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HotJava rearmed for browser war
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October 28, 1998 by Chris Nerney |
From...
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(IDG) -- Fearful of a future in which no major Web browser adequately supports Java, Sun early next year plans to launch a revised version of its HotJava browser.
"We're getting back into the browser market," says Jonathan Schwartz, director of enterprise products for Sun's Java Software division.
Sun has a lot of catching up to do, as the feature set of HotJava is pretty sparse. At the top of Sun's list, sources claim, is support for Dynamic HTML, e-mail, newsgroups, cascading style sheets and multimedia applications such as RealAudio and QuickTime. Today's HotJava lacks these key features, as well as such basic attributes as frames.
HotJava product manager Scott Ryder declined to talk about features but did say the update will give corporations a worthy alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Recent surveys show that Microsoft has overtaken Netscape in the browser market, and many observers believe this lead will widen.
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This is a major concern to Sun because Explorer is not fully Java compatible, which may scare potential customers away from the company's prized Java technology. For this reason, "Sun wants to make sure there's a good browser out there that runs Java," says
Anne Thomas, senior consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group in Boston.
A Java browser was supposed to come from Netscape. In fact, Sun last year dropped plans to commercialize HotJava in large part because it was counting on Netscape to carry the Java flag onto the browser battlefield, with Netscape's Javagator project and in the continued support of Java in its Navigator and Communicator browsers.
Netscape in the summer of 1997 said Javagator, an all-Java browser based partly on HotJava code, would be on the market by the first quarter of this year.
However, as the company's financial and market share problems mounted, internal Java development, including work on Javagator, was put on the back burner.
Further, while Netscape is an original member of the Java alliance, its support of Java has fallen behind in its updated browsers. Last November the company pulled the Java-compatible logo off of Communicator 4.04 because it did not support Java Development Kit 1.1. In fact, Netscape no longer actively develops a Java Virtual Machine.
While Sun never completely quit developing HotJava - it released Version 1.1.5 last December - the company long ago abandoned any pretense of challenging the Microsoft and Netscape browsers in the PC and desktop markets.
Instead, Sun has targeted the lightweight Java browser for OEMs and developers to bundle with their own Web-enabled devices and applications.
Asked if the upcoming version of HotJava will be designed to compete with Netscape and Microsoft in the commercial browser market, Ryder would only say, "The current product is not positioned that way."
Ryder says that if Explorer emerges as the dominant browser, Microsoft would have a competitive advantage in the Web consumer product and services markets.
"Because the browser market continues to solidify around Microsoft, companies that are in the solutions business or the content business face a serious risk," Ryder argues.
The reason, he says, is that Microsoft is configuring its browser to drive traffic to its own services. "As Microsoft expands its base into homes and cars and mortgages and financial services and everything else, [Web-based competitors] risk losing access to their customers," Ryder says.
"If you go into the search site in Explorer, the default is Microsoft's search engine, and the first results that come back are Microsoft sites," he says.
"So if you want to buy a new car, you'll get sent to CarPoint, which is Microsoft's site. And if you're Autoweb.com or Auto-by-Tel, that's a problem," he says.