Category: Web Browsers

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OK, so you want a web anyone can use, whether they’ve picked Windows, Macintosh, Linux, or whatever came on their cell phone or PDA. What can you do? Here are some ideas:

Web Users

Try an alternative browser. Use it exclusively for several days. Get used to what it can do, and how it differs from Internet Explorer or the browser you’ve been using.

Better yet, try two. If you already use Firefox, try Opera. If you already use Opera, try Firefox or Chrome. You can always switch back if you like the other one better. The goal is to see what’s out there.

If you find a web browser you like, tell your friends and family. Get them to try it out, or give them a demo.

If you really like the browser, and would like to spread awareness, consider joining a promotional group like Firefox Affiliates or Choose Opera.

Bloggers and Content Providers

Write about your favorite web browser. Encourage your visitors to try it out. Post links or buttons pointing to the download site.

If you agree with the Alternative Browser Alliance‘s goals, feel free to link to us.

Web Developers

Base your design on web standards whenever possible. Take a look at sites like the CSS Zen Garden and A List Apart for ideas. The Mozilla Developer Center and Opera Developer Community are also good resources.

Validate your code. Learn which rules are safe to break. Where you have to use proprietary features, use graceful degradation so that other browsers at least get a usable experience. Some tools for validation include:

Try not to make assumptions based on browser detection, which is often wrong by the time the next version of a program rolls around. Where you have to check, detect capabilities, not browsers.

Start a collection of web browsers. When designing a site, check the layout with as many browsers as you can early in the process. Check critical parts of the site before you go live. Sites like Browsershots or BrowserStack can help you with browsers and platforms you don’t actually have.

Do your development on Chrome or Firefox. Both have extensive tools to help you test and debug your websites.

Conclusion

These are just suggestions. You can do as much or as little as you want, as much or as little as you can!

This article originally appeared on the Alternative Browser Alliance in 2005. This is the latest version before I retooled the site a decade later.

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The main reasons are innovation and security.

The intense competition between Netscape and Internet Explorer in the late 1990s ended with the World Wide Web dominated by one browser. At its height, Internet Explorer was used by an estimated 95% of people online.

There were many reasons IE took over: it came free with Windows, the most common operating system. Many webmasters would rely on Internet-Explorer-only features like ActiveX, leaving their sites inaccessible to people using other web browsers. As time went on, webmasters would write their web pages without checking for errors, except by testing them in Internet Explorer.

One Browser, One Web… One Target

You might think this is acceptable: One vision, leading the web forward. Unfortunately, once Internet Explorer’s dominance was secure, Microsoft did very little to update it. There was almost no innovation from 2001 through 2004, either in the front-end or the back-end, until Windows XP Service Pack 2 redesigned security. Many aspects of the languages that make up the web, particularly in the core languages of HTML and CSS, remained unavailable or buggy in IE until the 2006 release of version 7—5 years later—and even IE7 still has a long way to go.

Also, not everyone could or wanted to use Internet Explorer. Die-hard Netscape fans clung to their browser or shifted to Mozilla. People using Linux-based or Unix operating systems didn’t even have the option of using IE. Macintosh users could use Internet Explorer, but their version had different quirks than the Windows version everyone used for testing.

Two things happened.

First, the smaller browsers started innovating. While the heavyweights battled for dominance, a tiny Norwegian company called Opera began to re-think the way people used a web browser. Long after Internet Explorer and Netscape were free, Opera was still shareware…and still getting paid customers. (Today Opera’s free too.) Mozilla, a spin-off of the old Netscape, made an effort to implement as much of the web standards as possible, as correctly as possible. A small project called NetCaptor combined MDI with tabs to create “tabbed browsing,” which made its way into Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari… and has finally appeared, years later, in Internet Explorer 7.

Second, the Internet ceased to be a friendly neighborhood and was flooded with viruses, trojan horses, and spyware. With a single program accounting for more than 90% of users, and a design that tied that program directly to the operating system, that meant one set of security bugs could attack most of the users on the internet. Alternative browsers and operating systems have long promoted their security over Windows and Internet Explorer. In 2004, people who used a Mac, Linux, or an alternative browser on Windows didn’t even need that extra level of protection because they weren’t even targets!

The Solution

Competition keeps innovation going. If several products have to fight for market share, they have to continually one-up each other. End result: all browsers improve, everyone wins.

It hardly seems a coincidence that Microsoft stopped developing Internet Explorer when they trounced Netscape, then started again as soon as Firefox started making gains.

Security may be easier to manage when you only have one place to look, but it’s also easier for the bad guys to crack. In 2004, they could get 90% of the web just by targeting Internet Explorer on Windows. In 2008, they can still get 75-80%, still aiming at one target. Now imagine that spread out among IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari on Windows, PowerPC Macs, Intel Macs, and Linux. They’d have to settle for 10% or try to crack every combination they could. Web developers, on the other hand, designing for the common language of the web, would have no more trouble than they do today.

And who knows? You just might find yourself liking another browser better than you thought!

This article originally appeared on the Alternative Browser Alliance in 2005. This is the latest version before I retooled the site a decade later.

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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)