WWW Inventor On Microsoft's Browser Tricks

Unipuma writes: "Tim Berners-Lee gives his views in an interview with Silicon Valley about the latests blocking of the MSN website for most other than Internet Explorer browsers. 'I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.'"

Hear hear

[RedOregon]

Agreed wholeheartedly. M$ isn't the only one guilty of this type of action, as sites all over the damn place either won't display or won't display right depending on what browser you use, but they're the first ones (that I'm aware of) to try to do it on a wholesale, large-scale basis. Glad they took the pressure hit and backed off; now if other sites will just take the example...

Netscape

[mr100percent]

Didn't Netscape force eveyone to use thir browser to see Netscape.com?

Of course it failed miserably, just as I hope MS does for this...

Netscape 6 seems to work fine

[hAkron]

I just connected to www.msn.com with netscape 6.0 what browsers are they talking about? Or what part of the MSN site in particular won't display with anything other than IE? Or is this just a shoot first ask questions later type of article where nobody botherd to check the accuracy of the story?

Re:Unreadable sites

[pointym5]

and I don't see any sites getting rid of Flash just because Lynx doesn't support it.

That's because they're foolish. I regularly send "I'm a pain in the ass" mail to whatever marketing address I can find to inform people that locking potential customers out of their promotional websites is the height of stupidity. Use of Flash or other plugins may be OK for optional "tours" or whatever, but to block a customer from the main page due to lack of a plugin is a clear case of marketing people gone wild without adult supervision.

The idea that flash animation is required to grab attention is based on a misunderstanding of the context. If I go to a commercial web site, chances are I've gone there on purpose to gather information. I do not need to be impressed. I do not need eye candy to keep me "stuck" to the site. I just want information.

The same goes for access sites at banks or credit card companies (like Citibank, for example) that feel the need to drown me in stupid flyover popup menus. Why why why? I just want to check my balance, and your 100K of Javascript does NOT make my life better.

In case anyone missed it.

[Anonymous Coward]

MS blocking browsers is not new and they still do it. Try playing any game on the Zone with anything other then IE.

I have to keep IE as I can't play Asherons call if I use Opera.

Re:Unreadable sites

[Masem]

HTML 4.0 has a wonderful tag called the OBJECT tag. It allows you to include multi-media content but allows multiple levels of defaults if that content can't be displayed on the target browser. (Compared to IMG, where it only has one level, the ALT tag, and this can't be formatted nicely in HTML).

E.G., if I wanted a Flash animation, but defaulting to a static JPG if Flash wasn't available, or in the case of a text browser, a short paragraph describing what the user could have seen, I could do this:

OBJECT type="x-application/flash" src="image.swf">
<OBJECT type="image/jpg" src="image.jpg">
This is a the default text rendering here.
</OBJECT>
</OBJECT>

If OBJECT was used more, then it wouldn't matter if content was mostly in plug-ins; it should be no problem to rewrite it to use alternate methods to maximize those who can see it. In non-4.0 browsers, the code above simply looks like the inner text block, so they will still see something.

The problem is that OBJECT is yet to be strongly implemented by any browser, IE, NS, Opera, etc. Yet it was introduced in the HTML 4.0 standard, which is more than a year old, so it's a matter of getting these browser makers (all of them, not just a few select ones) up to speed on the latest approved spec asap. With how Mozilla does a separate development of the Gecko engine that handles the HTML display from the mechanics of browsing and the UI, this can help, but I doubt that one can do a similar separation with code from IE or Opera.

Re:WWW Inventor???

[Speare]

It says 'www Inventor' in the headline... yet I don't see Al Gore's name anywhere...

Ha ha ha, yes, how funny.

However, the joke goes that Al Gore "invented" the Internet, not the World Wide Web. The WWW is only one aspect of the Internet, certainly the killer app that brought it mainstream in the 1990s.

Good ol' Al never sought credit for "inventing" it, but did claim some responsibility for "creating" it in its current form: a public and global network mostly driven by the private sector. In his years as a lawmaker, he did sponsor legislation that supported this transition from a purely academic (ARPA) and military (DARPA) tool of one country, mostly driven by the government of that country.

Re:Compatibility? What about standards?

[keath_milligan]

Whoever modded this redundant is off-base. This is the core of the issue.

The whole problem here is that some browsers don't correctly or fully implement the standards (NS 4.x) or that other browsers (IE) "extend" the standard with proprietary tags and then web content producers build sites with a single browser in mind.

Browser makers need to choose a level of W3C standards-compliance (v3, v4, etc.) and implement to chosen level religiously. Likewise, web developers need to do the same with their sites - pick a level of compliance and stick to it. Modern browsers (at least IE6 and recent versions of Mozilla) are doing a much better job of standards-compliance.

What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect Microsoft to do? The important thing to remember here is that this is that this is a free market. This isn't anticompetitive (that would be Microsoft forcing /. to only display for IE). Microsoft has the right to make their site viewable by only their browser, and I have the right to never visit their site (IE or not). Most people using MSN probably use IE anyway. If /. or Yahoo or Google tried it, they would probably see a significant drop in business, and change their mind. That's how a free market *should* work. There is plenty of competition on the web to make sure that it works out...

