A Modest Browser Proposal

Robert Scoble men­tions on his blog that he had a meet­ing with the IE team and that they are solic­i­tat­ing feed­back from the blog com­mu­nity about what to include in the next update of the browser. While par­tic­u­lar fea­tures are nice, I’d like to sug­gest some­thing much more rad­i­cal: Switch to Mozilla.

It may sound like heresy and would cre­ate quite some con­tro­versy in the online space but let’s face it, the browser wars are over. Since AOL decided to get out of the browser busi­ness, the Mozilla foun­da­tion has suc­cess­fully man­aged a tran­si­tion and is now mov­ing for­ward on adding value to their offerings.

By adopt­ing Mozilla as their core ren­der­ing engine, Microsoft could achieve a num­ber of quick wins: first of all, it would allow it to adopt a num­ber of new fea­tures that many users have requested. Things like tabbed brows­ing, an expand­able plug-in archi­tec­ture, a ren­der­ing lan­guage for the appli­ca­tion layer (no more XUL vs XAML dis­cus­sions) would come out of the box.

Sec­ond, it would put an end to issues relat­ing to stan­dard com­pli­ance that have plagued the dif­fer­ent imple­men­ta­tion. Since Inter­net Explorer con­trols the mar­ket, and Mozilla and Fire­bird rep­re­sent a sub­stan­tial por­tion of the remain­ing of the mar­ket, throw­ing Microsoft’s sup­port behind Mozilla would mean an increase in mar­ket share for IE in that com­pat­i­bil­ity issues between the two browsers would become inexistent.

Such a move would also get Microsoft more involved in the open source com­mu­nity and could be seen as extend­ing an olive branch to that world by say­ing that Microsoft employ­ees can work side by side with open source vol­un­teers to pro­duce great software.

Last but not least would be the fact that Microsoft could offer ver­sions of IE for more plat­forms, dis­con­tin­u­ing its con­cept of aban­don­ing the Mac­in­tosh plat­form and extend­ing into Linux and other Unix sys­tem (wouldn’t that be ironic?)

While it is evi­dent to see what advan­tage Microsoft gains, some peo­ple may won­der what are the advan­tages for the Mozilla foun­da­tion. On this end, I would see a cou­ple of things.

First of all, a player like Microsoft back­ing Mozilla would solid­ify the finan­cial foot­ing of the Mozilla foun­da­tion for years to come. Another issue would be in terms of mar­ket share: While IE has a dom­i­nant mar­ket share and Mozilla still remains the sec­ond player by a large mar­gin, such an alliance would make both browsers only one, hence turn­ing the plat­form in the de-facto indus­try standard.

Another advan­tage to the Mozilla foun­da­tion would be the mar­ket­ing power of Microsoft cou­pled with the tech­no­log­i­cal advances made by the Mozilla foun­da­tion could help stan­dard com­pli­ance flour­ish around the inter­net. At the cur­rent time, many web devel­op­ers only develop for Inter­net Explorer because it has the lead­ing mar­ket share.

The fire­bird effort would also ben­e­fit from this as I am assum­ing that Microsoft would still want to keep Out­look as its email client (the inte­gra­tion with Exchange server means that try­ing to get Microsoft to move to a new email client would be dif­fi­cult at best)

The road would not be an easy one. First of all, Microsoft would have to find a way to either import its plug-in archi­tec­ture (the ActiveX one) into Mozilla or aban­don it and con­sider Mozilla’s approach instead. This would be a major devel­op­ment as many of the secu­rity issues in IE have been relat­ing to this.

The other thing would be an audit of the Mozilla code base to plug any holes that may exist and ensure close con­nec­tiv­ity between the Win­dows Oper­at­ing Sys­tem and the browser. At the cur­rent time, I would ven­ture to say that Mozilla prod­ucts have ben­e­fited from the lack of notice by script kid­dies. Becom­ing the largest player in the mar­ket would make Mozilla an instant target.

While I am dream­ing about this, the real­ist in me says that it will not hap­pen. But then again, one can always dream.…