Tag: IE

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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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Q: What happens when you break up/fire your web browser-developing group with years of experience, and later hire an outside firm to build your next product?

A: Netscape 8.

IEBlog has an amazing report—which I’ve just verified. Netscape 8.0.1 disables IE’s XML rendering. So if you try to load an XML document—say, an XSLT-styled RSS feed like the feed for this blog—using Internet Explorer or Netscape 8 with IE’s engine, you’ll see either a blank page or an unloaded-image icon.

Apparently every time Netscape 8 runs, it trashes a registry entry that defines how IE displays XML. At this point the only way to fix it is to uninstall Netscape 8 and delete that entry (directions at the above link).

This raises two questions:

  1. Why does Netscape 8 alter an Internet Explorer registry setting?
  2. Why can Netscape 8 alter an Internet Explorer registry setting?

I’ve said it before (though possibly not here), but Mozilla is much better off now that AOL isn’t calling the shots.

Update June 20: Netscape 8.0.2 fixes this problem.

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According to IEBlog, IE7 will have tabs. OK, everyone who’s surprised, raise your hands.

Anyone?

Bueller?

It seems obvious that every feature in Firefox 1.0 that has been used to promote the browser to the general audience will show up in the next version of Internet Explorer. That’s just common sense. People left your product to get X, so you provide X yourself in hopes of luring them back. And since Firefox is developed openly, the IE team can see what they’re planning and try to guess what the next big draw will be.

So Firefox 1.1 will probably not be able to compete with IE7 on feature set, at least as far as the end-user is concerned. And since designers have to respond to the market (for all our “Spread Firefox” and “Browse Happy” buttons, we don’t really have much effect on what browser people are using), improved standards compliance has never been a major factor in adoption.

What does that leave?

  • Security. This is a tricky one, particularly with the recent publicity over vulnerabilities. We (FF supporters) need to emphasize more secure and not totally secure, which is what people are hearing and debunking.
  • Open Source/Free Software. Only a small portion of the audience cares about this. Too many people don’t know the difference between Free Software and free software.
  • Not Microsoft. Microsoft has ticked off a lot of people with their business practices, especially in Europe. And Americans love to root for the underdog. (Remember when little Microsoft was going to save us from the big bad IBM?) Probably not a long-term strategy, though.
  • Compatibility. IE doesn’t run on Linux, and the Mac version is basically dead. Firefox is fast becoming the default browser on a number of Linux distributions, and while the Mac version isn’t perfectly integrated, they’re working on it. So for someone like me, who uses Windows, Linux, and MacOS on a regular basis, a common browser has strong appeal (even if I do keep looking for the preferences in the wrong place).

(Cross-posted at Spread Firefox)