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blufive[the ongoing browser wars, part 2]
As many people know, the Chinese government places serious restrictions on its citizens' internet access, via the "Great Firewall". Other governments in the world have national "censorware" proxies in place, which block access to politically unpalatable sites. It couldn't happen here, though, could it?
The whole hoo-ha over Opera's Bork Edition serves as a reminder of a related issue: web browsers are fully capable of modifying the pages they display. "Bork" isn't the first browser to do this, though. The most (in)famous example is Microsoft's "Smart Tag" technology, which was originally slated for inclusion in version 6 of Internet Explorer.
Smart Tags would highlight key words on web pages, turning them into links to other pages. Which, of course, is where it gets interesting. Those key words are chosen by whoever wrote the Smart Tag, who also gets to choose where the link would point.
Smart Tags have the potential to be a very useful tool indeed, by providing automated hyperlinking to related documents (a function they perform in Office XP and the forthcoming Office 2003); but they also have far less pleasant possibilities. Suppose the keyword was "abortion". It doesn't really matter where the corresponding link pointed, it would be contentious to many people.
At this point, the browser is interfering with the web page being read, without the knowledge of the page author, and very possibly without the knowledge of the reader. The interference can go as far as inserting links to pages representing a point of view completely at odds with that of the page author.
If we regard the web as a news distribution mechanism, and we factor in the technical proficiency of the many users who cannot distinuish between "The Internet" and the web browser they are using, the potential for political manipulation and the dissemination of propaganda is terrifying. Whoever controls the browsers can potentially control what the users see on the web.
Fortunately, Microsoft didn't include Smart Tags in the final release of IE6, probably due to the howls of outrage from several areas of the technical community, including bodies like the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
However, it's difficult to be sure how thoroughly Smart Tag support was removed from IE6, and there are persistent rumours that some of the nastier bits of malicious spyware install smart tags linking to paying advertisers.
Now, suppose your national government were to dictate that everyone in the country had to use a particular web browser. How would you react? Outrage, right?
The thing is, in many ways, you're already there. Depending whose statistics you believe, somewhere between 85 and 95 percent of the world's web surfers use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, versions 5 and 6.
Now, it wasn't a government edict that created this situation, and whatever other opinions I hold about Microsoft, I don't think they're about to start inserting rabid political propaganda into every page viewed via IE. (Links to sites warning of the "dangers" of Open-Source Software? That's a different question)
The Opera Bork Edition has reminded us that any web browser can manipulate pages. "Bork" only alters one site, does so in an obvious manner, and comes with a nice helpful press release explaining what it does and why. Those are deliberate choices on Opera's behalf. A less scrupulous manufacturer could just as easily apply such techniques to the whole web, and be much more subtle about it.
It can be argued that actually using such a capability on a large scale would be commercial and political suicide. However, if Microsoft had deployed smart tags in the summer of 2001, would it have seriously impeded the spread of IE6? I doubt it - most users wouldn't even have known what was happening.
Do we want any one entity, no matter how apparently benign, to have that much power?
Who still thinks a web browser monopoly is a good idea?
As many people know, the Chinese government places serious restrictions on its citizens' internet access, via the "Great Firewall". Other governments in the world have national "censorware" proxies in place, which block access to politically unpalatable sites. It couldn't happen here, though, could it?
The whole hoo-ha over Opera's Bork Edition serves as a reminder of a related issue: web browsers are fully capable of modifying the pages they display. "Bork" isn't the first browser to do this, though. The most (in)famous example is Microsoft's "Smart Tag" technology, which was originally slated for inclusion in version 6 of Internet Explorer.
Smart Tags would highlight key words on web pages, turning them into links to other pages. Which, of course, is where it gets interesting. Those key words are chosen by whoever wrote the Smart Tag, who also gets to choose where the link would point.
Smart Tags have the potential to be a very useful tool indeed, by providing automated hyperlinking to related documents (a function they perform in Office XP and the forthcoming Office 2003); but they also have far less pleasant possibilities. Suppose the keyword was "abortion". It doesn't really matter where the corresponding link pointed, it would be contentious to many people.
At this point, the browser is interfering with the web page being read, without the knowledge of the page author, and very possibly without the knowledge of the reader. The interference can go as far as inserting links to pages representing a point of view completely at odds with that of the page author.
If we regard the web as a news distribution mechanism, and we factor in the technical proficiency of the many users who cannot distinuish between "The Internet" and the web browser they are using, the potential for political manipulation and the dissemination of propaganda is terrifying. Whoever controls the browsers can potentially control what the users see on the web.
Fortunately, Microsoft didn't include Smart Tags in the final release of IE6, probably due to the howls of outrage from several areas of the technical community, including bodies like the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
However, it's difficult to be sure how thoroughly Smart Tag support was removed from IE6, and there are persistent rumours that some of the nastier bits of malicious spyware install smart tags linking to paying advertisers.
Now, suppose your national government were to dictate that everyone in the country had to use a particular web browser. How would you react? Outrage, right?
The thing is, in many ways, you're already there. Depending whose statistics you believe, somewhere between 85 and 95 percent of the world's web surfers use Microsoft's Internet Explorer, versions 5 and 6.
Now, it wasn't a government edict that created this situation, and whatever other opinions I hold about Microsoft, I don't think they're about to start inserting rabid political propaganda into every page viewed via IE. (Links to sites warning of the "dangers" of Open-Source Software? That's a different question)
The Opera Bork Edition has reminded us that any web browser can manipulate pages. "Bork" only alters one site, does so in an obvious manner, and comes with a nice helpful press release explaining what it does and why. Those are deliberate choices on Opera's behalf. A less scrupulous manufacturer could just as easily apply such techniques to the whole web, and be much more subtle about it.
It can be argued that actually using such a capability on a large scale would be commercial and political suicide. However, if Microsoft had deployed smart tags in the summer of 2001, would it have seriously impeded the spread of IE6? I doubt it - most users wouldn't even have known what was happening.
Do we want any one entity, no matter how apparently benign, to have that much power?
Who still thinks a web browser monopoly is a good idea?
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Date: 2003-03-16 14:21 (UTC)The side issue of the web being designer controlled is one thing that really annoys me. For one thing - Tim Berners-Lee's original browser allowed the addition of comments (and of course Annotea is a W3C standard for handling commenting using current technologies). The quicker we get to building a two-way, standards-based semantic web, the less likely we are to have the sort of problems you're talking about.
I do agree it's a pity that IE became the dominant browser, but Netscape took its eye off the ball and failed to fix the egregious rendering bugs in Netscape 4.7 (and that's ignoring its CSS problems!) - and Mozilla took two years longer to get around to shipping code than we all expected - leaving developers with two main browsers to target, both of which were similarly standards compliant: IE and Opera.
Luckily things are a lot better now. IE is unlikely to have a major upgrade for another year, Mozilla is forging ahead on becoming the standards-compliant reference browser of choice (and its spinouts are rapidly becoming more end user friendly - I fully expect whatever Phoenix becomes to rapidly become the number 2 browser on Windows, with a 25% market share, by the middle of 2004). And on other platforms, we're getting a wider choice of browsers than we've had for years - I'm currently composing this reply in one, the rather excellent OS X browser Safari.
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