All that content stuff doesn't push one browser over the other. Because all of the content is the same, except for the handful of sites that just don't work on non-IE.
Actually I know quite a bit internet use for business. I'm a software tester, part of my job is pointing out that my ocmpany's website sucks, and looking at other websites to make improvement suggestions. But, for the most part, the rendering differences between IE and its competition are too subtle for non-pros to notice. Unless something goes completely haywire in the render you need to know what the site is supposed to look like to know it's not supposed to look like it does in Firefox. Since most people aren't going to be doing side by side comparisons it's largely immaterial and unnoticed.
It does make me a geek, that's what I get paid to be.
The current version of Netscape is nearly identical in all the features I care about to FireFox. I almost ditched Netscape back in the 6.x days when it took a serious dive, but I never really liked Opera (can't put my finger on it, just don't like) and my rebelious streak kept me from ever going to IE, but with 7.x Netscape has improved dramatically.
Right all the WEB is is content, all the BROWSER is is features used to DELIVER somebody ELSE'S content. The features are what push the browser, the content only makes people want A browser ANY browser. Sorry I have it exactly right, there is no content reason what so ever for one browser over another, FEATURES are what dictate which browser a person will want. Browsers are like word processors, the word processor you use isn't going to improve what you write or read in it, it's only going to make it easier to write it or read it; features not content.
When people pay for content they are paying the content provider, like their favorite newspaper, when people select a browser with which to view the content they paid for they are doing so based on features.
Tabbed browsing is a big yes, people love it and it's one of the things mentioned in every single review of FireFox and Netscape. It's the big new FEATURE of browsers that's caused IE's share to shrink rather dramatically. IE dominates the market because 90% of the people on the internet have gotten at least one version of IE free (two if they're an AOLer) and aren't geeky enough to even know there are other browsers out there. There's a reason the MS marketing model has revolved around pre-installation for the entire history of the company, they understood that as the PC moved away from the pure geek market to toward the appliance market a majority of the market share would be people that lack the knowledge or curiousity necessary to replace what the computer came with. Pre-installation made DOS king, pre-installation made Windows king, and pre-installation made IE king, and pre-installation is right now protecting Windows and IE.
Fine weekly alerts for IE. Regardless of the timing security alerts happen for IE on such a regular basis they've become the background noise of the tech industry, they happen almost as often as Democrats call Republicans racists. And every one of those security alerts is a commercial for anything but IE. I don't think MS is evil, or at least if they are that's not the problem with IE. While I'm sure that if some other browser had the market penetration of IE they'd be attacked just as much as IE I doubt there would be as many holes and they'd be as severe.
IE, and every other MS product, has two major problems that cause 90% of its security problems: extensibility, and closeness to the operating system. At my first company we were working on an Exchange Client add-on (yet before Outlook, before even the original Outlook which was just a shell extension to Exchange Client), one of the big puzzles we were working on was how to propogate our add-on through out a company without making IT go from machine to machine. Our uber programmer eventually found this brilliant MAPI call we embedded in our custom object, what happened was if I e-mailed you something with our extension part of the e-mail would be the calls necessary to install our extension on your machine. Once he explained to everybody how it was going to work he then turned to us and said "you realize of course this is the perfect way to distribute a virus, and with as tight as Exchange is to the OS you can distribute a nasty virus". Outlook still has those calls, ActiveX has a version of those calls, VBA in MS Office has a version of those calls, those calls are why MS products are insecure and unless MS gets rid of them they can never be secure. Their products are deliberately designed to be able to distribute add-ons seemlessly and without the user knowing anything happened, which is a great idea in a world without bad guys, but is a horrid in the real world.
I agree 100%
The differences between browsers are small - yet sometimes the small differences make nasty problems (small spacing problems that hose an entire screen).
My point all along was it is ludicrous to think a new free browser is going to knock MS off their pedestal. I am also not arguing the superiority of IE - just that most content is targeted toward IE and for a browser to make an impact it will have to be just like IE (and most likely better) therefore how the heck can a free browser that renders like IE knock MS off of anything.
My company (and most others) only support IE. Not because it the best ever written but because the vast majority of uses use it and we can not afford to support multiple browsers (at least we can not justify the cost - this can easily change if the market demands it. This does not mean it will not work in other browsers.
Your first statement is right on - MS wants to integrate all their products in some way - they got very rich off this strategy - the problem is there is a dark side to the strategy.
Will another browser become the dominant browser - maybe and I think it might actually be good for MS. My point is another browser will not hurt MS and it might actually help them. I believe it might be time for MS to abandon the extensibility model for IE or maybe create two browsers (one that does not integrate). I have written applications that incorporate the browser and they are pretty cool but it opens up lots of possibilities for hacking.