Lester Horwinkle said:
True, Netscape is dying. But so is Mozilla.
With 95-98% of users running IE, web developers would love to drop support
for Netscape/Mozilla. The two camps differ in their object hierarchy,
forcing us to write special JavaScript code to deal with them differently.
Since it's more productive to deal with the majority, new advances in the
Net/Moz camp come up against resistance. It's just easier for us to write
for IE.
One thing that you're missing is IE's lack of support for web
standards. IE's core engine hasn't been really updated since 4.0 or
so, resulting in a disturbing lack of support for web standards that
have come about since then. IE didn't fully support even CSS1 in 4.0,
and it doesn't now, to say nothing of CSS2. To see an example of what
I am referring to, try viewing the page
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/glassy.html in
both IE and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. The code for the page is
blindingly simple -- just the same image rendered 4 different times
with different filters. It looks broken in IE. Try
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html for
another example of the same phenomenon.
Another item that I see against IE as a web designer is the lack of
native PNG transparency support. This feature would allow you to
easily create items on a page that let the background show through,
resulting in a nice "smoked glass"-looking effect. With any recent
browser, you just use the PNG the same way you would any other image
-- with an unadulterated <img> tag. To use it in IE requires that you
include a stupid MS-proprietary "filter" tag which breaks all
standards-compliant browsers. This effectively makes .PNG useless as
an image format for most web development, unless you resort to ugly
JavaScript hacks to detect the browser and alter image tags if IE is
detected. See
http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html
for an example of what I'm talking about.
You complain about using JavaScript hacks to detect the browser. I
would argue that this is *not* caused by the Mozilla or Opera
browsers, but by IE -- Opera and Mozilla are both widely known for
their compliance with open web standards. It's only IE that insists
on not fully supporting standards and adding its own proprietary
extensions to the Web.
Open standards are a good thing -- they allow multiple programs to
render the same code in the same manner. Proprietary extensions only
serve to create web page lock-in. While it's possible that IE will
fully support CSS in the future, there's no chance whatsoever that
other browsers will support the IE filter tag, simply because
Microsoft created it as an extension rather than a standard. There's
nothing out there saying "any browser that sees this filter tag should
behave in this way". This is bad even for IE developers, because that
means there's nothing that says Microsoft can't change the way the
extension works and break webpages using the feature in its next
release of IE.
Really, IE is a dinosaur in every sense of the word. It has only
shoddy support of current web standards, doesn't have popup blocking,
doesn't have tabbed browsing support, doesn't have mouse gesture
support... In fact, it doesn't have support for just about any
browsing innovations developed in the last few years.
Mozilla-based browsers, contrary to your "dying" assertion earlier,
are gaining ground rapidly, mainly because of spyware-related
concerns. Even the most computer-illiterate of users can understand
that using IE will result in massive amounts of popups and their
computer slowing down to the point of unusability, whereas using
Firefox will avoid the problem. This isn't as important for those
savvy people who know what spyware looks like in all its forms, but
those people are definitely in the minority. Most computer users
(that form up a large bulk of your 90% figure) don't know enough not
to click on a Gator popup when they see it, so using a browser that
doesn't allow programs to directly install malicious code on the
computer with an automatic popup is crucial for them.
As a web developer and repair consultant of many years, I can say that
Mozilla is *definitely* the better browser of the two. So go ahead,
keep writing for your little proprietary IE extensions, keep wishing
other browsers would go away -- just don't come crying to me when MS
breaks a feature and there's nothing you can do about it, and don't be
suprised if you see your claimed 90% shrinking as IE becomes more and
more outdated by browsers which are actively developed.
Clint Olson
co-n-co at mochamail dot com
Christopher Jahn