The Second Browser War

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.0 reigned supreme at the beginning of the 21^st century, its rival Netscape crushed, the Browser Wars of the 1990s over. The “Evil Empire” had won, to the dismay of Microsoft’s rivals. With Netscape gone, and most Macintosh users running IE for the Mac, IE had no serious competition for years.

This changed in 2004. The massive attacks of Blaster and LoveBug brought Microsoft’s security issues into public awareness, and the Mozilla Foundation released version 1.0 of the Firefox browser. Now, two years later, Firefox has seized ten percent of IE’s market share, Safari rules the Macs, and IE 6.0 seems clumsy and antiquated by comparison. With websites like Explorer Destroyer forcefully advocating Firefox, the Browser Wars are raging again.

The Empire Strikes Back

After two years, Microsoft seems to have finally awakened. “Wait a minute!” Microsoft is thinking, “in two years Firefox has shaved off ten percent of our browser market share. We’re the Evil Empire, for gosh sake! We need to strike back!”

Now, with IE 7 Beta 2 (the first attempt at a new version of IE in five years), Microsoft is planning to strike back. But will IE 7 shape up to be an effective browser, or will it continue IE 6’s failures?

Let’s take a look at the Beta 2 version and see if we can find out:

Interface Evolution

The interface is a good deal less chunky than IE 6’s. The various toolbars and whatnot take up a smaller percentage of the total screen space. (You can, of course, still hit F11 to switch the browser to full screen mode.) You’ll note that the menu bar has disappeared. By default, it’s hidden, though you can bring it back through the toolbars’ contextual menu.

For some reason, the navigation buttons (back, forward, refresh, etc.) are scattered across the top of the screen. IE 6 keeps the navigation buttons on the left side of the toolbar, and so do Firefox, Opera, Safari, and most other web browsers. For casual, rapid browsing, hopping the mouse back and forth across the top of the screen rapidly gets tiresome.

Tabbed browsing has been around, in various forms, for over ten years, and IE has finally gotten around to including the technology. The tabbed browsing interface in IE 7 is slick enough. You can open a new tab through a keystroke, through the menu bar (if it’s enabled), or by clicking the button to the right of every open tab.

Tabbed Tiles

Quick Tabs is a rather useful new feature. It’s similar to Exposé in the Mac OS X shell. Hit CTRL+Q, or click on the Quick Tabs button, and your opened tabs are shown in miniature tiles across the screen. If you have numerous tabs open at once and can’t remember what’s what (I tend toward 10-15 open tabs), it’s a useful way to refresh your memory and hop from tab to tab. I wholeheartedly approve, and hope Firefox and Safari implement something similar.

Favorites Center

The Favorites menu has been replaced in favor (pardon the pun) of the Favorites Center. It acts as a sort of drop-down menu box. In the left column are saved bookmarks. In the center column, IE 7 finally has support for RSS feeds (something Firefox has had from the get-go), and the rightmost displays the browsing history. This unified sort of menu tool is far more elegant than IE 6’s separate Favorites menu and drop-down History (and utter lack of RSS support).

And the Search Wars rage on

In the upper-right hand corner IE 7 has an integrated search box, undercutting legions of add-on toolbars for IE 6. The search box, of course, defaults to Windows Live. This recently caused a minor controversy when Google accused Microsoft of anti-competitive tactics, claiming that the default setting of Windows Live deprived end users of choice. This isn’t entirely true; it’s reasonably simple to change the default search provider through the drop-down menu to the right of the search box, no more difficult than changing the default home page. And if you visit Google with IE 7, Google offers a helpful reminder to make Google the default search provider (though, in truth, the message is about as irritating as the “upgrade to IE 6” error messages from IE-only websites).

Net for the Phishers of Men

So IE 7 certainly has an overhauled interface. But the slickest interface in the world is meaningless if the browser isn’t secure. IE 6, as well all know, has had some very public failures. Does IE 7 resolve this in any way?

Microsoft’s most-touted security improvement in IE 7 is the phishing filter. Phishing has become an epidemic problem, to the point where it threatens the viability of on-line commerce. An effective and widely available phishing filter could do much to alleviate the problem. But does it work?

I get something like 40-50 faux PayPal phishing e-mails a day. I picked one at random, copied and pasted the URL into IE 7’s address line, and waited to see what would happen. Right away a full-screen warning appeared, far more effective than a tame “unrecognized certificate” warning.

The anti-phishing system apparently works by user reports, so it could lend itself to abuse (similar to Google-bombing). On the other hand, IE 7 doesn’t actually stop a user from visiting a website, it merely displays a very large and strident warning. A user can still choose to view the page. Still, it’s been said that Homer Simpson would use IE 6, and since Homer’s almost certainly ignorant of security technologies (https, SSL, secure-password practices, etc.), a simple and unambiguous phishing warning is probably a good thing.

So is it any good?

Given that IE 6 remains the dominant web browser, the final version of IE 7 will likely inherit that position. IE 7 Beta 2’s interface is, beyond question, a vast improvement over IE 6’s. (Though, to be honest, this isn’t saying all that much.) However, most of the improvements are catch-ups to features that have been available in other browsers for years.

And is IE 7 more secure? Certainly Microsoft has gone to considerable lengths to tighten IE’s security. The “sandbox mode” for the Vista version, its decreased integration with the Windows shell, and phishing filter are welcome strides. But will they work? Will it resist spyware and provide protection from drive-by downloads? Or is there some undiscovered security flaw lurking deep within IE 7’s code, some flaw that will enable the next great worm attack?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, the Browser War will go on, and we’ll see if Microsoft can come out on top a second time.

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