Tag: IE

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The WaSP is reporting that Microsoft will end support and cease distributing Internet Explorer for the Macintosh at the end of January. It’s been about eight months since the latest version of Mac OS X shipped without IE, and almost three years since Apple launched Safari.

While there is an “end of an era” feeling to this, it’s kind of like losing the last veteran of World War I. It’s of more historical significance than anything else. When Microsoft released IE5/Mac, it was hailed as the most standards-compliant web browser available. But Microsoft abandoned it years ago.

Fortunately, not only is Safari a worthy successor, but there are other options as well. What’s great about the web browser field these days is that the major players are constantly improving their offerings and working toward greater compatibility. And soon any website that wants to cater to Mac users will no longer be able to fall back on “Just use IE!” They’ll have to test in Safari, and of course the easiest way to build a website that works in IE/Win, Safari, and Firefox (the two defaults and the major alternative) is to start with standards-based code in the first place—which improves compatibility with even more browsers. Users get more choices, and websites get more users. Everyone wins.

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A tale of the Browser Wars on the high seas.

Harken, lads, and listen to my tale. It is the tale of the FyreFawkes, a vessel that turned the tide in the never-ending battle for the high seas.

In this day, shipping lanes criss-cross the ocean like a Web, and in years past, that web was commanded by the Fleet of the Navigators. Wherever ye wanted to go, a Navigator ship was there to take you. But the wealthy My Crows’ Loft Company controlled the ports, and knew that if they did not take command of the high seas, someone might use the Navigator Fleet to build their own harbors, outside My Crows’ Loft’s sphere of influence.

So My Crows’ Loft built their own fleet, a fleet of Explorer craft, and after a great trade war, their fleet dominated the ocean. The Navigators’ fleet shrank, nearly forgotten.

But My Crows’ Loft grew complacent in their victory, and the Explorer fleet aged. Worse, the vessels had weak spots and leaks that pirates and brigands of all sorts knew how to attack. What was once a pleasant voyage across the sea became a journey fraught with danger, with spies, phishermen, and great wyrms lying in wait for the unsuspecting voyager. Continue reading →

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It occurred to me today that if you lay out the three major players in computer operating systems and the three major players in web browsers, the results track remarkably well.

  • Windows and Internet Explorer. The dominant player. Obtained that position by being good enough, cheap enough, and promoted enough to win a protracted two-way battle. Detractors claim the victory was primarily due to marketing and business practices, not quality. Plagued by a public perception of insecurity. Currently trying to maintain that lead against an opponent unlike any they’ve faced before. Believes itself to be technically superior to the other options.
  • Linux and Firefox. Open source product with a core team and hundreds of volunteer contributors. Originally created as a replacement for a previous major player. Very extensible. Promoted as a more secure alternative, but has faced growing pains with its own security problems. Highly regarded among many computer power users, beginning to gain mainstream acceptance and challenging the dominant player. Believes itself to be technically superior to the other options.
  • Mac OS and Opera. Has been there since the beginning. Constantly innovating, pioneering ideas that get wider exposure when their competitors adopt them. Very dedicated fan base that never seems to grow enough to challenge the dominant player. Has been declared doomed time and time again, but keeps going strong. Believes itself to be technically superior to the other options.

It breaks down, of course. Traditional UNIX is missing from the OS wars, though it provides a nice analogy to Netscape for Firefox. The battle lines don’t quite track either, since the previous wars were Windows vs. Mac and IE vs. Netscape. And Safari’s missing entirely. But it’s interesting to see the same three roles in play.

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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.