Microsoft Corp. gave early testers their first glimpse of its next-generation Web browser Wednesday, and said Internet Explorer 8 will adhere to the same standards as competitors’ programs.
Microsoft’s browsers, including the current Internet Explorer 7, gained notoriety among Web developers for handling Web page code differently than Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox, Apple Inc.’s Safari, the now-defunct Netscape Navigator and others.
For the most part, major non-Microsoft browsers and outside developers who built Web pages worked with agreed-upon technical standards, while Microsoft was accused of adding proprietary code to those standards. The result: Web pages that looked good in Internet Explorer but broke on other browsers, or vice versa.
At a Web developer conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer division, made light of Microsoft’s past spotty standards and pledged to do better.
Microsoft has launched its most audacious attempt yet to seize the initiative back from Google in the race to harness the internet as the computing platform of the future.
The software giant announced that from today, one of its most lucrative products, the Office Suite, will be available online, meaning that consumers will be able to create, write and store Word and other documents on the web.
The release of a web-based version of Office comes just a day after Microsoft said it would offer web-based versions of some of its enterprise products, including the e-mail program Exchange, meaning that companies will no longer have to buy expensive servers to run their employees’ e-mail accounts. Instead, their workforces will be able to access e-mail stored on Microsoft’s servers.
Microsoft’s aggressive foray into the new web-based model of software delivery marks yet another attempt to catch up with Google. Its great rival has already launched a suite of Office-like applications, called Google Apps, which allows users to create and store documents online.
