Can Microsoft really build a better browser?

The elephant in the room here, and one that is completely ignored by this article (AFAICT) is corporate web apps.

A constantly moving target, which auto-updates silently, is anathema to the average half-baked corporate web app. They're half-baked for a reason: they have a limited budget, a limited customer set whom they mostly trust, and need to be maintained in parallel with lots of other apps by understaffed development teams working in companies whose main business is not software.

Perhaps MS needs two browsers, or some other solution. But I can't see them moving to a fast-iterating model without a radical shift in where they make their money - i.e. their business model.

You can [sadly] substitute IE9 for quite a few different products from MS where the demo come out so early that by the time of release, competition is well ahead.

ZuneHD was initially announced cheaper than the comparable iPod touch - by the time it shipped (9 months later), apple had dropped the price on its product. HP Slate announced before iPad but available after.

Microsoft really doesn't understand how to market themselves.

And why not? IE6 was released in August 2001! Its competition was something like Netscape 4.8. Mozilla was barely alpha, and not really usable yet. In this light, IE6 was a good browser, better than any competition back then. Of course. IE6 was mostly irrelevant few years later, but that wasn't because it was crappy browser, but because it was simply obsolete (but without a replacement from Microsoft).

Yes, Microsoft can definitely build a better browser. They just need to put their hearts to it. And cut off all support for IE. They envisioned a Chrome-OS like system before Google did, and I think they even have a team to work on it (not sure though).

I hope not.

For them to kill Trident and move to WebKit would be a git from heaven. of course it will never happen, though. Having a top-notch browser doesn't fit their corporate plans at all. The web platform is a threat to Win32 as it always has been, more now than ever, and it would practically be disregarding shareholder interests to promote a standards based web app platform.

To be perfectly honest, I don't want IE to iterate very quickly, because then there would be 30 quirky, borked versions of IE to code around rather than 3. Granted, the last few may actually be standards compliant, but dealing with the 25 intermediate stages that aren't would be the seventh circle of development hell. Even though conditional stylesheets means you wouldn't have to rely on CSS selector hacks, that would make QA an order of magnitude more onerous than it already is.

I guess it's a chicken-and-egg problem, they aren't compliant because they don't develop iteratively, and they can't iterate often until they're more compliant unless they want to saddle everyone with a dozen inconsistently non-compliant browser versions. Even if they tried, all but the very largest web properties probably wouldn't QA for all versions of the browser. The drop in IE support from websites would result in a worse experience for their users.

I think having a more iterative release cycle for Internet Explorer would put Microsoft in a better position. Having small releases adding new functionality would be much better than having to wait 2+ years between browsers. This tactic seems to work in the Windows & Office world, but not so much in the quickly changing browser market.

Does it even want, or need, to? That's probably a more interesting question, though this is still a fairly sophisticated argument he's making, not the "Microsoft sucks!" article that you might guess from the headline.

Microsoft can build better browser. But it will be zero-sum for them.

Yes they can. No, they don't want to.

Microsoft doesn't want to follow standards, their browsers are made to access stuff built by software they license and the only reason they are willing to adhere to some standards now is because they have fallen behind. So in essence their shitty browsers are a kind of DRM.

No