The Browser Market

It's becoming fashionable to kick Microsoft's Internet Explorer, if you're a Web professional. There is a certain kind of pack-behavior that on some level frightens me, and there's an element of that in this. But yeah, if this was a 1930s horror movie, we would be seeing The Villagers massing with pitchforks and torches, about now.

The problem with IE6 is the same as the problem with Netscape's Navigator 4: It got too popular and then it stopped growing and evolving.

Way back in the Dark Ages of Web work, Netscape and Microsoft were locked in a brutal duel, with each one it seemed releasing new Web browsers on a more or less annual basis, about six months apart. So the Red Browser appeared with New Feature X, and then a few months later, the Blue Browser appeared, with New Feature X and New Feature Z. Lather, rinse, repeat. Oh, and throw in a few tags like <blink> and <marquee>. ::Shudder!:: See? I told you it was like a 1930's horror movie. ::Thunder and Lightning!::

So, at some point the weight of all of the "improvement" and the crush of internal politics and the tyranny of the installed base and the hassle of dealing with legacy code caused Netscape's Navigator 5 to essentially implode. And while we were waiting, Microsoft took the lead it hasn't given back since. By the time Netscape 6 came along, nobody much cared but in the mean time, a lot of people had developed internal systems that required Netscape Navigator 4, even though it was in many serious ways broken.

For years, we had to struggle with NN4 and it's peculiar set of problems. And today, the browser shoe is on the other foot. We are coming out of a time when Microsoft back-burnered support and development for Internet Explorer 6, which lived for more than five years as the browser. When it came out, it was good. It was an improvement over almost anything else available at the time. But Microsoft abandoned it, and for years we had to deal with workarounds and hacks because as bad as it was, it was the browser nine out of ten people used.

As Firefox continued to grow and improve, and as Safari continued to grow and improve, and especially with the first rumors of what was to become Google's Chrome browser, Microsoft went back to work on Internet Explorer. And feeling responsible for what they had (not) done and not wanting to "break the Web" for everyone by fixing everything all at once, they set about the task of improving Internet Explorer in stages, while disrupting the dozens of millions of Web sites built essentially for IE6 the least. And, being Microsoft, they got it wrong.

There are published standards that explain what a browser should do when it encounters, say, an H1 tag, or a Paragraph tag. Microsoft has always taken these more as suggestions, and we've ended up in a world where every other browser developer gets it right and Microsoft, with all of the market share, remember, gets it wrong. They could release a standards-compliant browser, sure. But doing so would make a lot of sites look weird if they were coded for IE6's peculiar shortcomings. So, Microsoft said, we'll create a new IE7 and teach it to look for a particular line of markup that every developer would add to their pages from now on, explaining how to work out the page design. Let me say that again: Every Web developer in the world must now revisit every Web page they have built in the last six years and, even though they had followed all of the rules, they must now include a special tag in order for their pages to render correctly. Otherwise, IE7 would act just like IE6 had for all of these years and all of their work would be for naught. Cheeky, huh?

Microsoft was finally convinced of the error of their ways, and Internet Explorer 7 looks like it will be a good browser, today. And there is evidence of an upcoming IE8, as well, with further enhanced support for the standards everyone else met years ago. But all of this has frustrated a lot of people who are shopping around for other browser options.

In the weeks ahead, we'll look over some of these and explore the plusses and minuses involved.