Duckwizard.com

I have a serious question that I would like to ask Microsoft. Why not just throw in the towel when it comes to the web browser market? You are spending considerable resources developing Internet Explorer, but no matter what you do, it will always be inferior to Mozilla, Opera, and now even Safari on Windows. You steal the majority of market share from these superior products because your operating system users don’t know any better (didn’t you lose an antitrust suit forbidding you from bundling IE? What happened to that?). And how much revenue do you make from Internet Explorer? Considering it is a free product, my guess would have to be zero.

Mozilla is open source software. The Mozilla Public License explicitly allows you to rebrand Firefox (say, as Internet Explorer 9) and ship it. Why not just give up on IE, and take from the open source community instead? Everyone would be happier: your users would be happier that their browser experience is better, and web developers across the globe would rejoice at the better standards support that your new browser offers. And all of it would cost you exactly zero dollars. In corporate terms, that is the deal of a lifetime. So what gives? Why are you still pushing IE? Why are you spending man-years of labor at considerable expense to create another version of IE, when it will still be inferior to everything else on the market?

Please. Enough already. Focus on products that make you money, like Windows and Office. Leave the browser market to people who give a crap about web standards.

I would like to issue a pledge. If Microsoft gets rid of Internet Explorer, and starts shipping a rebranded Gecko-based browser instead, I will give $10,000 US to whomever is responsible for making this decision. That may not be a lot to you, but it is to me. I’m sure if every web developer on the planet was given the chance, they would also kick in a few bucks to this fund. So, Mr. (or Mrs.) Microsoft Big Wig, there could be hundreds of millions of dollars in it for you if you can make this happen.