And now, for some rambling about browsers.
The NYT Bits blog has a good post about the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 (now in beta) and browsers in general. But I have to quibble with a couple of things…
IE 6, introduced in 2001, was a mess, really opening the door for the open-source project Firefox, which is richly supported by Google. IE 7, analysts say, was a major catch-up effort, while IE 8 is Microsoft’s bid to move ahead of Firefox and Apple’s Safari in performance, features and user experience.
Well, IE 6 actually wasn’t such a bad browser back in 2001, except in terms of security. In fact, it was the best major browser in terms of standards support—its main competition was Netscape 4, originally released in 1997, and Netscape’s development had been stagnating ever since. Netscape’s successor, the Mozilla Suite, wouldn’t be released until 2002 and was always too slow and bloated to seriously contend. A reasonable alternative wouldn’t arrive until version 1.0 of Firefox was released in 2004.
(Of course Opera was around throughout, but its market share remained negligible.)
I think back to the comment made by Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s co-founder, in the heady days of the browser pioneer’s ascent. The browser, he said, could “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.” …
… during Microsoft’s federal antitrust trial, Jim Barksdale, Netscape’s chief executive, tried to dismiss the Andreessen comment as a young man’s flippant joke.
But it was no laughing matter to Microsoft, and that potential threat was the animating force behind the tactics Microsoft used to stifle the Netscape challenge.
OK, OK, OK. Microsoft has had some questionable business practices. But the reason they won that battle in the browser wars is that their browser was better. And it was better because Netscape/Mozilla dropped the ball and basically ceded leadership to Microsoft. The problem is that once Microsoft became undisputed the king of the hill in browsers they basically stopped updating IE until the increasing challenge from Firefox spurred the release of IE 7 in 2006.
Now IE 7, while it has its share of problems, was a huge step forward in terms of features and standards support. Problem is, there is still a huge installed base of people continuing to run IE 6. A big reason for this is that updating to a modern browser would break a lot of corporate applications written specifically for IE 6, so IT departments won’t upgrade their users. So roughly a third or more users running IE are still using version 6.
My biggest hope for IE 8 is that it gets people off 6. Maybe being two major browser versions behind and nearly a decade out of date will convince IT managers to finally update their applications and move their users off IE 6. Or users could get more vocal as their browsers at work become more dated compared to what they’re using at home. This could be wishful thinking, but hey, you gotta have hope.
In 2008, IE 6 is an obsolete piece of shit and no one should be using it. This is less apparent to users than it is to Web developers because developers have no choice but to get stuff to work in IE 6. But anyone who builds Web sites knows that accounting for the various quirks, bugs, and nonstandard behavior of IE6 demands a huge and increasing amount of development time. If we could all stop supporting it, the productivity of Web designers and front-end developers would skyrocket. Plus its lack of modern features and standards support means that coding for IE 6 compatibility holds back the Web.
P.S. This looks kind of cool.
