The Emotional Pumpkin

感情的な南瓜

Friday, February 25, 2005

God, I'm frustrated (or, Why Microsoft Will Lose the Browser War)

I bet you thought the browser war was over. It isn't. Microsoft just got complacent. Once they had won out over their biggest opponents, the (obviously crappy) Netscape 4.xx browsers, they stopped innovating. They stopped releasing new versions of IE except to plug various security holes. In the meantime, a bunch of other companies/groups have released newer, faster, and just plain better browsers (better from both the user's and programmer's perspectives). It has gotten to the stage where IE is clearly (at least, to me) the least usable and most difficult to program for browser out there.

From the user's perspective:
  • It doesn't support tabbed browsing
  • I originally had something here about how IE does not have a pop-up blocking feature. It was pointed out to me (see comment below) that IE 6 with SP2 does, in fact, have a pop-up blocker. Consider me corrected. [Original text: It doesn't have popup blocking built in (intelligent or otherwise, but that's another post)]

From the programmer's perspective:
  • It has, bar none, the sloppiest standards support (especially CSS) of any browser

I don't imagine that Microsoft is expending (or planning to expend) any intellectual capital on improving IE before whatever they release along with Longhorn. Strategically, I figure they can probably get away with it. Or they could have, if the field still looked like it did 6 months ago. Now, though, with the emergence of the two (again, in my mind, at least) best browsers for Windows and Mac OS--Firefox and Safari, respectively--and moreover the continued defection of Microsoft's users to both of these, Microsoft may find itself in the position of having to earn back user loyalty with the next release of a browser.

So what brought this on? I've been working, for the past few days, on using CSS positioning (rather than a table) to make a blog template where there are two sidebars that look like they overlap the main blog content. After much tweaking, I've gotten to the point where the template looks great in all* browsers except for IE for Windows (yeah, even IE for Mac, while not perfect, does an adequate job of displaying the page). It is driving me up the wall. I am ready to pull my (or more accurately, someone's) hair out. AAARRRGHH.

* By all I mean: for Windows, IE 6.0.2, Netscape 7.2 and Firefox 1.0, and for Mac OS, IE 5.2 and Safari 1.2.4.

3 Comments:

Blogger arcade_fire said...

I'm not defending IE, FF is better but IE with SP2 does have popup blocking as far as I know.

10:07 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I really have nothing to say other than Tabbed Browsing is the greatest thing ever.

6:23 PM  
Blogger Charleton said...

Firefox rules. Windows sucks. I love your templates. Just wanted to say hi.

11:24 AM  

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