Microsoft Must Sing
Microsoft should buy Opera and rebrand it IE 10. For the sake of the open web, Microsoft’s pace of innovation isn’t cutting it.
Microsoft previewed Internet Explorer 9 at its Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles yesterday. The new features for IE 9 read more like confessions of past wrong doings. Better JavaScript performance and uncommitted partial support for HTML 5 just aren’t good enough. Web developers can’t effectively utilize any standard Internet Explorer doesn’t support because Internet Explorer’s market share negates Firefox’s and Safari’s swift innovation.
A Business Proposition
At Web 2.0 Expo in NYC this week, I tried to convince a Microsoft IE Product Marketer to get his company to acquire Opera. He laughed. The Opera guys loved the idea.
The Opera web browser is a feature rich product by an truly innovative company. While the company started developing its browser long before Safari and Firefox, it hasn’t been widely adopted.1 This makes it perfect for acquisition. The portable design of the Opera rendering engine would give Microsoft a speedy desktop and mobile browser with better standards compliance than is planned for Internet Explorer 9.
Microsoft would accomplish more on day one of its acquisition than in the last five years of renewed Internet Explorer development.2 It would then be free to concentrate on building a product that leverages Windows and continues the implementation of emerging web standards. The hybrid rendering engine model of Internet Explorer 8 could still be available to render improperly coded websites when needed for compatibility. Everyone else would benefit from Internet Explorer behaving similarly to Firefox and Safari.
Tim O’Reilly predicted that Microsoft will become the champion of the open web. That can’t happen until Microsoft fixes the application most people use to get online. I don’t like or use Internet Explorer, but Internet Explorer is the most important application in the world. We all need it to succeed to build a better web.
2: Gates Highlights Progress on Security, Outlines Next Steps for Continued Innovation
Edit: The Dilbert strip that came out three weeks later was perfect.
Posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 15:18.