Browser wars? Yes please. December 22, 2007
There have been a number of recent articles by smart people suggesting that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the browser wars returned: “The W3C Cannot Save Us”, “Do we need a return to the browser wars?”, “Reigniting the browser wars”, The future of web standards. In that last one James made a simple statement that brought it all together for me:
…HTML went from initial concept to version 4.01 in less than a decade, but has stayed pinned at 4.01 since before the turn of the millennium…
I was doing web development back in the height of the browser wars and my experiences then with browser incompatibility were just as frustrating then as they are now. The only difference is that they were simple and obvious incompatibilities and now they subtle and maddening. Wouldn’t it be better to have incompatibility bullshit AND forward progress than just incompatibility bullshit?
No browser is going to seriously impact compatibility because they all have to keep eating from the same trough (the html we make) and every one of them looks bad if it can’t do a decent job of rendering something the other browsers can. I say bring them on. The only thing that has has driven any progress as of late was the Acid2 test which only succeeded because it made it very simple to understand just how broken peoples browsers were when it came to CSS. Acid2 caused a minor flare up in the war were all the browsers started competing to see who was better and who could get it working first.
I’m all for the various browsers continuing to work towards rendering the same HTML in the same way. This is something we need that benefits everyone, but the fact of the matter is that we’re still not there, and it doesn’t have to be an either or situation. You can add new features, support for new tags,client side database storage, whatever, without sacrificing compatibility on features all the browsers share. And there’s no reason we have to wait for some glacially paced committee to come up with the features. Screw that. There are some brilliant people working at the various browser companies.
The only thing I ask is that if there’s an existing technology in play that can accomplish what you want use it, or work to improve it, don’t try and replace it with something that’s very similar in end result, but totally incompatible (I’m looking at you Microsoft). SVG and Silverlight are the most current example that comes to mind. I will readily admit that Silverlight has some excellent features that totally exceed what SVG can do, but in the end they’re both tools to render vector based graphics you can animate. Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone if the people who worked on Silverlight had of instead spent the same time and energy improving SVG and JavaScript to a point where it could do everything they wanted? Microsoft could have looked Bad Ass for doing this cool thing with SVG and JavaScript than no-one else could touch yet but it would have been available for all so that they’d get the benefit of looking cooler than everyone else and have it shortly followed with the benefit of being compatible with everyone else.
I’d rather have the rocky road of progress than this slow descent into stale conformity.
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