Browser Detente

It's been three years since we last reviewed the current state of the browser. Last time, we were keeping tabs on the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer civil war. That war is over and surprise - Microsoft won. Netscape's current usage can be measured in the low single digits. That's not to say that Internet Explorer doesn't have any competition. Other insurgents have risen to challenge Microsoft, and they are fairing better than Netscape did. Today, there are more browser options than ever. But there are really only three contenders to keep an eye on: Internet Explorer (of course), Firefox, and Safari.

I.E. has continued to be the most popular browser - by far. It accounts for more than 80% of all browser usage. Its market share is amazingly entrenched, especially considering how long it's been since its latest release (almost three years ago!). Microsoft just released a long-awaited beta of I.E. 7.0, but it won't be officially released until later this year. I'm not going to bother describing Internet Explorer's features since most of you are probably reading this in I.E. right now.

Firefox is a free, open source browser which, in some sense, flows from the legacy of Netscape. Whatever happened to Netscape anyway? Well, in 1998, AOL purchased Netscape and later released its core code to the open source community as "The Mozilla Application Suite." This open source code base is now used, in part, by many different browsers, including Firefox.

Firefox is an excellent browser, and it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Without a doubt it is the preferred browser of professional web developers because of its strict standards compliance, helpful development tools, and robust JavaScript error reporting. From a user perspective, Firefox has a tabbing interface that allows one browser window to contain many websites. You can easily toggle between sites without having to open lots of browser windows. Additionally, the webpage find/search feature is brilliant. As you type in your search word, Firefox highlights words on the page that match, letter for letter. If there is no match, the search box turns red, and you hear a soft clicking sound as you type. You don't have to type in your full word, hit submit, and wait for a response to find out there are no matches. You can also have Firefox highlight every occurrence of a search term on the page.

Safari is Apple's excellent browser for the Macintosh. If you are a Mac user, this is the browser of choice. Internet Explorer isn't even an option, since the latest version of I.E. available for the Mac is the ancient 5.2.3 version (5.1.7 if you haven't upgraded to system X yet - are there any of you still out there?). Safari is an excellent browser, and it is very standards compliant. Safari adopted the same tab interface as Firefox, but not the cool search/find feature. The newest version of Safari, under Apple's new Tiger 10.4 operating system, has really great RSS features (we'll talk more about RSS in a future newsletter). Mac users tend to use Safari over Firefox because of its tight integration with other Mac applications (like email). From a development perspective, the only downside to Safari is that it is only available on the Mac. But since it's consistent with standards, supporting this browser is relatively easy (thank you, Apple!).

Often in a website request for proposal you might see a bullet point requiring support for all browsers. This is an impossibility. If you support all of the older browsers, you will be so limited in terms of design that your site will look like it was built in 1996. If you design a modern looking site, it will look terrible in older browsers, and in some cases it won't work at all. Defining which browsers your site will support is an important consideration before designing it or before choosing a technology platform. Browser support is by far the hardest technical challenge facing web developers. But it is getting easier. The more browsers support official HTML and CCS standards (we'll talk more about CSS in a future newsletter), the easier it is to support multiple browsers and platforms. Today, sites look very much the same whether you look at them in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. But there are some differences.

The display differences between browsers are most noticeable when comparing Internet Explorer to any of the others. While standards compliance is growing (hopefully the new I.E. 7 will continue to move in this direction), there is still a gap between Internet Explorer and everyone else. I.E. supports roughly 90% of the latest HTML and CSS standards. That's good, but that still leaves 10% of official standards unsupported. Additionally, Internet Explorer has built in a few of its own unique features that other browsers cannot support. This means it's still possible to go to the same site in I.E., Firefox, and Safari and see subtle differences in how they are displayed. These differences are usually minor and often "degrade smoothly." In other words, the features simply don't display in one browser or the other without breaking the functionality of the site. Nevertheless, we still walk a thin line between including display features that will work in only one browser or the other. Usually, this means we leave these elements out, causing us to drop to a lower common standards denominator - an unfortunate trend that decreases our overall palette for web design. When it comes to robust web design, the majority of our work is in finding solutions for the smallest discrepancies where standards have been ignored or superseded. Alas, such is our lot in life.

Newfangled is very happy - thrilled - to announce a new browser standard that will raise our common browser denominator in order to afford a much more robust web design palette. We are formally dropping support for all Internet Explorer 5.x browsers. Somewhere Jim Hendrickson is rejoicing. Why all the hoopla over dropping a browser that's over six years old? Well it's because of you, Mr. Apple System 9 holdout man. Even up until a year ago, we still had clients who had no options other than Internet Explorer 5.x, or worse, an old version of Netscape, because they were still using Mac System 9 rather than System X. We sympathized with the Mac world. Making the jump to System X was not easy. Everything changed, and it wasn't cheap to upgrade existing hardware and software - never-mind enduring the learning curve of a new operating system. Because Newfangled specializes in partnering with small to mid-size advertising agencies and design firms, we had several clients and many prospects that still used Mac System 9. We were not willing to completely abandon their latest available browser. Extending our support of I.E. 5.x well beyond its natural lifespan carried with it a heavy cost. It made our job of supporting sites across all of these browsers significantly more difficult, and it put a downward pressure on our design options. This cost was magnified given that I.E. 5.x browsers were full of bugs and only partially supported CSS, which created all sorts of weird and unpredictable display problems. Sites that performed perfectly in all the current browsers could break badly in I.E. 5.x. Fixing such problems was never a matter of a simple tweaks. Sometimes it required significant design changes, or multiple versions of CSS files and templates to fix the site, all for the sake of the 1.33% of users that still used that old browser.

Now that we've dropped support for this browser, we can take that same effort and apply it to adopting new features and capabilities, supported in the current crop of browsers. Better design and easier to build - that's what I'm talkin' about!

The content formatter is one of the most useful features of Newfangled's content management system. This allows basic website text formatting using familiar word processing tools. Unfortunately, this feature has not been available on the Mac, due in large part to lack of Mac web browser support. Newfangled's new browser standard has allowed us to upgrade our system to support our formatter on the Mac! For those agencies that have been helping their clients with website content without the availability of the formatter, this is a major improvement.

The Browser War is over and relations between the browsers are improving. We can all hope I.E. 7 will continue to move in this direction and that the open source browsers like Firefox will continue to compete, forcing I.E. into stricter standards compliance and promoting exciting innovation. After all, nothing is more fundamental to our use of the web than opening up our favorite web browser.