On Browsers

I think it's important to stop for a second and think about where browsers are going. I happen to have come across this recent article by Joel Spolsky: How Microsoft Lost the API War. Here's the section of that article that I found most striking and relevant to our discussion:

..So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. ..

I'd often wandered what happened to IE, whose development appears to have "stopped in its tracks" as Joel says. I recall wielding element behaviors years ago. They were considerably ahead of the curve. So now I understand.

But most people today are designing to IE. Furthermore, I happen to have just finished reading Eric Meyer's excellent "More Eric Meyer on CSS" and was struck by the number of CSS hacks and patches that had to be employed to keep IE in the game, hacks that were not necessary apparently for Mozilla, Safari, or Opera.

The web has become the platform for writing applications. However it's apparent that the IE track is now (and has been for some time) defunct. How do we protect the other remaining tracks?

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Miscellaneous

  • If you haven't yet, you should definitely take Mozilla Firefox out for a spin.