Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

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Nothing Lasts Forever

An interesting NewsForge article makes a very good point about web standards and browser wars:

In my 2002 book, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, I said it was stupid to design Web sites that would work correctly only with the most popular Web browser. Yes, I told readers, over 90% of all Internet users today may use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (MSIE), but not long ago 90% of all Internet users ran Netscape. Web designers and site owners who made Netscape-only sites had to scramble madly to redo their work when MSIE started getting popular. “Learn from this!” I said.

and furthermore:

The point here isn’t that MSIE is bad and other browsers are good, but that there are many browsers out there, and it’s almost impossible to predict which one will dominate in three or four years — or whether any of the current ones will dominate. For all we know, someone in China or Brazil is secretly working on a revolutionary Web browser that will be faster, more flexible, and more secure than those that are in common use, today.

In the end, the only “standards” likely to stay with us are those set by worldwide, non-corporate bodies like the W3C and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Forward-looking Web designers and Internet business people already know this, but not everyone has enough foresight to look at trends like shifts in browser usage patterns, then look beyond the immediate trends and say, “The true lesson here is that I shouldn’t be preparing for increased use of one browser or another, but that I should make my work usable through all standards-compliant browsers.”

Considering that the download counter for FireFox over at SpreadFireFox.com is over 3 million, this is something to think about. I recently had several related stories happen to me, all of which point out how important standards are.

First, when the AP photographer was taking my picture last week, I spent some time talking to him about spam and Microsoft. Suprisingly, I found out that the Associated Press uses Netscape across the board for email and browsing, and many people are currently trying out FireFox as a replacement, with some even dabbling in OpenOffice as well. I have heard similar stories about FireFox from others, and even the media has been noticing it. CNET has been running a set of stories on the possible extinction of IE including an editor’s piece about how he switched to FireFox.

Second, my brother who works for a major consumer website has been discussing with me the problems he is having supporting Apple’s Safari browser at work. His company has been receiving enough complaints to warranty a purchase of a Mac specifically for testing their site with Safari. Of course we also remember the case of Opera/MSN settlement that happened a while back as well. This shows that minority browsers are actually increasing in usage where they are being noticed.

Third, considering that IE has not been updated in years and Longhorn is long forthcoming, the stagnation that Microsoft has imposed on the Web standards really sucks. For example, some of the cooler features coming out such as XHTML 2.0 which uses XML and CSS for styling it, is something that I would consider using in the future for development, especially considering that a lot of software already has XML backends. With XML all is needed is a CSS stylesheet or a XSLT stylesheet, and voila - a whole new document comes out. When recently working with XSLT, I have been thinking about possible doing XHTML 2.0 with XForms in the future, of course if the browsers support it

Of course, it is kind of ironic if Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market gets killed by their neglect of IE and FireFox’s ascendence. It is also very interesting that FireFox, the leaner meaner version of Mozilla, was able to do what the full bloated Mozilla/Netscape could not. This is almost like a phoenix rising from the ashes which brings to mind the cute quote that the Mozilla team made up when the first version of FireFox (then called FireBird) was released (go to about:mozilla in Mozilla, Netscape or FireFox):

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Tags: firefox, ie, microsoft, mozilla, opera, press, w3c —

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