While I’ll continue to use Firefox to keep developers accountable to other browsers and to do my part in maintaining a healthy market share (apart from a host of other reasons), I genuinely think it’s different this time. Browsers are doing a lot to maintain an open standard and things like ActiveX are no longer plaguing the browser market. DRM continues to be the proprietary evil it is, but other than that it’s a lot better than the IE days.
Though nowadays the open standards can be a bit… misleading? A lot of them feel more like edicts from Google to enable features for ChromeOS, like WebUSB.
Standards don’t seem to prevent web app makers from looking at you user agent and telling you to switch to Chrome. Google’s applications in particular are infamous for serving different code (with different performance and bugs) to different browsers.
The first instance that I know of is with Mosaic, because I have seen “best viewed with Mosaic” buttons in the archives somewhere, and Mosaic was one of the first, if not the first browser to support images, iirc.
Then came Netscape, which supported frames and Java, and many people over a certain age have certainly seen the Netscape buttons. Before Netscape was dominated out of the market by IE, which, must be noted, really was technologically superior by many counts, Netscape (code name Mozilla) itself drove Mosaic out of the market, although Mosaic made it to at least 3.0, and was a fairly capable browser by then, supporting forms, images, and a tree-history feature later seen in Firefox addons such as TreeTabs.
The beauty of the Web-based system is that all of these browsers, going back to Mosaic 1.0 and Lynx and www all speak the same basic subset of HTML, and you can still, today, build a website which works in all of them.
It’s pragmatism all the way down, indeed.
This was a self-inflicted wound by developers.
While I’ll continue to use Firefox to keep developers accountable to other browsers and to do my part in maintaining a healthy market share (apart from a host of other reasons), I genuinely think it’s different this time. Browsers are doing a lot to maintain an open standard and things like ActiveX are no longer plaguing the browser market. DRM continues to be the proprietary evil it is, but other than that it’s a lot better than the IE days.
Though nowadays the open standards can be a bit… misleading? A lot of them feel more like edicts from Google to enable features for ChromeOS, like WebUSB.
I was happier not knowing that WebUSB is a thing. Thanks. :/
Standards don’t seem to prevent web app makers from looking at you user agent and telling you to switch to Chrome. Google’s applications in particular are infamous for serving different code (with different performance and bugs) to different browsers.
Thanks for sharing and liking everyone.
If you enjoyed this tou might also enjoy my “interview” with my internal strawman of Chrome developers from last March: Are you making a real web application? Or just a Chrome application?.
It’s sort of become, a browser lifecycle…
The first instance that I know of is with Mosaic, because I have seen “best viewed with Mosaic” buttons in the archives somewhere, and Mosaic was one of the first, if not the first browser to support images, iirc.
Then came Netscape, which supported frames and Java, and many people over a certain age have certainly seen the Netscape buttons. Before Netscape was dominated out of the market by IE, which, must be noted, really was technologically superior by many counts, Netscape (code name Mozilla) itself drove Mosaic out of the market, although Mosaic made it to at least 3.0, and was a fairly capable browser by then, supporting forms, images, and a tree-history feature later seen in Firefox addons such as TreeTabs.
The beauty of the Web-based system is that all of these browsers, going back to Mosaic 1.0 and Lynx and www all speak the same basic subset of HTML, and you can still, today, build a website which works in all of them.