Browsers Wars
War is evil or just another chance for improvement? The latter statement can be true for browsers development history. Today we can observe the battle between IE, Mozilla, Opera and Safari. There are two battlefields but the results are obvious for global users. Notwithstanding various complaints, IE still doesn’t have adequate rival.
Of course, Firefox slowly gaining in this competition, but still IE still dominates if we are talking about global usage. For many people internet still associates with the little blue e and maybe such tendency remains to be true for next generations.
The other war is all about the future of the browsers and this time the main heroes are developers and communities. With the help of web development community Firefox has such market share today. So, let’s be aware of the responsibility we have in this fight.
IE – the Story of Success?
Old times were simple. We have IE6 that ruined all our masterpieces in web development. So, any alternative to this appreciated greatly. With our sites look amazing in all other browsers except this, IE Microsoft got a bad reputation in the web development world.
Of course, Microsoft had interest in our problems but perhaps, its reaction was too slow. Thus, instead of good browser we had great ideas. Anyway we were able to fix the crap in IE6 with a separate CSS file. With conditional CSS files you can provide less than perfect software.
Some time passed and we got IE7. It was the time when IE6 lost its war and gained awful reputation. However, to be honest, a decent CSS professional could work around most bugs rather quickly. But that time we had IE7 that was a great improvement to IE6. Of course, it can’t be called perfect, but still some bugs disappear.
Today to make site for IE7 is as simple as for other browsers. Still we have a separate file with conditional comments, but Firefox, Safari and Opera also have their own drawbacks.
Not so long ago, IE8 was announced. It passed the acid2 test and positioned itself next to Opera leaving Safari and Firefox behind. We really can influence improvement in the browser situation – as it happened due to our criticism on IE6. However, there should be too many complaints to ditch Microsoft. But still they provided us with a browser that can really compete with its rivals.
Reference: www.onderhond.com/blog/work/the-browser-wars