Anyone who builds web pages knows about the difficulties of designing for multiple browsers. For years, my team’s designs have been hampered by technology specs which force us to build our pages to be visible in Netscape 4.x. Our clients, mainly Global 1000 companies, are very slow to implement new technologies across their many offices and tens of thousands of computers. For this reason, we’re still using tables and spacer GIFs for positioning, rather than using the more efficient and elegant CSS/XHTML combination.
We’re not alone. There have been many initiatives over the years to bring everyone up to date and to eliminate the crufty backward compatibility hacks us developers are forced to use, to ensure our pages work in the dozens of browsers and browser versions — each with its own quirks and bad habits — released over the past 10 years. Probably, the most successful of these projects has been the Web Standards Project. And, development has become somewhat easier with the near-standardization of the web community on the browser from Redmond. Besides Microsoft’s monopoly advantage in the browser market, for a long time, IE has been the better browser and it has been free. Why change?
Well, now, there’s a new impetus for moving to standards-based, modern browsers: Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer is the dominant browser on the internet, has announced that IE6 will be the last standalone version of its browser. Future versions will be integrated fully within the new operating system, code-named “Longhorn” and due sometime in 2005. In addition, it has decided to stop any development of IE on the Macintosh platform.
So, right now, sticking with IE-centric development of web sites is locking one’s self — along with your customers and users — into a browser that will be nearly 5 years old before it is next updated. Meanwhile, for the first time, there seems to be a profusion of browsers which are faster, more frequently updated and more standards-based than IE. We have Mozilla for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux, Safari for MacOS X, Opera for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux, and Konqueror for Linux.
Tim Bray has an excellent essay on this process, which has inspired Josh Segall to create a “Use a Better Browser” page and button. Read them over and try some of the other browsers. You might wonder why you’re sticking with your old man’s browser.