IE, What Have You Done for me Lately?

What am I using Internet Explorer for these days? Certainly not for surfing the computernets. Oh, maybe I’ll occasionally launch it accidentally. Embedded links in Outlook still launch it as my default browser.

Oh, and animated GIFs work much better in IE than they do in Firefox.

…

Um… uh…

I’m thinking…

Oh, I use it for Windows Update. Yeah. Good ol’ Windows Update. That is, when the built-in updater is not working and I need to troubleshoot the update failure. That ActiveX control is great, the way it checks for patches I need to download. That’s why I got into computers, actually – to make sure my OS is fully patched. That has seemed like more and more of my job lately.

And I use IE on our internal LAN for integrated Windows authentication, aka NTLM, the single sign-on technology that enables Active Directory domain user authentication via web browser. I’ve set that up for SharePoint and Outlook Web Access. It’s a neat little feature that’s part of IIS (the built-in HTTP daemon in Microsoft Windows Server).

Nevertheless, it seems as though, despite their best efforts, Microsoft may be losing the browser war. But, then again, what does it really have left to gain from winning this war? It seems that when these technology waves start rolling, big movers do what I do when I start playing a game of Monopoly. When I play Monopoly, I buy everything I land on. Even the stupid purple ones at the beginning – and the utilities and the railroads. Why? Compulsion, maybe fear. I’m not really sure, but I think the same mentality has existed at Microsoft during the Web 1.0 boom and was pervasive at Google during the Web 2.0 boom.

When this “control everything” program was going on at Microsoft, they attempted to control what they saw as the three-tiers of web topology: the browser, the server and the portal Their efforts were a multi-pronged attack: encourage the favored MS script language, VBScript, for client-side scripting (the only browser the VB scripting runtime engine worked on was IE); when that didn’t work, they came up with their own version of javascript (jscript). Since javascript had become the de facto browser scriptingg language, they tried to got it to work as a server-side scripting language and offered it up to developers as an alternative scripting language for ASP. They also encouraged the development of proprietary browser plug-ins (ActiveX controls) and extended the HTML featureset so that cool tricks (e.g. page transitions) only work in IE.

Developers, Developers, Developers…
Too little, too late, by the time the .NET framework showed up, many developers had switched to PHP, or had their work taken away from them and handed to faster and more agile Java developers. What was originally going to be called ASP+ turned out to be a clunky development framework that, although robust in its capabilities, swayed many developers to either entrench with what would become known as “classical” ASP, or switch to other development platforms altogether.

And Finally…
And we continue to see the miserable failure that is Microsoft’s attempted domination of the search and portal theaters. Despite massive funding and continuing to operate at a loss, MSN and Live Search continue to trail behind Google and Yahoo! as the, at best, number three offering for searches and as users’ default home page choice.