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The Browser Wars
(August 2002)
So why not all use one browser?
Quite a few people like this idea. Some of them already work to it, only letting you even see their site if you have Internet Explorer. There's a problem with this approach. The WWW has the potential to have a tremendous effect on the world. Politically, economically, but mostly in the area it was desiged for: the exchange of information.
At its heart, the Internet is an incredibly powerful tool, enabling almost anyone to make information available to almost everyone. There has never been anything like it before in human history. Potentially, I can write something, and five minutes later, it can be read by several million people, all over the world. The internet has already had a profound effect in the scientific community. The software development community is currently undergoing seismic shifts as the Internet enables the spread and growth of open-source software projects.
Do we want this incredible tool to be controlled by a single entity? Most people would be aghast if a single government were control access to the Internet (unfortunately, many governments ARE attempting to control their citizens' access to the Internet, but that's another rant). Yet many of these same people seem quite happy to allow a single corporation to control the way most people view the Internet. At least most western governments are (theoretically) elected by, and representative of, their people. Microsoft, on the other hand, is only obliged to act in the best interests of its shareholders.
In 2001, Microsoft announced that they were going to include "smart tag" support in IE6. In summary, whenever a web page contains particular words, the browser would insert a link of Microsoft's choosing. At a stroke, Microsoft, together with its fee-paying partners, would be able to insert links to adverts in every web page viewed by everyone using IE6. Yes, I know about the meta tag which would prevent IE doing this. I should NOT need to put a metatag in my page to prevent Microsoft inserting adverts without my permission.
Would it stop at adverts? Given the way Microsoft is currently lobbying governments the world over with scare stories of how choosing open source software will do irreperable damage to a country's software industry, do you really think Microsoft could resist linking the word "Linux" to a microsoft.com article about the corrosive effects of this un-American software? Or more subtle variants on that theme? Welcome to the world of the (privatised) Ministry Of Information. (See this article for a more detailed analysis of the implications of smart tags.)
Luckily for all of us, Microsoft decided not to ship Smart Tags with IE6. However, there are now numerous instances of spyware trojans exploiting the software "hooks" that remain in Internet Explorer. So instead of spewing their links all over our pages, Microsoft have just managed to open up security holes that let other software vendors do it.
It is a very bad idea to let any single organisation (corporate or otherwise) have that much control. So we can't use a single browser. The healthiest situation would appear to be to have several popular browsers, so that if one of them does something nasty, users can move to an alternative. Unfortunately, the last time we had two browsers slugging it out toe-to-toe for market share, it was a disaster for content writers.