[conspire] Browser 'Wars'

[Micah Lee]

As a web developer, I'm so thankful that there are new browsers and the
old ones are dying out.

I like the trend of making all the toolbars smaller and smaller so you
have more screen space for the actual websites (even IE9 beta does a
decent job at this).

I like that all the new browsers have developer tools built-in that lets
you type code into a javascript console while the site is running to
check the environment, and they also include debuggers where you can set
breakpoints, step through code, and examine the state of the DOM tree at
any point in time.

I painfully remember a time before tabbed browsing. Javascript has
gotten much faster recently, especially in Firefox 4. We no longer need
to use Flash to make flashy things.

The major browsers are: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari, and the mobile
browsers in Android and iPhone. Firefox is the only real open source
option, and in my opinion the best option. Use it.

Chrome, Safari, and the Android and iPhone browsers all run the same
open source engine under the hood called WebKit, which is great news
because it means if my stuff works great in Chrome it probably works
great in all the rest as well. All these browsers also auto-update, so
it's rare to find people with very old versions.

Internet Explorer is, of course, by far the worst. Nothing works right,
they add random proprietary crap all the time, I need to use a virtual
machine to test in it, and there are no decent development tools (until
IE9, but then I need to use a Win7 VM to test in that). And worst of
all, most IE users are stuck in old browsers. Luckily IE6 has started
it's slow trip to hell, but a good chunk of people still use it. A lot
of people use IE7, and a lot use IE8 too. People have to make a website
for all the real browsers, and then hack it into working on all the
various versions if IE. It's horrible. Web developers should charge a
couple extra hours of work to Microsoft for each project. The IE tax.

The web has changed a lot recently. There's now crazy things like Google
Docs that acts like desktop apps but that can easily have multiple
people editing a single document at the same time. We're finally
approaching a time where we can ditch Adobe Flash and other proprietary
plugins. People are writing web apps that you can use from any computer,
including smartphones, to access the same data, and it gets insanely
convenient (still working on the secure part). Why would you want to use
an old browser?

Micah

On 02/09/2011 08:33 PM, Margaret Wendall wrote:
> Ri9ck,
> 
> I've been using a Netscape/Mozilla browser since the ancient v2.n, which
> I got on several floppies for windoze browsers through @the mall.com
> <http://mall.com>. I tried Chrome and I HATE it. Even IE is better, if
> more bloated. How can we get through to Google that we really want to
> use our old browsers? Maybe a discussion on Saturday would be relevant?
> 
> Margaret
> 
> 
> -- 
> Margaret Wendall
> mwendall-at-gmail-dot-com
> "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" - Juvenal
> 
> 
> 
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