|
Welcome
Guest
|
Register
| Login
|
|
|
| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Online | User List | Help |
Killersites.com Forum
Misc Forums
Web Accessibility
Thread: The new twist on the browser wars
|
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Thread Type: Sticky Thread Total posts in this thread: 14
|
|
| Author |
|
LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
The earliest references you will find to the "Browser Wars" was the battle for supremacy between Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator (NN). Netscape was a good browser back then and most agree better than IE for a while. IE has always had the "Home Field Advantage" by coming included with the Windows Operating System (OS). Being the first browser most people experience it is seen by them as the best and they see little reason to switch. Netscape made roads to changing this and became popular until a new version of IE was released with better support of at that time current design tools. Netscape then fell off the market and IE claimed victory. As time has gone on, IE has been slow to upgrade and dogged by security problems. Other browsers have tried to make a dent, some using the IE engine and just fixing security holes and adding a few perks. Others tried it in the back waters in the lesser used operating systems with some success. Opera claimed to be the fastest browser, but was forever doomed without big bucks behind them to allow them to create a free browser. Then one day the Mozilla Project that was behind Netscape Navigator went solo with the Mozilla suite which was very successful and became the power behind Netscape 6 as well as a popular browser in it's own right. Back in the shadows, a small simple browser was growing, no email, chat or other fluff. It went through many names before entering the field as Firefox, "the little browser that could." With the believed victory of IE, the browser wars simply entered what one could call a "Cold War." The battle cry of this war one could say became "Standards Compatibility." The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed a set of standards for languages like HTML, XHTML and CSS so that all browsers react the same to the code. Mozilla / Netscape, Opera, Firefox and those for other systems joined in the movement to different levels but all pledged to support standards. All but Microsoft with IE, even though Microsoft is a long term member of the W3C, they kept doing their own thing secure in their overwhelming market supremacy IE6 came and did not change much but tools. It still ignored standards to the most part. But one day this little upstart named Firefox hit the market and the vibrations were felt world wide. Millions of people jumped from IE to firefox and IE felt the sting. Suddenly Microsoft was interested in Standards and the newly developed IE7 was rushed through development andthe release plans were shoved forward and changed. No longer was IE7 only a release for the newly renamed next generation operating system Vista (formerly known as Longhorn), not planned as a stand alone browser upgrade foranyone with XP and older systems. Suddenly chosen testers were delivered witha IE7 beta version for XP. Now IE7 may be available for XP users (not confirmed yet other than test purposes yet though). IE7 now gets talked up as greatly improving standards support. Warping occurs.. Now as mentioned, the first "Browser War" (BW I) can be defined as IE vs. NN. The second or "Cold War" (BW II) was more like IE poor standards compliance vs. standard compliant browsers (Netscape/Mozilla, Opera, firefox and co.) This war is still raging. Go to any web design forum and you will witness the war as it has spread to web design. It is being waged in forums and blogs across the net as standards advocates like myself argue that if we do not use standards, IE will never change. While the other side tends to argue that with a 80% market share, we should design for IE and anything else is not logical. As long as the leading browser does not support standards, standards (as good as they may be for us and the user) are dead. So where we teach the use of CSS positioning the others preach the continued use of tables as CSS is poorly supported in IE. (There is a compromise called Hybrid, using very limit tables and CSS positioning) Now we get to the part where Rod Serling greets us. Warping begins to twist our perceived reality.We begin to sense the beginning of a new war, "Browser War III" (BW III). Let me explain... Again the browser wars are usually defined as IE against someone. Most recently IE vs. the Standards Movement. But here lies the problem, IE7 will be standards compliant as far as we can tell at this time before the public Beta release. So what happens now? We have hoards of developers who have chosen not to use standards, to continue to design web sites for a faulty old browser based on the argument that it is and has always been the majority browser. That is what is used, so that is what we will design for. So what happens when IE6 vs. Standards compliant browsers becomes IE6 