Open source... schmopen source. Browsers are the past man, Microsoft has bigger fish to fry then creating free browsers for the drooling masses. Let Mozilla have it's Firefox (which I use and like) I don't think it is going to break Microsoft's bank.

And, the reason there are still I.E. only sites is because of the Drooling masses wanting to see pretty transisions and neat rollovers without having to have Flash components. Granted now that Firefox supports the true W3C DOM it can do it too, but in the days before Mozilla 1.0 Netscape would GPF those sites.

So cut those guys a break, maybe they haven't gotten around to modifying their Document.Alls to Document.GetElementByIDs.

You make a good point, Tony. But if Microsoft is really innovating, they're really going at a slow pace, which I believe is unacceptable for today. I've seen a video about the "new" Internet Explorer 7 browser, and I wasn't extremly impressed. I saw a cool looking browser which *finally* did some of the things people have been asking for.

And if Microsoft has bigger fish to fry, such as Avalon for instance, where is it at? When will we see it? 2008, 2009?? Macromedia Flash is already dominating the "rich user experience" market, and it will continue to dominate throughout this year and possibly the following years. (Unless someone totally unexpected comes up and beats both Microsoft and Macromedia -- much like NASM did back in the days of who could create the best assembler.) Flash can connect to Web Services, make calls to CLI code, and all that. So what's so new with Avalon? Is this bigger fish Indigo perhaps?

Same deal with Mozilla, and many other free software projects. Those guys are moving tremendously faster than Microsoft, and they're not just creating pretty looking RSS readers.

Dr Shim brings up some of the points that I would have brought up.

Tony, you say that "browsers are the past", but it's hard to see it that way when the majority of the people viewing the Internet are using browsers.

When I browse, I want it to be as fast and efficient as possible. Right now, Firefox blows IE out of the water in that department.

I wonder if Microsoft would even be making these new updates to the next version of IE if it wasn't for Firefox.

Excellent points Dr. Shim however...

I think comparing Flash to Indigo is analogous to comparing Wichita Kansas to New York City. Hey they are both cities, and I can buy stuff in both places. But the amount of things you can do in New York compared to Wichita are vastly different.

Indigo is meant to allow users to unify systems seamlessly over multiple presentation layers (web, Rich Client, PDA...) and multiple servers. Granted it has had some delays, but they aren't building a Tonka Truck.

Avalon granted is just another pretty face, but Microsoft feels it is necessary to give the UI another refresh(Frankly I think it is about time we can write UI in XML...)

I know I sound like a Gung-Ho Microsoft guy (and it does pay my bills) but I am just presenting the facts. Microsoft has several systems in the works that will revolutionize how we view the computing world (Longhorn, Indigo, Avalon, SQL Server 2005, .NET 2.0 just to name a few). My view is stick with a winning team.

So what if Flash can connect to web services and CLI, so can JavaScript. I don't think you are looking at the bigger picture.

I will continue to use the products I deem best, with the exception of FireFox Microsoft is winning by leaps and bounds.

I heard about the hype around Mozilla Firefox, and I downloaded it to get around spyware. I could install Firefox even though I don't have administrator's priviledges on my computer running Windows 2000. Internet Explorer is optimized to load quickly. Firefox takes an eternity to launch, and it gives me an error message when it exits. Furthermore there is a bug in Firefox to load external stylesheets.
Cheers,
Jean

Tony: And I sound like the Gung-Ho Linux guy. ;)

I wasn't comparing Flash to Indigo, which wouldn't be very accurate. Indigo is used to build connected systems, and Flash is used to build rich user experiences. Flash has more in common with Avalon, to be honest. As it stands now, Flash can only natively read WSDL information from existing Web Services, but not create any. It can also make calls to "managed" code, via another peice of software called Flash Remoting. So natively, Microsoft future offering with Longhorn can do more.

Anyway, I'm impressed with what Microsoft is doing with Longhorn. I'm an avid reader of Channel9 (http://channel9.msdn.com), and what they're doing is really cool. However my excitement about these new technologies has died down a bit with the realization that Microsoft is moving at a very slow pace. I'm not saying that they're not (or can't) innovate, which is absurd. But I want to see results, and I'm becomming quite excited with the software the "other side" has recently made, such as Xen.

Tabbed browsers all the rage? IE's had them for a while - at least when good developer's get their hands on it - www.maxthon.com