With Firefox stealing another percent or two of market share every month, Microsoft appears to be starting to get a little worried about it. This article at Eweek indicates that even though Microsoft claimed there would be no updates to IE until the next Windows ships in 2006, they are considering service packs for Windows for the purpose of adding new features to IE.
Folks, you can thank Firefox for that, Microsoft would not spend money on IE unless they were worried that by the time Windows Longhorn is released (except for security patches of course) IE might not be the dominant browser any more. After all, they haven’t added any features to IE since about 2001.
The other thing you can expect them to do, is to continue trying to convince customers to use ActiveX and their other proprietary “extras” in an effort to make sure that people and customers have to use IE to use their corporate Intranets. Since ActiveX has been the cause of dozens of security flaws, viruses and compromises, that argument should be a lot less convincing now days. Lastly they are planning to blur the lines between local applications and Internet served applications. Considering their abysmal security record, I hope I’m not the only one worried about the implications of that.