vs. IE7 and the standards movement? You can see the problem now can't you? All those designing for IE6 will awake to discover that their majority based web sites do not work in the new IE7. They will have to scramble to re-build sites standards compliant as they should have from the beginning. IE7 market share will go up and the IE6 share will go down with equal speed. But in a warped world strange things happen and as I like to describe it, the dead walk. IE6 will loose it's status and begin to die but thanks to Microsoft it will become a Zombie, dead but refusing to go to the grave. Still doing things like it did before and eating web sites. The evil behind this monster will once again be Microsoft. IE7 will only be available for Vista and maybe XP. All the rest of the world still holding on to Win 95, Win 98, Win ME & Win 2000 will keep using IE6 long after it should be buried. So for years to come we will still be haunted by it's poor support and unable to totally ignore it. Majority advocates in a civil war... So that is what it looks like will happen. We standards advocates (smart enough not to use hacks) will rejoice that our sites look about as good in IE7 as in Firefox having used Firefox as the test base, then when the celebration is over go back to cursing IE6 until it one day disappears. Those advocates using hacks will wake up with a hangover and cursing. Those who's whole world revolved around designing for a faulty browser just because of a temporary majority status, well I do not want to be in your shoes. You will be in a civil war, IE will no longer work as a argumentfor not using standards. IE market share will be split between the new growing standards compliant IE7 and the old faulty shrinking IE6. Which IE will you choose to support? Time will tell which question was really the better:
IE7 is far from perfect. It greatly improves rendering of CSS and standards... but they have chosen not to improve support for things like the XML Mime type and other problems still making the life hard of designers trying to use XHTML standards and some others. But it should be a great improvement all the same. [This article is not meant as a historical document. It is written vaguely just to make a point. The actual timeline between some events mentioned may not be entirely accurate as it has little to do with the idea put forth. LSW] UPDATE: To my embarassment it seems IE7 Public Beta 2 has been released already, during a time period I was offline shortly. You can download it here . It is also worth noting that the following can be found there as well, Guess it is now official that IE7 will be available for XP SP2 users. Highlights are from me. Evaluation of Internet Explorer 7 should start now, but the software should not be used on production systems in mission-critical environments . Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview will only run on Windows� XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) systems, but will ultimately be available for Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2003. ---------------------------------------- [Edit 3 times, last edit by LSW at Feb 21, 2006 4:10:35 PM] |
||
|
|
admin
Advanced Member Joined: Jun 14, 2003 Post Count: 2940 Status: Offline |
To deal with the IE6 vs. IE7 problem I recommend using IE conditional comments to fork your CSS code. IE conditional comments are a far better choice than CSS hacks. Comment: Still today, on web standard zealot sites like alistapart, they have new articles that promote the use of hacks! This is irresponsible - people should not be taught something that is doomed to cause them problems down the road ... I guess these guys can't admit to themselves when and where they went seriously wrong: creating the culture of hackery and over-zealous adherence to web standards. ---------------------------------------- Stefan Mischook Video Tutorial Store | Web Templates |
||
|
|
tpattison
Advanced Member UK Joined: Dec 29, 2004 Post Count: 1662 Status: Offline |
Good post. I think that, so long as web developers choose to support web standards, the users of the older Windows will notice the dwindling support for IE6 and move to Mozilla, Firefox or whatever. I'm not talking about any time soon, but will depend on when IE7 hits hard. Do you suppose IE7 will come as an auto-update to Windows XP? Otherwise, the majority of people who "don't look after their PC" or those who call someone every time something unexpected happens, simply won't be upgrading to IE7 unless they buy another computer. IE6 will be the major browser for many years to come... Tim ---------------------------------------- Pavonis Mons | Listen of the week: "Residue of Desire" by Acumen |
||
|
|
Les
Advanced Member Joined: May 9, 2004 Post Count: 640 Status: Offline |
Hi LSW Excellent well thought out article.  Stef Has made a great contribution regarding hacks and comments in his blog this matter as well, No wonder people come to this forum to ponder over the killersites articles. Cheers --  Les ---------------------------------------- Tomorrow never comes, make the most of today |
||
