Well, it's a race... [LWN.net]

Well, it's a race...

Posted Sep 9, 2010 6:46 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: On stability by roelofs
Parent article: Debian squeezes out Chromium

Internet Exploder certainly doesn't; Safari doesn't (AFAIK); and neither does Opera (also AFAIK).

Internet Explorer certainly released often enough back when it had competition (IE1: August 1995, IE2: November 1995, IE3: August 1996, IE4: September 1997, IE5: March 1999, IE55: July 2000, IE6: August 2001). When it reached 90%+ market share Microsoft decided to kill the HTML and replace with with XAML. When that failed it started released new versions again - albeit still sluggishly. Safari enjoys MacOS lock-in (Windows version is a joke) while browser which don't have such lock-in support need to innovate faster, so both Firefox and Opera released few versions per year (sure, they were named "minor versions", where Chrome names it's versions "major", but this is just PR). For example Opera released version 10.60 just two months ago.

The only recent difference is faster obsolescence of older versions - and this is related to HTML5 push: if we are proposing it as a viable alternative to Flash or Silverlight then we must guarantee that new features will be accessible to majority of users quite fast. And the only way to achieve it is to aggressively upgrade clients - like Flash or Silverlight are doing.

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Well, it's a race...

Posted Sep 9, 2010 15:53 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

History of things:

Microsoft Explorer was originally Spyglass Enhanced Mosaic. Spyglass was a company whose idea was that by making browsers companies could specialize then it could get into the corporate market versus the consumer market that Netscape was focused on. Problem is that consumer markets move very very quickly and corporate ones do not. So Spyglass ended up in a game of catchup with its 5 programmers against Netscapes 20. However, Spyglass thought it had an ace in the sleeve with a deal with Microsoft.. until they realized that Microsoft could hire hundreds of engineers to rework their source code.

IE1->IE4 were mostly Spyglass code with lots of additions from Microsoft. IE5 was mostly Microsoft with some stuff from the remains of Spyglass (who had gone away in 1998 or so because they had not asked for a per copy payment from Microsoft in exchange for the source code... ) I have been told that sometime after Microsoft reached 90%, they repurposed most of the engineers working on the browser to other projects thus the slow down of 'features' until Mozilla restarted the race.