It's the right of other browsers to compete

[code_rage]

The right which is being abrogated is the right of other browser publishers to compete with IE. Since Microsoft has been ruled a monopoly, special rules apply to them which don't apply generally in the marketplace. Monopolies cannot use their monopoly power to exclude competitors. Some of the licensing issues such as excluding Netscape from the Windows desktop might be permitted if MS were not a monopoly, but as a monopoly they cannot use this power.

Re:Why is this about "My Rights"?

[lgraba]

Why would anyone want to bother reading M$N sites anyway?

I have a reason. At home, I tend to use Linux probably 95% of the time, so I normally couldn't care less about MSN. However, my DSL/ISP is Qwest, and they are 'transitioning' (i.e. selling) their ISP customers to MSN. If I were passive and just allowed this to happen, I would then need to access MSN to administer my account. This would mean that I would have to log into windows and access the admin page with IE. Also, as discussed a couple of weeks ago on Slashdot, in order to read my mail, I would have to use MS Outlook, since MS is somehow restricting POP3 to only work with MS clients.

I will not be passive in this, however, but will have to change ISP's (while probably keeping Qwest as the the DSL provider). I have talked to a couple of other Qwest DSL customers at work, and they are switching ISP's, and someone at my wife's work told her that they are switching for the same reason. Maybe we can get a mass migration going.

In the meantime, does anyone know of an ISP in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area that works with Qwest's DSL?

Netscape.com (and others) are just as bad..

[benmhall]

Try checking your mail with Opera or Knoqueror. As some who have posted here suggested, this story is just news because it's MS.

Me, I want it all: I want to be able to browse to any website using a good, standards-compliant web browser and see the content. I have done corporate web development before too. Yup, it's tricky supporting all of the new browsers while maintaining compatibility with the dinosaurs like NS4.x. Such is life. Get over it.

Oh, and MS and Netscape are not the only offenders. I sent a polite letter to ATI a few months back when I was trying to decide on my next video card and found out that ATI shut Mozilla/NS6 out. They left Konqueror though, so I was able to browse the site. Man was it broken..

My bank, PC Financial, has had on and off support for alternate browsers. It had always worked with Mozilla/NS6 and they that stopped for a while. It seems to be working again, and now works under Konqueror too, so at least they aren't all bad...

Finally, I went to www.ea.com a while ago. As usual, I tried with both Mozilla and Konqueror. Again, no good. They blocked them out, and suggested "upgrading" to IE.

I can understand wanting to let NS4 go, as it really is showing its age, but that some major sites don't support NS6/Mozilla is baffling to me. It's not _that_ hard to get right.

Oh yeah, one more thing: msn.com is a _very_ popular domain. Don't forget that it is set as the default start page for IE users. Back in its day home.netscape.com had over 40million hits a day for this reason. Now msn.com has this going for it. (But yeah, the content isn't too hot..)

Well, there's my rambling..

No, they don't block other browsers completely

[TopherC]

I think the truly evil thing that MS is doing here is blocking other browsers, or even warning the users that their "experience" will be less than perfect. These other instances you mention are probably not malicious errors, they are more likely accidental ones. MS's web pages are maliciously broken.

This is classic FUD!

The main problem here is that Joe Newbie will take it at face value. He won't realize that Mozilla, for instance, is more standards compliant than IE and that MS is breaking their web pages by using MSHTML and blocking the better browsers on purpose. He won't realize that you can change the browser string by just one letter and view the web pages with no problems. He will instead think that these other browsers are inferior -- the opposite of the truth.

Re:WWW Inventor???

[donux]

Talking at a Unix User Group in London last year, Vint Cerf corrected an attendee
who made a similar jibe about Al Gore.

Cerf paid tribute to the work that Gore had done to help create the modern internet
and expressed regret that the comment had become such an albatross for the (then)
presidential candidate.

Re:Lay your cards on the table, Tim...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Curl is in a strong financial position. The company has prominent investors who believe Curl has the ability to change the way people use the Internet. I am committed to expanding and strengthening the company's financial position and long term success."

Hmmmm.... that doesn't sound a lot like a philosophy of "openness."

you're right, and it doesn't sound like a philosophy of "closedness" either. what is it that you take offense at: "strong financial position"? "change the way people use the Internet"? "expanding and strengthening the company's financial position"? none of these implies being anticompetitive or closed or even not complying with published standards.

Re:Compatibility? What about standards?

[smcv]

There's an easy way to do this, thanks to a Netscape 4 bug. Never use <link> to load your stylesheet; use <style> @import(foo.css); </style> instead (both are fully standards compliant, and both use external stylesheets, which are A Good Thing). Netscape 4 never got round to implementing this, so NS4 users will see your site in not-so-glorious black-on-grey. But it'll work, which is a distinct improvement. You can even <link> in the common bits plus Netscape kludges, and use <style> for the IE/Opera/Mozilla/NS6/other-recent-browsers alterations.

Re:Compatibility? What about standards?

[driptray]

IE6 is a step *backwards* in compliance, with it's fscked-up CSS box model.

Actually the box model in IE5 was broken, and it has now been fixed in IE6. The fact that you got it the wrong way around just shows how easy it is for a Microsoft bug to be converted to "a standard" in people's minds, and for the "correct" behaviour to be seen as the bug.