Category: Web Browsers

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I’m launching a new browser switch site, with a bit of a twist. It’s promoting all alternative browsers, kind of like Browse Happy, but a bit more inclusive and aimed at a slightly different audience.

The idea is that a diverse browser “market”—one with three or four major browser suppliers all competing with each other—is the best way to maintain innovation and security. Anyone following the classic browser wars, the lull in IE development, and the sudden appearance of IE7 can see the difference competition makes for innovation. As for security… If someone can hit 90% of the world’s computers by hitting IE on Windows, we’re in trouble. But if they have to hit 30% each on IE, Firefox, and Opera, and even those are split among Windows, Mac and Linux, it’s a lot more effort for the bad guys.

I got the idea back in May, during some rather heated Firefox/Opera flame wars. It seemed to me that fans of the two browsers had more in common than they thought, if they’d just stop fighting each other. I worked on it during June, and launched a test version last month, asking for feedback from friends and from the Spread Firefox and My Opera communities*. It’s still not where I’d like it to be (Comic-Con, then procrastination), but after the net went crazy over Paul Thurott’s “Boycott IE” article I realized I’d better launch what I had and refine it later.

So, without further ado, I’m officially launching the Alternative Browser Alliance.

Alternative Browser Alliance

*I’ve since imported my comments from the post on Confessions of a Web Developer, my old blog at My Opera, because it was largely the same content. That’s why some of the comments here are dated earlier than this post.

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For future reference, here’s a list of what I’ve used as my primary web browser since I first discovered “Mosaic” in 1994 (or rather, since I first got direct Internet access and not a shell account with Lynx).

On Windows: Netscape → Opera → Mozilla → Firefox
On Linux: Netscape → Mozilla → Galeon → Firefox
On Mac: Safari*

*I’ve only been using a Mac regularly for about a year. Before that I only occasionally used them in computer labs at school.

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The ridiculous Firefox/Opera rivalry (it’s software, not religion) has given rise to one annoyingly persistent meme: the belief that tabs are just MDI (Multiple Document Interface).

They’re not.

MDI, as implemented in many Windows applications and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, involves having a mini-desktop inside your application, with its own windows that you can minimize, maximize, and rearrange. If you have a taskbar-like interface it can look a lot like tabs, and you can certainly use it the same way as tabs, but it’s a different UI paradigm.

A tabbed interface is very specific. You have only one view at a time in your application window, and you switch between them based on a row (or column) of tabs along the window’s edge. You can look at it as a proper subset of MDI, but it is not the same thing.

Additionally, classical MDI uses one master window for the application. All documents appear in that window. Tabbed interfaces often (though not always) allow you to have more than one window, each with its own set of tabs. This makes it possible to group documents, web pages, etc. by category in a way that you can’t with a single-document interface or classic MDI.

So when people claim Opera had tabs first, they’re thinking of MDI—which Opera did have before Mozilla did. Tabs were showing up in browsers like Netcaptor and Galeon, however, long before they showed up in the Mozilla suite—and long before Opera hid its MDI capabilities under a tab-like veneer.

(reposted from Spread Firefox in response to Asa Dotzler’s post on the history of tabbed browsing)

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The new Opera 8.0.1 includes an experimental feature called Browser JavaScript. It’s a collection of client-side scripts that automatically corrects known errors on websites as they’re displayed. Opera downloads updated scripts once a week.

It’s an extension of the User JavaScript concept. Firefox’s Greasemonkey is basically the same thing, and it’s gotten a lot of attention as a method for correcting or enhancing sites. The key difference is that these scripts are centrally maintained, and automatically updated.

Browser JavaScript is disabled by default, and can be turned on by putting Browser JavaScript=1 in the [User Prefs] section of your opera6.ini file.

(via Opera Watch)

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On Sunday, a development version of Konqueror passed the Acid2 test. In the comments, someone posted a screenshot of iCab also passing the Acid2 test.

I did a double-take. iCab? Das Internet-Taxi für den Mac? The browser with the nice “Make iCab smile” campaign to encourage non-broken HTML on websites but CSS capabilities that have rivaled Netscape 4 as little better than a bad joke? That has been in perpetual beta for years with no sign of shipping a final release?

So I did the only thing I could do. I downloaded the new beta and tried it. Not only did it nearly pass Acid2 (there was a narrow white line across the middle of the face) but it actually handled all the layouts on my own site… something which it had always failed at spectacularly before.

The WaSP Buzz posted a congratulatory note to both this morning. Strangely, iCab is the first browser available to the general public that passes Acid2. The up-to-date Safari is still sitting inside Apple’s development labs, and while you can download the source for the updated Konqueror, you’ll have to wait for KDE 3.4.2—or possibly 3.5—to be able to use it yourself without running a bleeding-edge desktop. Update: Apple has just launched CVS access to WebCore, putting Safari in the same situation as Konqueror: you can download and compile the latest source code if you want, but if you just want to grab an installer, you’re gonna have to wait.

Follow-up in 2024: I’m surprised to discover that iCab still exists, and is still developed — though in 2020 the author rewrote it so it uses macOS’ built-in web renderer (like Safari) and not its own engine anymore.

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FirefoxFollowing up on my comments on Opera, Firefox supporters have a major blind spot as well. It has to do largely with the heavy emphasis on web standards among the developers and the early adopters, and the ideals of the open source/free software community. There are a lot of websites out there that don’t look quite right on anything but Internet Explorer, and there are sites out there that just plain don’t work in anything but IE. This is largely due to three facts:

  • There is a lot of broken HTML out there that has only been tested on IE, and the designers relied on IE’s particular error-recovery behavior.
  • There are sites that rely on ActiveX or other IE-specific code without providing an alternative.
  • There are sites with bad browser-detection logic that deliberately exclude other browsers, regardless of whether they would otherwise handle the site.

In each case you can either change the browser to handle the websites, or you can change the web to handle the browser. Both approaches are difficult, and while the former often yields more immediate results, the latter is more ideal, because it benefits users of all web browsers. In most cases Opera has chosen to adapt the browser, while Mozilla has chosen to promote standards for web development. Continue reading →