Browser Wars Hot Up; Who Cares?
Recent reports highlight Internet Explorer’s drop in percentage of internet users. Given the huge war between Mozilla and IE, it sounds like big news, but is it?
These days I don’t think browsers are as important. The innovation in one is rapidly copied to another. The UI differences between Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome are minimal. Each of them does a good job of rendering standards based HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Each vendor has a use for their browser. Microsoft has a component version of IE it can embed in most of Windows. Apple has a component version of Safari that it can use across Mac OS X and iPhone OS. Google’s browser is optimized to run Google’s style of application. Firefox is a great platform for building browsers, while also being a browser.
The important thing today is to own a destination worth browsing to. And that is a much harder challenge.
February 3rd, 2009 at 8:05 pm
“Each of them does a good job of rendering standards based HTML, CSS and Javascript.” - are you sure about that? Even IE? If only that were true!
February 4th, 2009 at 5:49 am
IE7 & 8 are much better than the dark old days of IE 4 & 5. There is still differences between the browsers, although CSS and Javascript hacks and libraries seem to smooth many of them out.
February 4th, 2009 at 8:10 am
IE7 & 8 are indeed an improvement over the dark old days of their predecessors but when designing anything for the web it’s still a case of code it once for ‘normal’ browsers and then code it again for IE!
And that’s just the markup and CSS, add JS into the mix and the mess gets worse - debugging JS on IE is a well documented nightmare.
I think it’s also fair to say that pretty much all of the hacks and frameworks cropped up exactly to get round the problem of “design your site/webapp once, then do it all again for IE”.
Anyway, we’re getting away from you original point with which I couldn’t agree more - having a good site/webapp to use is much more important than what you view it with.