Comment by sriramk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sriramk | Hacker News Reader

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My feeling here (ex-MSFT employee, so maybe biased one way or another) is that Mozilla is going after the soft underbelly of Microsoft, because they can.

Mozilla is already locked out of iOS and they have failed at getting Apple to budge. If WinRT locks them out, they'll be locked out of two out of the three major tablet platforms (it's a safe assumption that WinRT will get some marketshare at least).

Microsoft is an easier target than AAPL - Win8 is still under development so it's still early days and the company has a history with various governmental organizations (the DoJ, the EU). My guess is Mozilla is attempting to rattle Microsoft into opening up Win8 to get Firefox to run. Or drum up enough press, get the DoJ to make a quote or two and really get Redmond to worry.

If I were Microsoft, I would hold my ground. Strategically, it makes a lot of sense to own the browsing experience e2e and I think Mozilla's case is weak given MSFT's lack of marketshare, the existence of Chromebooks, Boot2Gecko, etc.

"Strategically, it makes a lot of sense to own the browsing experience e2e"

Can you expand on this?

There are a couple of benefits I can think of, but no major ones. - Quality of experience: owning the browser ensures that sub-par browsers don't degrade the overall experience (such as destroy battery life and overall platform impressions). - Controlling innovation: If Microsoft feels threatened by HTML then it can limit certain features until native apps catch up. I believe that this is a double-edged sword though, as Chrome and Firefox steadily push forward people are stil unsure if IE can keep up.

Allowing third-party browsers ensures that your platform always has the best browser and the browser is an incredibly important part of the platform.

Personally, I see not allowing alternate browsers as an attack on the browser ecosystem at a time when Microsoft has been trying to be very standards friendly with IE10. For tablets, I use the browser a ton, and being allowed to run the latest and greatest browser of my choice, with WebGL, Web Intents, etc, and not be tied to IE or Safari, is a selling point.

The cynicist in me says that Mozilla's Boot 2 Gecko Phone project most likely will not support other browsers, and Chrome OS doesn't either, so why should Win8. And I think this really sucks.

I don't think Microsoft will make the mistake of falling behind on the web platform again. In fact, their latest moves (both tech, organization-wise) show them throwing more weight behind IE/HTML and less behind .NET/SL/Win32 (this is from me reading the tea leaves from the outside, not any inside scoops).

I'd argue that MS is still falling behind- IE10 is just catching up but has no leapfrogging and how far out is IE11?

Even more critically, look at all of the users MS is leaving behind- no XP support for IE9, will they abandon Win8 users when there's still a massive number of them?

Unless IE ramps up their release cycle I see no way they can stay on the leading edge.

Microsoft isn't even explicitly banning Firefox, from my interpretation of things. They just don't allow executing code in data-space for security reasons, which is a feature that firefox uses for its JIT for performance reasons, but can just interpret it instead. Whereas, Apple explicitly bans running code at compile time.

Furthermore, if Mozilla beat MS on this, they can then take that victory and try and apply it to Apple.

> If I were Microsoft, I would hold my ground.

You mean to justify such kind of crooked behavior?

No, it means owning the browsing/battery life experience e2e.

Geez! When it comes to issues about Apple or Microsoft (or Ruby), it seems a number of people on HN lack the ability to think objectively. It's quite sad really. It's like watching Republicans and Democrats fight in Congress, or North Carolina banning gay marriage, or Muslims and Christians fighting over God knows what. All these things stem from the inability to put oneself in the other side's shoes. Extremism sucks. Apple isn't 100% evil or saintly and neither is Microsoft.

The question is, do you really think that MS can always outdo Mozilla in "browsing/battery" experience?

They are controlling browser for a reason, but not a good reason to rule other players out.

As a platform provider, Apple/Microsoft choose not to provide the full computational power to software developers. All the more reason developers should go to Android.

That's a good point, but I don't think it's the question. Let's start by putting yourself in Microsoft's shoes... and by making the silly assumption that Apple's lock down of iOS is acceptable (suspending reality for a moment).

Write a piece of software for internal use. Now write a piece of software with public API's that will be available to every developer on the planet and will have to be supported for a decade.

You might find that opening up your code for global use may be easy, but it's more often the exception. But there's no denying it will push your ship date out further.

Given MS is so far behind in the ARM-based computing category, it's ludicrous to apply anti-trust restrictions on them. I wouldn't want that to happen to any company, including the ones I hate.

I probably won't ever use one of these Windows 8 tablets, given I have 4 iPads lying around the apartment and prefer Ubuntu on my laptops. But I'd still like to see as many awesome tablet choices on the shelves as possible. Microsoft is putting in a great deal of effort into making a quality product. It's already behind by several years. Let's see what they can do.

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