IE Team sends cake to Firefox Team - Congrats!

26 Oct

Posted by Andy Brudtkuhl under Microsoft

Microsoft sends a congratulation cake to Mozilla, originally uploaded by jollyjake.

So the Internet Explorer team sent a cake to the Mozilla team congratulating them on their release of Firefox 2 which launched about a week after Microsoft launched IE 7.

Humorous. Surprised it didn’t say ‘Ha, Ha We beat you!’

Oh well, we all know which is the better browser.

I’ve been using both since their launch dates. What’s the differentiation factor? Plugins, Plugins, Plugins. Firefox has an active developer community that serves to enhance their product with value-added plugins such as the Gmail Notifier and Web Developer Toolbar, etc, etc, etc.

Microsoft refuses to embrace community development for value added projects. C’mon you can play like your open source can’t you? I don’t want your source code … I want to be able to build an application to run on my XBOX 360 or Zune.

Sure, IE 7 has the integrated feed aggregator which is much better than Firefox’s RSS Live Bookmark implementation. But I’m willing to bet the FF team realizes that the future of syndication will be a web service and not through a desktop application. That’s pretty obvious to me and the reason I believe IE 7 will NOT take RSS mainstream.

Thanks to Jeremy for pointing this out.

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3 Responses

Joe Cheng

October 27th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
1

(I work for Microsoft but not on Windows Live Writer, not IE)

Actually IE has had “add-ons” since at least version 4.0. I’m not sure if there’s always been a central place you could go to get free add-ons, but there is now: http://www.ieaddons.com

Here’s a web developer toolbar:
http://www.ieaddons.com/AddOn.aspx?cid=2&scid=70&aid=a9bcc859-8419-4b67-aac3-e1b3e9749414

I couldn’t find a Gmail notifier that wasn’t part of a larger toolbar, though there’s nothing to stop someone from writing one.

I’ve developed quite extensive Firefox extensions and IE add-ons, and there are advantages and disadvantages to each one. With Firefox it’s much easier to customize any aspect of the browser UI, whereas with IE you are basically limited to extending the UI in a few predefined points (custom toolbars, command bar buttons, explorer bars at the left or bottom of the screen, context menu additions, main menu additions). On the other hand, with Firefox it’s almost impossible to create any new widgets besides the ones they give you in the XUL toolkit, whereas with IE you can easy create custom interfaces.

A huge advantage for Firefox is that most extensions are just JavaScript and XML, so you don’t have to know [C++ or VB] and COM to create an extension. They did a great job of lowering the bar of participation, something that is generally Microsoft’s forte.
Joe Cheng

October 27th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
2

Sorry, meant to say “I work for Microsoft but on Windows Live Writer, not IE”.
Andy Brudtkuhl

October 30th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
3

Thank you much for the comments Joe. I have built add-ons for IE as well for a few enterprise web apps. I have also jumped into FF extensions just to try them out. It is much easier to do in FF, which is probably why they have such a vast community behind it.

One question — why not do Windows Live Writer as a web service?