Why Web standards in IE 8? It's done so well without them

If you thought Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie's announcement at the Mix conference that the company has ″decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default″ in the new beta of Internet Explorer 8 was curious, you're half-right. It was more than that. It was a major tipping point.

For as long as there have been Web browsers, Microsoft has insisted that whatever IE did was "standard" because, after all, it was the most widely used browser. This wasn't so good for the W3C, a community that has put tremendous thought and effort into developing the Web as a set of standards. But it was great for Microsoft because it created a self-sustaining browser monopoly.

Making IE behave differently from truly standards-based browsers reinforced corporate decisions to standardize on IE and develop their Web applications in non-standard ways. And every time "This Web site requires IE to work correctly" appeared on a site it squeezed companies that made other browsers, like Opera, further into a tiny corner of the market.

But by forking the browser market, it now appears, Microsoft has left itself out on a limb – and one that it's going to be difficult to climb down from.

There are three reasons, I think for Microsoft's current difficult position:

• One is the emergence of effective anti-trust regulation – not by the United States, I regret to say, but by the European Union.
• The second, of course, is the emergence of effective competition – Mozilla Firefox has proved that its vision of standards-based browsing and its open-source development model are both competitive against Microsoft's tactics.
• And third, Web browsing is rapidly becoming a mult-platform activity – spreading beyond the PC in earnest even as it becomes the central activity of most computer users. Users want the Web to work the same on a Linux box or a Mac or a cellphone as it does on their desktop PC. Companies that built out their Web apps and sites for IE only now face hurdles they let Microsoft set in their path.

The biggest problem for Microsoft is that everybody's got options – not only users, who have browser options, but corporate customers who have development options, and they're voting with their feet.

Microsoft is scrambling to make itself browser-centric. It's finally showing interest in software-as-a-service. Its announcement of Exchange and Sharepoint hosted services for companies smaller than 5,000 employees are hardly world-shaking, but it indicates that the software giant may be awakening to the idea that it can develop smaller products for smaller organizations. Ultimately it could lead Microsoft back to the consumer market, which it has largely abandoned.

(On the other hand, one of its first efforts in this direction, the beta of Office Live Workplace announced this week, is so wimpy it amounts to the same sort of willful misunderstanding of the capabilities of the Web that flawed IE from the start).

If Microsoft is serious about making IE be less proprietary and more standard there will be major impact on customers. The Web-developer blogs are already loading up on speculation about what happens if IE 8 "breaks the Web" – or at least the Web as rendered by IE – by dumping legacy support for IE 5 and 6's more outrageous misbehaviors. There are organizations that have chosen to remain standardized on IE 5 because the alternative, updating all their Web apps to IE 7, would have been years of work.

At the same time, embracing standards exposes IE to real competition from other browsers – and to a loosening of its dominance of the PC desktop, where it can tie Web content and browser features to installed, paid-for apps like Office. Some of the features in IE 8, like WebSlices and Activities, feel like a response to this problem.

But customer rebellion and user disaffection may not be the worst problems Microsoft faces. What smells like the real reason for Ozzie's announcement is buried at the bottom of the official press release:

"While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue," said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.

This quote, inserted into the release without any context whatsoever, reads like a secret message from Brad Smith to Neelie Kroes, the EU commissioner for competition. Is Smith replying to something in his inbox?