babbage's Journal: Sleeping giants

Microsoft is a lot of negative things, but stupid isn't one of them. So, for the sake of argument, let's consider that IE as a freestanding product has been not discontinued, but mothballed. No one seems to be working on it, no new versions are forthcoming, there is no roadmap for future development.

What happens then if Mozilla really does start to gain market share?

How threatened would Microsoft feel if Mozilla's user base hit 10%, 25%, or 50%? How high would the level have to get before they took action? My guess is that the first tactic would be to accelerate the next version of Windows, and provide incentives to make sure that the public upgrades (who says competition is a bad thing?). But if that's not enough, and Mozilla/Gecko use kept rising, how would they respond?

My hunch is that there is some threshold -- and I don't know what it is any more than anyone else does -- above which Microsoft would have no choice but to take IE out of mothballs, and the malarkey about "we can't improve IE without improving the underlying operating system." That's baloney, as should be obvious to anyone that has used any browser that has made a release since IE5/IE6 came out (Mozilla, Phoenix, Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, iCab, CrazyBrowser [which is even IE based!), etc).

So, if the sleeping giant stirs, and independent IE development is reactivated, how long would it take to ramp up work on it? It wouldn't surprise me if a point release (with atrophied features like popup management, maybe tabs) could be out in three to six months, and a full release within six months to a year. At a guess, obviously I don't know how long it would take to allocate people to work on it, get them familiar with the existing codebase, etc, but it wasn't that long ago that Netscape and Microsoft were release major browser upgrades on something like a nine month schedule, and maybe -- just maybe -- some stiff competition from Mozilla (and, to a lesser extent, Safari & Opera) can spur on another round of that.

Mozilla may try to be the tortoise, sneaking past Microsoft's sleeping rabbit, but sometimes the rabbit doesn't oversleep...

Browser choice

[Cujo]

First, I really can't get excited about the % of desktops that use Windows or IE, or whatever. Many of these are languishing in the spare office or are primarily used for WP and e-mail. It's just too hard to care.

That said, what would it take to make Mozilla or other standards-compliant, non-proprietary browsers a major % player?

1. people running he default softwre that came with their Wintel box would have to made aware they have a browser choice.
2. The same people would have to care that they have a brows

Re:Browser choice

[Daengbo]

I fully expect the staus quo to remain exactly that.