Note to Richard MacManus -- have you actually used IE7? If you had you might not have written this piece in such an embarrasing way. To write that the reason the IE team has taken so long to get 7 out the door is because they "...wanted to really push things even further" is either an embarrassing admision of failure by Tony Chor or a thoughtless repetition of Microsoft marketing speak. The reality is that IE 7 hasn't even caught up with where Firefox is today, much less pusing further.
From an outside perspective I have to sit here and think that the IE7 versus Firefox development race is going to go down in history as one of the great examples of how the open source community is not only able (as in Linux) to duplicate well understood stable product categories, but is actually able to innovate circles around a commercial product. Firefox is more stable, more secure, handles questionable HTML much more gracefully, has more built in features... but perhaps the most important thing about Firefox is the open plugin architecture which means that 100s of innovative applets have been built that extend Firefox in ever imaginable way. The closed box mentality of Microsoft simply cannot compete.
Furthermore, insisting on a proprietary browser strategy now hurts Microsofts attempts to promote the development tools and server strategy. I, for one, will not even evaluate Atlas (Microsoft's Ajax development kit) because I don't trust them. Sure, it works great on Firefox today. But the market keeps evolving. What happens when Firefox adds something that Atlas doesn't support? What happens when IE adds something proprietary that Atlas DOES support? Divergence. Lock in.
The best thing that Microsoft could ever do for itself is ADOPT FIREFOX AND ABANDON IE. First of all they could have a huge marketing win by proving to the market once and for all that they have no intention of hijacking Internet standards with their own proprietary browser. Second, they could save a lot of money by not perpetuating their own browser development team, and the few people they did keep on that project could make contributions back to the open source community gaining Microsoft further accolades. Finally, they could actually have a good product.
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