TheWhippinpost - 5:54 am on Jun 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

I'm partially with ricfink on this. It's clear to me that M$ has, since about IE 5, been positioning the browser to be an extensible application platform.

As such it's engine is more flexible and enables developers to build more than "just web pages" - there's a lot of people out there that still don't know you can build a data-driven site/app...fuelled client-side, ie... using a bog-standard server without ASP, Perl, CGI whatever.

The downside to the wider possible uses however, means that by extension, and arguably by design (or is it innovation?!), that it sets it's own generic standards - In many ways M$ is ahead of the standards game because the various bodies can't keep pace with the rate of change.

All the browsers it seems have mis-interpreted the standards and I think they all still do to some degree - Opera was only flagged the other day for some CSS bug.

A lot of developers understandably like Opera for it's features, well MyIE2 has a lot of Opera features, not all of them, but then Opera doesn't have all MyIE2 features either but the thing is, MyIE2 is probably the only browser that shows what the IE engine is capable of...and I don't even believe that it's scratched much below the surface yet, but as freeware, it's done an incredible job. So to say that

it is probably the least-capable browser on the market today.

is wholly not true...the capability is there in the engine.

I'm not M$-obsessed however, I certainly don't want to see an integrated browser melted into the OS, but MyIE2 has made me realise that the browser is the new desktop just as the web is becomming the new hard-drive.