Browser Wars 2.0

War is good, when the war involves web browsers.

Here is a little history for those of you who are new to the browser wars. The first major battle was fought in the late 90s between Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator. The result was a decisive victory for IE and what followed can be described as the dark ages of the browser world. Microsoft had over 90% of the market and as a result decided to stop developing IE. IE6 was released in 2001 and we never saw another major browser release from Microsoft until IE7 was released in late 2006. IE6 was a decent browser for its time, but it did have a number of quirks and bugs. These problems didn’t matter much since IE had such a dominant market position so everyone just assumed that was the way the browser was supposed to work.

There were other browsers available. Netscape was still around, Mozilla, which was the open source version of Netscape, and Opera were all other options. I was not a big fan of any of them, especially their interfaces. When I began working at zu, Shane introduced me to a browser called Phoenix. It was essentially a stripped down version of Mozilla. I started to use Phoenix on a regular basis and it opened my eyes to how IE-centric the web had become. Phoenix eventually grew up and became Firefox. Other browsers were starting to be introduced. Apple had the audacity to make their own browser called Safari and Google eventually introduced their own browser named Chrome, which is based on the same rendering engine as Safari.

Each of these browsers offered their own strengths. Opera has always been fast and feature-rich while Firefox has always been lean but had extensions which allowed you to add the features that you wanted. Safari had excellent CSS support and pushed standards groups to add new exciting features such as CSS animation. Chrome had a lightening fast JavaScript engine and each browser tried to copy and improve upon each others innovations.

This has created rapid and dramatic improvements in browser technology over the past couple of years. Standards began to pick up steam too. HTML5 started gaining steam and browsers began to eagerly implement features like the canvas tag. CSS3 development roared back to life after a long period of stagnation. JavaScript performance has increased dramatically which has allowed JavaScript intensive websites and JavaScript libraries to proliferate.

Even IE, the enemy of web developers everywhere, has finally begun to catch up. IE8 still lags in many of the advanced features that other browsers have, but IE9 looks downright promising. There are many web developers that think Microsoft should just replace IE’s rendering engine with WebKit (same engine as Safari and Chrome) or even drop the browser all together. I cannot agree with this point of view. Competition is good, especially amongst web browsers. When Microsoft conquered the browser world, they abandoned browser development. However, if Mozilla, Opera, Apple or Google had achieved the same type of market share that Microsoft did in the first part of the decade, I have no doubt that they would have stopped innovating as well. Long live the browser wars.