February 16, 2005
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Reversing its longstanding policy, Microsoft (MFST) said on Tuesday that it will ship an update to its browser separately from the next version of Windows.
By Ina Fried and Paul Festa
Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced plans to launch a test version of Internet Explorer 7 this summer. The company had said that it would not ship a new IE version before the next major update to Windows, code named Longhorn, debuts next year. Gates made the announcement at the RSA Conference 2005 here.
In announcing the plan, Gates acknowledged something many outside the company had been arguing for some time -- that the browser itself has become a security risk.
"Browsing is definitely a point of vulnerability," Gates said.
Gates said that the new browser version will work on machines running on Windows XP Service Pack 2, a Windows update that the company launched last summer. A beta, or test version, should be available by this summer, he added.
Analysts credited MSFT's change of heart to the progress of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser, which has made incremental but steady market share gains against IE in recent months. In a survey conducted late last year, Firefox nudged IE below the 90 percent mark for the first time since the height of the browser wars in the 1990s.
"I think it's a response to both the delay of Longhorn and the challenge of Firefox," said The NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin, who said Firefox was probably more of a spur. "Were there no Firefox, they'd have more leeway to sit on it until Longhorn."
MSFT's decision to announce plans for IE 7 at a security conference was no coincidence. IE 6's security reputation has suffered over the years, dogged by a long string of security bugs, phishing schemes and patches.
MSFT sought to allay security concerns last year by issuing the Windows XP Security Pack 2 (SP2) operating system update, which included a number of changes to browser security.
But critics complained that the update would only benefit people who either already owned XP or who had paid for an operating system upgrade, leaving about half the Windows world out in the cold.
MSFT on Tuesday acknowledged that those complaints about XP exclusivity lingered, particularly among enterprise users of Windows 2000.
"Right now, we're focused on XP SP2," Dean Hachamovitch, who heads MSFT's IE team, wrote in the company's IE blog, in a posting dated Tuesday. "We're actively listening to our major Windows 2000 customers about what they want and comparing that to the engineering and logistical complexity of that work. That's all I can say on that topic."
But IE 6 has earned enmity among developers, and not only for its security lapses. Web authors have long complained about MSFT's spotty implementation of various Web standards including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format, Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
As the company reversed itself on issuing a standalone IE, Web authors wondered aloud whether IE 7 would fix those bugs along with the security holes.
"Any released information stating your commitment to modern coding practices -- meaning XHTML, CSS, XML, not to mention full PNG support?" asked Web designer Brady Frey in response to Hachamovitch's blog posting. "Aside from security, this has been the reason why we've dropped IE's usage company wide -- I have the choice of building one Internet application for all users, or one for IE users. We don't want to waste money doing both anymore."
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