the SP2 Patch or buy a Windows 2003 or.. (maybe the long term waiting), you can wait for the next Longhorn releases that will ship with the latest IE (in most cases it will be out in 2006).

I'm suggesting that you should switch to Firefox or Mozilla that always update their functionality and fixed their security hole as soon as possible while enhancing their CSS and PNG supports (currently, Mozilla 1.8.4 Beta 4 has a partial support on CSS3, which is a good news).