Microsoft Recognizes Other Browsers
3 CommentsPublished November 19th, 2004 7:54 AM EST By Daniel Goldman
It appears that after the news about alternative browsers gaining on Internet Explorer, that Microsoft has finally noticed that not everyone uses Internet Explorer. Microsoft is starting to get serious about interoperability and open standards.
A senior developer working on the MSDN Subscriber Downloads site (codenamed Xena) wants to make it more compatible with Firefox and Opera. Here is a quote from his blog:
“As we started work on Xena 3.0 about a year ago, one of my priority 1 requirements was to make the site fully cross-browser compatible. Funnily enough, the operations team (who tend to be pretty focused) told me that losing Deeptree wasn’t required, because 99.5% of our client browsers were IE. I was able, however, to make the point that this could possibly be the case because we only support IE (after explaining that “support” is different from “can be accessed”) and so that might possibly be a factor. The net-net of this is that cross-browser compatibility for Firefox, Opera, and IE will be included in the update for all major site functions.”
That is a start for Microsoft. When will the Internet Explorer development team adopt this policy?
If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for *anything* to change in either of the categories you mention…
True, that there is no point waiting for anything to change in any of the Microsoft departments. But its good to see that things are slowly changing. The sooner that Microsoft realizes that it no longer has the dominant prescence it used to have, in the market, the sooner will it be able to come out with newer stuff, which are better, and more consumer friendly…
We can already see the improvement. MSN Search Beta works nicely in Opera. Much better than current MSN Search website…