Well, that's where I think there is a problem. It shouldn't be about "winning". There should be plenty of room for everybody in this market. But it's impossible as long as companies refuse to implement the standards set forth by the industry (W3C). Heck! That's what HTML is supposed to be for! What's the use of even using HTML if one company is going to decide on what is standard and what is not? Why don't we just make web pages in .doc format, and let people use Word to read the information! HTML was invented specifically so information can be viewed identically by any browser on any machine...

Let me elaborate. We're talking competing products. Any given user will not be browsing the Internet all the time with 2 browsers at once, therefore only one is going to be used most of the time by the user and the one is "the winner". Winner = being used by people who do not use them for religious reasons. Because clearly both of them are not making money strictly from selling the browser that's the only field they really compete. Whenever we summon statistics there is always a winner and a loser.

Any personf will refuse to synchronize their bookmarks every time they add a new one, and one browsing history is enough mess to find a page they saw yesterday and would like to revisit today. So there can only be one main browser for a person and this browser is the winner.

As to the standards, as stated before, IE is the de facto standard. It's W3C that's not IE compliant. If ~90% use IE then there is no point in setting standards that conflict with the majority of the clients that they with to standardize. Comply or fade away - you won't be missed. And judging by what I see that's pretty much what Firefox has done - they complied and extended upon. They mimick IE in many places which is good for them. Incidentally the moment they started doing that, was the moment they starting to gain market share. The only thing that counts is the user experience. Should I have a better experience with IE7 than Firefox 1.what.ever I am simply going to switch back. Should Firefox excell in the task, so be it. I really do not care what laber the browser has.

Any given user will not be browsing the Internet all the time with 2 browsers at once

Actually, that is precisely what got me interested in Netscape 8. Using just one browser, you can switch on the fly from the Firefox engine to the IE engine. You can set specific sites to use IE and others to use Firefox, and you go from one to the other without even realising you do. Quite a powerful feature. But for now it's still beta and quite unstable, had to revert back to Firefox. But will most definately give Netscape 8 another shot on the next beta.

As for Microsoft being the standard, why don't we just type out sites in Word and make MS Word the defacto Web standard?

IE is the de facto standard. It's W3C that's not IE compliant.

Sorry, Skinstudio, but I can't agree with one corporation setting the standard for everyone.

I understand the point you're making, in some ways MS has set the standard just by holding almost 100% market share. But that shouldn't mean that there should be no other standard set.
Microsoft is a for-profit corporation. They develop and sell Operating systems and software (browsers included) with the end goal of making money. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. That should NOT mean that they get to set the standards for use and development of the web, operating systems, or software.
Should Stardock get to set the standards for how all desktop enhancements work?
Should Ford/Chevrolet/Chrysler/(insert favorite suto manufacturer) get to set the standards for how roads are built?

paxx, that only proves my point, you wanted to use one browser instead of two.

As to the Word being a standard, it's not going to happen as Word is not free or provided with the operating system, but i have no problem with RTF/Wordpad being so as long as it comes with all the functionality DHTML can provide. Actually that's exactly the case with Macromedia Flash, we have whole sites built with it, and somehow it's OK with everybody.

tjesterb, oh there should be standards, it's just that as long as they are not implemented in IE they're pretty meaningless. Now Microsoft has declared increased standard compliance in IE7 and I'm really glad to hear that, but as long as IE7 is not dominating the userbase along with the other CSS 2/3 compliant browsers they simply continue to be meaningless.

SkinStudio, Word may not be free but Word Viewer is free. As long as you just want to view .doc files, it works fine. So, since Word can do pretty nifty things (that most people never use), there you go.

As for Flash, actually, the swf format is now an open format.

That's ok. Actually I can use OpenOffice to create the Doc's I need let's do that.

So what sites can I browse in Word Viewer?

I meant to add more to my previous post, but had to leave rather quickly to help out a friend. Now that I read it, I guess I stated my point in what I had .
Anyway, I really don't want this to turn into the thousandth FF-vs-IE debate. I', a pretty devoted FF user, but if IE7 ends up being a better product for my needs, then that's what I'll use. I'm just pretty fed up with big corporations and their bullying tactics these days. (if you've read my posts in the Norton...sucks thread, you'll know why )
Competition is good for everyone, end-users and producers alike. If we get better products, we all win.

Hehehe! None of course, since site are made with MSHTML right now.

BUt of course you understand that my point was that when HTML was created, the challenge was to find a format that everybody could read. Back then the World wasn't Windows only. There was a great number of different systems quite incompatible with each other. The Internet was created so they can communicate with each other and HTML was invented as a standard language that every system could understand. Of course, back then, it was text only, and tables didn't even exist, but the principle stayed from the initial HTML 1.0 to 2.0. Around HTML 3.0, came the Netscape company started derivating from the standards and were basically saying WE are the true standard. Every needs OUR software to see things right. Then they got beaten at their own game by Microsoft, who was originaly more compliant to the W3C standrds than Netscape was. But it only lasted until IE became the browser everybody used, now it's back to the same problem, but from a different browser made by a different company.
I suspect, as it happened to Netscape, IE will probably be outran by another browser some day. Maybe some Firefox 5.0 or by something else.

tjesterb, that's the point. I hope none of the browser disappears from the scene. Firefox is a really good browser as I stated recently I also use it exclusively for browsing things that I do not get feeds for (for which I use Blog Navigator). If nothing else I hope it alsways stays around to keep Microsft alert.

But despite of what people say, it's a good browser (as in... rendering engine) with a poor/outdated wrapping (the IE window that users see).

paxx, I uderstand that perfectly, and I'm glad to hear that you;re also not religious about it.

To be honest I doubt that as long as we have Windows as the dominant operating system there will be another dominant browser apart from IE. Microsoft is pretty good at keeping the markets they've conquerred. They blew it initially with MSN on Windows 95. They wanted to take over the Internet the wrong way, redefine it (i.e. use the Word Viewer strategy). But then the secont approach was correct - comply, extend upon, take ownership.

As I said they can afford to have the best browser around as it is Windows that's at stake. To keep the user base locked in the Windows world they sure need IE with ActiveX that will simply not work on Linux. There... I said that. LINUX!