Microsoft to dump IE?
No. Probably not. But John C. Dvorak thinks it’s a good idea. And, contrary to what folks usually think of Dvorak’s predictions, this one actually makes a lot of sense.
His thesis is that IE is only a liability to MS at this point (Virii, anti-trust suits, Eolas, web standards, etc.) and that MS would be better off dumping it completely and instead toss a few bucks towards Firefox and Opera.
In addition, AJAX (somewhat ironically, being that Microsoft ‘invented’ it) has pretty much become *the* way to write web applications using the browser as the framework. MS seems to agree with their Live.com and full Firefox support in their Atlas asp.net AJAX framework as well as their newest Visual Studio products. As such, the old argument that MS really needs an integrated browser into their OS for true app development is weakened quite a bit (MUCH to the chagrin of Macradobe and all the efforts they put towards making Flash/Flex *the* next UI platform for web apps).
Alas, Dvorak’s predictions rarely come true. But if any of them should, it’d be this one.
