How Microsoft will destroy the web… again
First, I’m sooooo tired of nerdball, I’m kicking it to the curb with this post.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m all about making dire predictions. I predicted our current economic crisis and even pinpointed the cause being the mortgage meltdown. I also predicted that it would be revealed (too late) that Dick Cheney is an alien robot mastermind bent on enslaving the human race. I’m still waiting on that one.
My next dire prediction is that Microsoft will destroy the web… again. In case you’ve been sleeping under a bucket the past couple of days, the big interwebs news is the release of Firefox 3.5. One of the most talked about features of this new release is support for the HTML 5 audio and video tags using the patent free and open Ogg Vorbis and Theora codecs. Originally the plan was to include the Ogg formats in the HTML 5 specification, but Apple and Nokia threw a major warbler about it and so the Ogg specs were removed from HTML 5 and replaced with some kinda ambiguous, wishy-washy crap that I haven’t bothered to read.
So here’s my prediction. Microsoft will indeed support the HTML 5 audio and video tags in Internet Explorer, but it will only work with their proprietary codecs and not the free ones. There may or may not be support for the Mac platform, but there will certainly be no support for Microsoft codecs on Linux or other platforms. Since they won’t be supporting the Ogg codecs, web developers will be forced to use the Microsoft codecs to encode their content since Internet Explorer has such a large market share. That market share will increase once people start to migrate towards Internet Explorer so that they can watch videos and listen to music.
This is the same crap they pulled with Internet Explorer 6. IE6 was released with only partial support for CSS, and even the stuff they did support was plagued by rendering bugs. They had a huge market share at the time and so they didn’t bother to fix any of the bugs. They let IE6 rot for 6 years while the web stagnated and webmasters catered to the IE6 bugfest. Microsoft only started working on IE again after Firefox ate into about 10% of their market share. The new innovation really helped the web take off again (remember Web 2.0?).
The only question now is how long with Microsoft hold us back this time?
