Browser War Resulted in Better Web?

Trends come and go, and the same saying holds good for the internet. Back in early days of the internet, flashing and colorful text were design standards, then came flash based websites. Few years back, nearly all websites were fully flash based; luckily nowadays web designers prefer usability and try avoiding flash elements. In today’s web 2.0 age, all websites are CSS and Javascript (AJAX) based. For web designers like me, making a web page render perfectly in all the major browsers like IE, Firefox and Opera is a hard thing to accomplish.

Even though organizations like W3C were pushing hard for web standards, it was only recently that browser makers started caring about web standard. Opera was the first to pass the Acid2 web standard compliance test. Safaris, Firefox 3 took Opera’s lead and have made their browser web standards complaint. Very recently, even Internet Explorer 8 passed the compliance test. That makes all four biggies web standard complaint, but that doesn’t solve our problem yet.

If you take a peek at the browser market share, 74% of people user internet explorer (majority of them use IE6 :( ). Over the past couple of years, several web designers have turned into purely blog designers. Blog and design are two different words, but they are much related. As a blog designer, it’s very essential that you design a blog that works well in all major browsers.

To conclude, I think it will take several years for people to ditch their current browsers and upgrade to the new generation browsers. Until then, designing blog or any other website for that matter is going to be really painful.

This post was published by on May 26, 2008

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://www.pallab.net Pallab

    Undoubtedly browser war is vital to a better web.
    Just go back 10-12 years. At the time when Netscape was dominant. The web was a pain to browse with anything but Netscape, because half the sites were Netscape. The reason? Being the market leader Html didnt bother much about the very recently founded W3C and went ahead and integrated custom features.
    The same was happening 3-4 years back. You would see websites using IE only standards like activex and xmlhttp requests (this is now included in all major browsers).
    With Mozilla cutting into Ie’s share web developers are now more cautious. Most of them atleast check their website in IE and Fx. So almost all sites not work in Fx. Unfortunately for Opera users like us, that doesnt always solve the problem. The situation has definitely improved for us as Mozilla’s behaviour is definitely closer to Opera’s than Ie’s. But sometimes developers take the shortcut. Instead of making the website standards compliant, they make it ie compliant first, then they add a few hacks to make it look OK in Fx. These sites are the ones which refuse to display properly in browsers like Opera and Safari.

    So in conclusion, yes a competitive browser market is essential to a better web.

    Anyway, I should stop now as otherwise my comment would become longer than your post.