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Regardless of your feelings for Microsoft as a corporate entity, how do you feel about Internet Explorer 5? Will you or your company use it? Why or why not? Do you think Netscape and the Mozillans can catch up in a strong enough way to prevent Microsoft from dominating the browser space? And if they can't, who can bring real competition to the browser market? Discuss it in LangaLetter threads.
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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

The Browser Showdown: IE5 VS. Mozilla/Communicator 5

By Fred Langa

In a grand experiment last March 31, Netscape released the source code for Communicator to Mozilla.Org. This dedicated group of open sourcers has been plugging away ever since at Mozilla 5. Last week, they said they were closing in on their next milestone, which would contain "70% to 80% of the features needed for our dogfood target."

The term "dogfood" is geek-speak for any software in development. When developers use the product they are creating, and thus suffer the same bugs and shortcomings that eventual users will endure, it's called "eating your own dogfood." It's actually a great quality-assurance practice that helps to ensure that bugs are found and corrected.

Thus, the Mozillans are predicting that the next Mozilla milestone will be 70% to 80% of the way to the point where it will be stable enough for the developers to use it as a live development platform.

This is far from where some early Mozilla/open source proponents thought they'd be. I recall some optimists originally predicting that Mozilla 5.0 would ship last December. But clearly the task is much larger than that.

This isn't to disparage the Mozillans; they're volunteers, and they are making substantial progress. Their goals are also extremely lofty (as described at http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html):

In essence, they want to build a browser that exhibits excellent consistency in its user interface; is inherently international; is fully cross-platform; highly modular ("add infrastructure before adding features" is how they put it), and that offers good backward compatibility. These are lofty goals that--if achieved--will result in a great browser.

But the high standards to which the Mozillans are holding themselves and the volunteer nature of the work force mean the project is taking longer than many first thought.

Meanwhile, what has Netscape itself been up to? Why, it's been busy being acquired by AOL. (The deal was consummated last week.) There's been very little new browser code coming from within Netscape. The latest code is 4.08; the stand-alone browser version is called Navigator 4.08, and the "portalized," suite version is called Communicator 4.51. Both are incremental bug fixes and upgrades along the 4.x continuum.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Navigator 4.0 debuted in June 1997. Think of how long ago that is in Internet time.

A Communicator 5 beta may appear in the next two or three months, and the official world is that the product will ship "sometime in the second half of 1999." Given that there's no beta yet, it's safe to assume that this really means "end of the year." And my guess is that it quite likely could be even later than that. Or, more bluntly, something approaching a year behind Internet Explorer 5.

Indeed, IE5 is out, and to generally very positive reviews. In fact, I've only seen one outright negative review of IE5--and that was from a Netscape spokesperson.

To the nonpartisan crowd, Internet Explorer 5 is here, and it's a hit. It's not perfect, of course (what is?), but it's faster, more stable, and easier to use than its predecessors; and it gets rid of a lot of the junk (like the Channel bar) that used to clutter up previous versions. It also offers very good standards support--far broader than Netscape's or Opera's, for example.

Before you reach for your flamethrowers, I'm not saying "I love Microsoft." I know there are some who feel that anyone who says anything positive about any Microsoft product has somehow been co-opted. But given the amount and breadth of positive coverage of Internet Explorer 5, a rational soul will realize the impossibility of such a vast conspiracy among all the competing review editors--and columnists!--out there.

Internet Explorer 5's strength worries me because it means Mozilla/Communicator 5 faces a very, very tough uphill climb, especially with the lagging development schedule. If Mozilla/Communicator comes out and doesn't walk on water and cure cancer, the new browsers may be too little, too late.

For sure, they'll be a hit (almost no matter what) among the rabid anti-Microsoft partisans, but it's hard to imagine what inducement the Mozillans or Netscape could offer to average business users who already have an excellent browser in Internet Explorer 5.

Netscape's gamble may have backfired: With the external distractions of the open-source movement and the even larger distractions of being eaten by AOL, the company may have lost too much momentum. It just might be "game over."

What's your take? Regardless of your feelings for Microsoft as a corporate entity, how do you feel about Internet Explorer 5? Will you or your company use it? Why or why not? Do you think Netscape and the Mozillans can catch up in a strong enough way to prevent Microsoft from dominating the browser space? And if they can't, who can bring real competition to the browser market? Join in!

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