MS will never get a browser right...
Actually, come to think of it, I think MS had one of the first operating systems with hypertext support.
I'm not talking about Internet Explorer- actually, I'm referring to "winhelp" on windows 3.1. Sure, there were hypertext applications, and hypertext enabled applications (much like Apple's "hypercard" but hypertext-type document browsing was a rather foriegn concept at the time.
Actually, I take it back- winhelp was not the first MS program to use this; the help system of many of their DOS products used a similar system, with linked text going to other topics. (QuickBasic/QBASIC help, for example, and MS-DOS 6's "help" menu)
EDIT:
That being said, browser-wise I don't think they are going to get it right.
I mean, consider, that in the early days of firefox, they didn't actually try to fix IE6 by using the features that users liked in Firefox; instead, they made trite arguments against it:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ptorr/archive/2004/12/20/327511.aspxThis guy is the freaking epitome of melodrama. Apparently the fact that the firefox download downloads from a university site is enough to say it's a security risk.
he points out a number of "security risks" in the firefox installation and plugin system, and yet for some reason misses the point- Firefox is more secure while browsing. Not because of the buttons it assigns to be the defaults. He's over-analyzing and missing the forest through the trees. It's an old post and has a LOT of replies, and that just goes to show how very wrong he is about the whole thing.
I mean, with Internet Explorer 4, it was possible to instantly download ANY binary code from a web server and execute it on the remote machine. There were no dialogs, so it didn't make a *censored* bit of difference how their dialogs are designed.
In fact, this is the problem with Microsoft's security approach, at least when it comes to IE. it's not about making the User Interface secure, it's about making the actual stuff the User Interface is invoking secure. it's not about what buttons are chosen by default or what captions or chosen or who signed what file with what certificate. IE4 used to show a certificate screen with all sorts of info with MD5 hashes and the like, was the average user supposed to read this and understand it? I doubt it. But it's ok, since Cancel was the default option. It wasn't a security problem after all.
