Has Microsoft abandoned IE?

Microsoft "would like to see rich application development more onto the client," said Paul Colton, founder and chief executive of Xamlon, which offers development tools that use the same approach Microsoft is taking with Longhorn. "They don't own the Internet. They own the desktop."

Microsoft, which makes most of its money from sales of its Windows operating system and Office application suite, refuses to characterise the Web browser as a threat to those businesses. But years ago, the computer industry and Wall Street alike saw that a highly functional Web and browser could indeed reduce the importance of both the OS and desktop applications, drawing consumers away from them.

That potential has been realised in some areas of computing, for example, Web-based email. Microsoft anticipated that threat early with its 1997 purchase of Hotmail.

More comprehensively, the software giant met the Web threat embodied by browser start-up Netscape, which once commanded better than 85 percent of the market. Microsoft acquired browser technology from Spyglass that it turned into Internet Explorer. Through a relentless campaign that was later found to have violated antitrust law, Microsoft made quick work of Netscape, to the point that IE amassed by many estimates better than 95 percent of the browser market.

Despite an antitrust conviction, Microsoft emerged from its courtroom ordeal with its browser strategy essentially intact.

Critics in and out of court complained that Microsoft's quest for browser dominance was an effort to neutralise the threat of an open Web though an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. By extending the technology beyond industry standards, the company could compel Web developers to code their sites to IE rather than to those standards. As a result, competing browsers would fail to render significant sites and remain marginal competitors.

IE defectors

Microsoft weathered vociferous campaigns by Web developers to support standards published by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Now many of those same developers are urging surfers to dump IE in favour of standards-compliant browsers like the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox.

Perhaps worse for IE's reputation, security advisers including the U.S. government's CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) have warned against using Microsoft's browser. (CERT praised SP2's security improvements, but half of Windows users can't access them without paying for an upgrade to XP.)

How much the Web as a whole is heeding the call to dump IE is unclear. Some Web site metrics suggest incremental drops in Microsoft's market share, but no studies have shown significant losses for IE across the Web.