ReadWriteHack

This has been a rough year for Mozilla and its Firefox team. Once the darling of the Web and the champion of the oppressed against Microsoft and Internet Explorer, Firefox is facing stiff competition from its primary benefactor and backlash from users. Chrome also seems to be the preferred browser of Web developers. Naturally, this means speculation about the future of Firefox.

Has Firefox had better years? Absolutely. Does this mean that Firefox is "doomed"? Not so fast.

It's safe to say most Web developers would prefer not to support Internet Explorer 6. They'd rather put up a notice for the user to download another browser, or maybe just display the WAP-optimized version of the site instead.

But sometimes, it's not up to the developer to decide whether to support IE6. Your employer or client may require it. In a recent blog post Mike Davies reminds us that saving IE6 compatibility until the end of a project is a recipe for disaster. "If you leave IE6 testing and fixing to the end of your project, you have no-one else to blame for the pain but yourself," he concludes.

According to a post on the Mozilla Add-Ons Blog, 85% of Firefox 4 users have at least one add-on installed. The average user has five add-ons installed. The figure doesn't include the Personas feature and excludes add-ons bundled with other software that users haven't actively chosen to install.

"We previously estimated that at least a third of Firefox users had chosen to install an add-on, but knew the number was higher than that," wrote Justin Scott, the product manager for add-ons at Mozilla.

The new version of the WordPress.com dashboard no longer supports Internet Explorer 6. "It has required increasingly complex code trickery to make the WordPress dashboard work in the IE6 browser, which was introduced 10 years ago and does not support current web standards.," WordPress UX Lead Jane Wells wrote in an announcement this week.

The beta release of WordPress 3.2 does not support IE6 either.

Most of the response from Microsoft's competitors regarding "native HTML" is mockery. Some of that is deserved - it's clearly a marketing buzzword. But where are the substantive responses to Microsoft's performance claims? Demos aren't evidence of better performance, and the overall value of a browser is about more than a bunch of fish in a virtual aquarium. But how does the performance of Microsoft's browser hold up? And more importantly: what does Microsoft's approach mean for open standards and the future of the Web?

Earlier today we asked whether the HTML5 related performance enhancements in Internet Explorer 9 and 10 would be enough to woo developers from other browsers and operating systems to Microsoft's platform. And we recently asked whether OSX is still a developer friendly platform. But we've never asked you what environment you actually do your development in.

We know this community doesn't necessary represent the broader population of developers, but of course we'd still like to know: what operating system do you use to get most of your coding done?

Microsoft says it's "all in" for HTML5. But Silverlight isn't dead. Internet Explorer 9 and 10 enables developers to write the same markup and run it anywhere. But the browsers can do things no other browser can do, so you'll need to write different versions of your Web apps anyway. Microsoft is sending mixed messages.

Don't get me wrong. Internet Explorer and Windows Phone 7 look better than ever. And Microsoft really does seem to get the potential behind Kinect, its most innovative product in years. But the muddled message shows that Microsoft is still experiencing some difficulty figuring how to be an "open company," and is confusing hype with reality.

Today we're at Microsoft MIX, a developers conference in Las Vegas. Microsoft will be trying to woo developers and presenting on HTML5, Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight.

The event is kicking off with a keynote by Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president in charge of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft.

Hachamovitch demoed Internet Explorer 10, and the platform preview is available here for you to check out yourself.

"People don't remember this, particularly web developers, but there was a time when Microsoft made the best web browser in the world," JavaScript guru Douglas Cockford said in an interview at InfoQ late last year. "IE 6 was by far the best and continued to be the best browser in the world for many years after, but the other browser makers have all gotten ahead of them. And there is a chance that with IE 9 Microsoft might get that back."

IE6 may have been the best browser of its time when it was released, but it was never the most standards compliant. And the damage it did to web development as a whole is immeasurable. Microsoft is trying to make amends with Internet Explorer 9, its most standards compliant browser yet.

Google employee Michael Zalewski disclosed a CSS security issue in Internet Explorer today before Microsoft had issued a fix. This is the second time a Google employee has disclosed an IE security flaw to the public before a patch had been issued. Chris Evans posted a cross-site scripting issue to Seclists in September, according to Ars Technica.

The new flaw may also have been reported by two Chinese researchers at a security conference in South Korea according to KrebsonSecurity. Microsoft does not know of any exploits in the wild actually taking advantage of this vulnerability.

Should Google have disclosed these bugs to the public, or waited for Microsoft to issue a fix first?