| Tuesday, January 14, 2003 |
13:28 - Browser Detente
http://www.punning_pundit.blogspot.com/2003_01_12_punning_pundit_archive.html#873736
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Who ever said the Browser War was over? Sure, maybe the big Netscape-vs-IE siege broke a long time ago, but somehow that's failed to matter much to the other makers of alternative browsers.
What makes it possible for small-time browser makers like Opera and Mozilla (and on the Mac, OmniWeb, Chimera, iCab, and Safari for that matter) to compete for desktop space? Monopoly power at its finest, I'd say. Once IE had "won", there was no more incentive for it to improve. No need to incorporate new features, even if they were useful. As far as Microsoft was concerned, if they'd developed IE to the point where it could marginalize Netscape out of the picture, then it was good enough forever.
Hence bugs like the "images with XML data in the headers cause the entire rest of the browser's process life to hang" thing, which hasn't been fixed in two major versions and seems to be keeping nobody at Microsoft up at night, despite how widespread images created by modern XML-header-writing Adobe software are getting. As Andrew the Punning Pundit says:
IE sucks. It has none of the standard features that I like (pop-up blockers, for instance), encourages some sort of lame-ass I-can’t-believe-its-not-HTML that other browsers can not learn to read, has 2 settings for cookies (on and off) and seems to just beg for security holes to be exploited. On the other wrist: It does file-management. File management is one of the most unsexy things software can do, and it is only a browser function because MS was trying to evade the law, BUT it is just about the most important thing one can do with one’s computer. IE does it, nothing else does. And for that reason alone, it stays on my hard drive.
Not exactly a strong endorsement. This is the purest case of "good enough" that I've seen in a bloody long time, and the strongest endorsement of marketplace competition-- even at the expense of standardization-- to boot.
Because, you know, browsers have not reached the limit of their potential. Many companies are coming up with plenty of good new features and streamlined behaviors for next-generation browsers, as well as ground-up rethinking of certain metaphors that have been efffectively unchanged since the days of Netscape 2.0. Why does every browser handle bookmarks/favorites exactly the same way, with a drop-down menu? Why does every browser have to have a "throbber" which indicates activity and provides a link back to the browser's home page? These are concepts that date back to the heyday of the Big Blue Breathing N, and the fact that they haven't changed since then is not an indication that they can't be improved. Hence Safari's completely different handling of both of those things-- with resultant behavior that I think is a lot better in many ways.
"Don't rock the boat," says Microsoft. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Well, that doesn't tend to fly on the Mac, where IE is much less tied into the system than on Windows (read: not at all). Pretty much every Mac user I know has at least dabbled in another browser at some time, and most actually use something else, whether OmniWeb, Chimera, Mozilla, or Safari. IE is nice and compatible, but it's slow and ugly. It has some nice features that other browsers lack (type-buffering seeking on drop-down menus, auction tracking, sidebar features), but other browsers bring still more to the table: popup-ad blocking, animated-GIF looping control (nice!), regexp-based content-refusal, deep and detailed cookie management, JavaScript debuggers, helper-app configuration that isn't completely brain-dead. Plus speed. Plus gorgeous text rendering. And on it goes.
(It remains unclear whether Microsoft's MacBU has in fact internally end-of-lifed IE for the Mac, or whether such a decision-- if true-- is the cause or the effect of Apple's development of Safari.)
So at least on the Mac side, the browser sampler platter is still pretty well stocked-- more so than it ever has been in the past, in fact-- and almost all the selections have an appeal all their own. OmniWeb looks gorgeous and has the best OS X-ish design, plus the best debugging and information-discovery and content-control tools. Chimera has (possibly) the best rendering engine and nice convenience/privacy features. IE has a solid rendering engine and good navigational features. Safari has speed, rendering accuracy, slick operational concepts, and great looks. Lots of us use more than one of these, each for when we need to take advantage of a particular strength.
Now that website design has become so broadly standardized, compatibility isn't even so much of a problem anymore-- even when talking about stuff like DHTML and CSS. There's nothing new happening on the HTML side of things, which leaves the alternative browsers free to catch up with what's become standard practice. The marginal benefit of using IE for compatibility's sake is growing thinner and thinner, and there's nothing to hand Microsoft an advantage in that field anytime soon. So for any company or organization willing to put in the effort, there's some market share out there to be had. Browser users (particularly on the Mac) tend to treat browsers like chairs; they'll keep trying new ones, shifting around until the ass-groove is just-so, then getting up and trying the next one, until they find just the right one that suits their posterior. And if Microsoft isn't willing to go the distance and respond to the shapes of people's butts, fine-tuning and tweaking and improving, then other chair makers will rise to the challenge.
This is one of the odd, intangible benefits of using a minority platform. There's always excitement. There's always hope. There's never complacency or resignation. The war never really ended here.
UPDATE: Kris forwards me a CNET story on Safari and the reasoning behind using KHTML instead of Gecko for the rendering engine. It's a great read, full of little details that CNET seems to have done a good job in getting right. Sounds as though Apple's choice of KHTML was the right one, considering the reaction of some of the Gecko team members:
"I guess I'm supposed to be mortally offended--or at least embarrassed--that they went with KHTML instead of our Gecko engine, but I'm having trouble working up the indignation," wrote Mike Shaver in a Web log posting. "We've all known forever that Gecko missed its 'small-and-lean' target by an area code, and we've been slogging back towards the goal, dragging our profilers and benchmarks behind us, for years."
Shaver, who left Netscape three years ago but retained his position on the small Mozilla staff, said that in Apple's shoes he might have made a similar decision.
"If I had to write a new browser, and I was going to have to touch the layout code in a serious way, I would think about Mozilla alternatives," Shaver wrote. "I really, really hope that Mozilla will learn from Safari/KHTML, because they've done a lot of great work in about a tenth of the code."
That's certainly forthright. And it's further proof, to me at least, that Apple has its head screwed on straight when making sure that its technical decisions are the right ones rather than whatever's politically most expedient.
UPDATE: On second thought, maybe the article isn't as responsible a piece of journalism as it seemed; MozillaZine has the scoop on cheesed-off and misquoted developers.
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