|
|
admin
Advanced Member Joined: Jun 14, 2003 Post Count: 2940 Status: Offline |
"IE6 will be the major browser for many years to come..." Probably right about that one. ---------------------------------------- Stefan Mischook Video Tutorial Store | Web Templates |
||
|
|
LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
I disagree, when Vista really comes out it will be included with all new PC's. So any new sales will include Vista and peope will at best replace it with XP or such. But how many will go as far as to backgrade all the way to Win 98 or such. Then there will be those who upgarde by buying Vista. So Vista will take over the market quite quickly as did XP. From release date, I would guess Vista will be the majority in less than two years. Hence IE7 as well. Add to that XP. Now their is to my knowledge no official word on IE7 for XP. IE7 increases security but uses tools core to Vista, so the security measures will not work in XP. There are those who rightly argue that they would hardly put out Beta test versions for the browser on a OS it does not suport. Good arguement... then again if no one has Vista, how will they test it to be sure it works when Vista come out, especially with Vista being so late? But again, the arguement that IE7 will be available for XP sence they test it their may be logical... but Micro$oft has not officially said it would be supported by XP. They have said it would not be supported on win 95, 98, ME & Win 2000. The original Longhorn plans called for no XP support for IE7, but that changed with Vista and the XP Beta versions. Bottom line... we do no tknow if XP will have IE7 for sure or not. Nor do we know if a rendering patch will be brought out for IE6 to support standards like IE7 (in which case all the IE6 sites will be broken in IE6 as well!) It has benn asked but des not like IE6 will be brought up to speed at all. |
||
|
lm
Advanced Member Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Post Count: 2550 Status: Offline |
hi, So never mind IE7 or Camino for long long time it will all just stay the same: we still need to jump to many browsers to test our pages and use all kinds of workarounds. Only now we will call it progressive enhancement (as it explained in here )  ---------------------------------------- My blog |
||
|
|
MacRankin
Advanced Member Joined: Dec 18, 2005 Post Count: 368 Status: Offline |
Good post. I think that, so long as web developers choose to support web standards, the users of the older Windows will notice the dwindling support for IE6 and move to Mozilla, Firefox or whatever. I'm not talking about any time soon, but will depend on when IE7 hits hard. I disagree, when Vista really comes out it will be included with all new PC's. So any new sales will include Vista and peope will at best replace it with XP or such. But how many will go as far as to backgrade all the way to Win 98 or such. Then there will be those who upgarde by buying Vista. So Vista will take over the market quite quickly as did XP. From release date, I would guess Vista will be the majority in less than two years. Hence IE7 as well. I'm pretty sure that once you can get the ecommerce people focused onto Microsoft's new road ahead, and seriously looking at developing for I.E.7 and the new Vista OS, then my guess is that they won't want to lose a slice of this new cake. People will follow people. Consumers are getting more sophisticated these days and will tire of bad sites, and those ecommerce sites that look like they're from the 'Land That Time Forgot', will get forgotten very quickly. Having said that, Microsoft has always wanted to dominate any market even if it meant shafting anybody and everybody in the process. ---------------------------------------- We Brits do things differently, but we still get shot at! |
||
|
|
LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
Have updated the thread with new quote and download link from Micro$oft. |
||
|
|
shelfimage
Advanced Member USA Joined: Mar 24, 2005 Post Count: 3000 Status: Offline |
I haven't don extensive testing with IE7 Beta yet. I did have it on PC for a couple of days and I test my sites out on Browser Cam which has the beta2 release available. All that said, I haven't seen any big differences in IE6 vs IE7 other than the tabbed interface and other facelifts. My biggest headache in IE6 vs Standard Compliant UA's is not the standards, but how MSIE interpets the box model. For example: to get a left column in a css-p site to look the same in both browsers I use a conditional statement: //Here's the css for the other browsers// #left { margin:0 0 10px 24px; padding:0 15px; width:192px; float:left; background-color:#DADADA; color:inherit; } //for IE in an ie only style sheet// #left { margin-left:12px; } That's a 12px difference. It works, but doesn't make any sense. The padding is set at 15px - where did the other 3px go? ---------------------------------------- "The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings." -Okakura Kakuzo Save the developers<!> Maine Webworks |
||
|
|
|
|
Current timezone is GMT May 24, 2013 11:32:47 PM |
