Netscape 8: The Horror
It was with a sinking heart that I read of the recent arrival of the latest version of Netscape. Great. It just became that much more unlikely that anything beyond the simplest Web page would render as designed. Really, why even bother trying to come up with an ambitious design for a page, let alone an entire site, faced with the current profusion of browsers. It's 1997 all over again!
Designers that actually care about creating good-looking Web pages have no cause for optimism. The Golden Age of design for the Web is now officially over. You missed it? Well, it was that nice, sleepy time when Internet Explorer had such commanding market share that you could simply design for those browsing with it, without looking over your shoulder all the time. Yes, that's right—we all forgot to thank Microsoft for making our professional lives simpler. But it's too late now to say you're sorry.
First it was Safari, Steve Job's wonderful gift to Mac users, which had its own wild and wacky way of interpreting CSS, among other things. Designing pages that rendered reliably in IE and Safari was always a treat. Then came Firefox, a browsing emperor with no clothes, trumpeted by the media as the next big thing. Am I the only one on the planet who thinks Firefox is mediocre? Beyond the myth of its "security", it renders pages slowly and unreliably. However, the anything-but-Microsoft crowd don't seem bothered by its all too real failings.
And now Netscape 8. I feel like that character in the X-Files episode who keeps saying over and over, "This is not happening, this is not happening." Now we find that installing this wonder of technology subsequently breaks certain aspects of IE's rendering. Get ready for more of this kind of nonsense—your life as a designer just got harder.
We really don't need new browsers, pitched at us from those with barely veiled agendas that don't include benefits for users or those creating content for the Web. What we need is for Microsoft to do what it does best—crush the competition and make our life as designers and users simpler and more reliable. So we can design a great-looking page (maybe someday using real fonts—but wait, that's too ambitious) that displays reliably for readers without devoting as much time to hacks and workarounds as the design itself.
Go get 'em, Microsoft.
Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com
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You CAN'T be serious!
IE is THE most standards uncompliant browser out there! Lets not even get into it's security issues.
As well as being the worst when it comes to valid XHTML and CSS, it STILL will display horribly coded pages full of horrible code errors. Leading a non-educated designer into a false sense of security.
Firefox is THE fastest browser out there.
Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape 8, and yes even Netscpae 7, are all browsers that fully support standards. And they are SECURE.
Any developer worth his/her salt HATES Micro$haft's poor excuse of a browser.
And lets throw support for png with alpha transparancy into the mix. Internet Destroyer is the ONLY browser that doesn't support what would be a very useful thing.
The best thing that could happen to the web would be if the evil M-pire removed Internet Destroyer alltogether.
I've done studies myself where IE is outpaced by Firefox render speed on truly CSS2 compliant/valid code.
IE will simply balk at PNG's - the implementation of PNG support in IE 6 is plain horrible; however it's XML/XSLT implementation is much faster than Safari and Firefox put together.
But IE faster than Firefox? Maybe in boot time only.
But beware of Netscape 8... it breaks XML support within IE 6...
Aren't Netscape and Firefox basically the same thing based on Mozilla code?
Yes, Mozilla is based on Netscpae's Gecko (sp?) rendering engine.
Mozilla's Firfox is easliy the best browser out there for both speed and standards compliance.
Before the last two builds of Firefox, Opera easily won in speed, but Opera 8 runs a lot laggier than the lastest Firefox.
The major point though is that Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape (versions after N6) all adhere to standards. Bad code will cause a page to display wrong, or not at all. Which is how it *should be*.
The problem with IE is that it will display the garbage output by MS' infamous output to html that it sticks in all it's apps. Ever seen the trash output by people thinking they can use MS Publisher to make a website with? Of course *thier browser* will display this garbage proudly.
I'm not here to say that one browser should win over the other. My really big wish for this Christmas is that the browser manufacturer's get their proverbial stuph together. There's nothing more exasperating than to work on a style sheet, get it up and running in two browsers to have it fail only in the third.
None of the major browsers are blameless either and therein lies the crux of the problem. It'd be nice to be able to tell all of the visitors to your site that they must use browser 'x' because it supports CSS2 and is fully W3C compliant but the market place doesn't work that way. Sadly it's the developers and the consumers who get caught in the crossfire of a global pissing contest.
What I would really like to see is the majors develope to the standard first and then if they want add their own bells and whistles later without breaking the standard. Because, in the long run it's the clients and the developers that are paying for it all in added time and expense in order to build sites for their customers.
Okay, I have to follow this one up with a link I found about IE and CSS standards. Only posting it because I've been trying to work around a bug in IE in how it handles floats since around noon today. The link is http://www.positioniseverything.net/ie-primer.html and now that I feel totally vindicated I'm going to bed to dream of standards compliance. ;-)
Thanks for your comments. It's important not to interpret my position as an endorsement for the quality of Explorer. Rather, when one browser has pretty much a lock on market share, one can live with its limitations. But when there are a growing number of alternative browsers, how can a designer be expected to be able to take the time to create great pages, without devoting an impossible amount of time to anticipating how the code will render?
My interest is in the design side of the browser but those concerned with the speed aspect might find these tests -- http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html -- worth a look.
"The best thing that could happen to the web would be if the evil M-pire removed Internet Destroyer alltogether."
Look into MS long-term .NET strategy. Microsoft would love nothing more than to make browsers obsolete. In fact, a year or so ago, they announced plans to stop releasing newer versions of IE, until developers complained. They jumped the gun just a tad.
You also talk about Web standards. Hmm ... In a way, Microsoft has become the Web standard. Standards bodies are notoriously slow in adopting and implementing new standards. In theory standards can be a great thing. However, Microsoft, nor any company for that matter, should have to adhere to the pace or direction these bodies set for the Web.
Just another way to look at things.
I think some people are taking this article way too seriously, I think it was cleverly intended for humor ;)
I'm sorry, but if this isn't a joke, then I have to say that I'm pretty upset with this post. To say that Explorer is a good browser is just a slap in my face. I spend what seems like a quarter of my design time trying to get xhtml pages to render properly on Windows IE when they already render properly on Safari, Firefox, Opera, Netscape, and even Explorer on the Mac. It is ALWAYS due to ridiculous nonstand implementation of css in Windows IE. Look here for a list:
http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html
I can only see more alternative browsers as a positive thing. The IE dominated market was very restricted by it's limitations. With more and better alternative browsers on the rise, it forces competition and improvements.
As you work more with CSS, it becomes easier to quickly fix problems across browsers. The lazy, only design for IE attitude is my number one annoyance with most so called Web designers today.