Has Microsoft abandoned IE?

In the absence of general feature updates, some suggest that Microsoft is acting as though it didn't care much about IE's market share, particularly as it's measured by consumer behaviour.

"I don't think there is any question that the browser at this point has been somewhat neglected by Microsoft," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk. "Regardless of the attention that Firefox and Mozilla have garnered, Microsoft still looks at the fact that their market share has not declined in a significant way... Consumers matter -- they are the folks out there driving things like Google toolbars. But for Microsoft, the business customer is still 80 percent of revenues, and that is what they are most concerned with and apt to protect."

For both business and consumer computing, Microsoft is devoting its resources to Web-based technologies that could mute the browser's impact, specifically those that give an advantage to Windows-based systems.

For example, the company is hoping with Longhorn to create a whole new class of Windows applications that offer better ways of doing the same type of things that browsers do today. When it unveiled Longhorn at a developer conference last October, the company had Amazon.com demonstrate how such a program might work, offering a prototype camera store that could use Amazon's database, but offer a far more interactive and visually exciting way of navigating the store.

Microsoft's new Avalon graphics engine and XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) programming scheme allow companies to write Windows applications that easily interact with data over the Internet. Such applications also can run on their own, or within a browser -- though only on a Windows-based machine.

"When we started Avalon back in 2001, we wanted to break the distinction of whether something was running inside the browser or outside," Microsoft's Wallent said.

He said Microsoft doesn't see the majority of Web sites deciding to jump free of the browser. The kinds of information most often accessed on the Web -- news, stock quotes and shopping, are likely to stay there even in Longhorn.

Instead, Wallent said Microsoft is trying to make it easier for companies that already write desktop software to connect to the Internet. It also will help those Web companies that would like to have some additional software running on customers' computers -- something photo sites like Ofoto are already doing.

Colton's company, Xamlon, essentially shares that vision. It is bringing to market a version of the XAML prior to Longhorn. Applications written in Xamlon's version can work within a browser, but only within Windows and, at least for now, only within Internet Explorer.