Browser wars

With the recent announcement of Internet Explorer 9, the discussion of which browser is the best seemed approprioate.  For many people out there, Internet Explorer is the browser of choice if not simply because it came with their installation of Windows, and it's what they are familiar or comfortable with.  Though many people have been flocking to the many other browsers out there.  There are plenty of reasons for that too.  Hopefully we can cover a few of those reasons here.

Some Statistics

There are quite a few browsers out there.  Here's a list of a few of the major ones:

Internet Explorer
Firefox
Opera
Chrome
Safari

A website called w3schools.com keeps track of monthly browser usage statistics.  According to their statistics, as of February 2010, Firefox is in the lead with 46.5% of the market share.  Internet Explorer is in second with 35.3% overall market share.  That includes IE6, IE7, and IE8.  Google Chrome is in third with 11.6%. Safari is at 3.8% and Opera is at 2.1%.

It is important to note that Internet Explorer is overall dropping in the rankings.  A year ago at this time, Internet Explorer was closer to neck and neck with Firefox.  In that time, IE8's usage has risen, while IE7 and IE6 have consistently fallen.  One large reason for IE6's numbers dropping is a glaring security hole that Microsoft is not going to fix.  In fact, this very security hole has been claimed by Google as the point of entry for a large security breach into GMail.

Speaking of Google, Since Google Chrome's launch, the numbers have been steadily going up, and quickly.  Along with their mobile operating system, Android, Google's offerings are increasing in numbers faster than any other platform out there. Firefox has remained around 46% for the past year. A lot of users are starting to favor Chrome over Firefox for the speed issue.  Chrome has a faster javascript engine and starts up significantly faster than Firefox.  So Google has a lot of potential in the browser race right now.

A Brief History

So why is Internet Explorer losing ground so fast?  There are quite a few issues with that.  Security has played a large part in this issue as mentioned earlier.  In the past several years, spam, spyware, viruses, and trojan horses became more and more prevalent on the web.  As people's PCs became more and more sluggish from these issues, it started to become clear that the browser was the entry point for a large portion of these problems.  Microsoft was not very quick to respond to the problem.  It seemed like their browser was like a sieve to any piece of malicious software attempting to get in.  It would pop up asking if you'd want to install something, you'd click no, and it'd install anyway.  This was the beginning of the rise of the alternative browser.  Firefox began to take root because it wasn't embedded in the operating system like Internet Explorer was.  It was more secure, and it's free. So it was an easy migration for a lot of people.

So, with security being the prime instigator in the beginning of browser wars...web 2.0 became the second element.  As the web evolved into a more dynamic and truly interactive medium, the capability of the browser to render out the web page started to become more of an issue.  People don't like to wait.  That's not the only issue though.  The ability to make a website look consistent in all browsers started to surface as a difficult chore.

For those of you that don't know, there is an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the W3C.  They are the group of experts that set the standards for the web.  New standards started to be approved, like cascading style sheets, known as CSS and the subsequent revisions, CSS2 and CSS3.  Recently HTML5, which is the latest revision to HTML, has become the focus.

As these standards evolved, Microsoft took a different approach. They decided that they wanted to forge their own path and ignore most of the W3C's decisions.  It's been suggested that Microsoft thought that since they had the most market share, they could control the direction of the evolving web.  That proved to not be true.  What ultimately happened is that Internet Explorer was left in the dust by the competition.

Firefox was probably the largest of that competition and became the gold standard for use in web development.  Firefox also being as extensible as it is made it even easier to work with.  Firefox rendered web pages quickly and correctly. Chrome appeared and loaded even faster with stronger standards support than Firefox.

Now we run into problems though.  Since the majority of browsers are standards compliant and Internet Explorer is not, developers have to essentially create fixes or hacks to make their sites appear the way they are supposed to in Internet Explorer.  This effectively increases the time it takes to build a website and can be somewhat frustrating to the developer and/or client.  To add insult to injury, as the standards evolved, certain features have been rendered unusable because they just don't work in Internet Explorer.

Capabilities of W3C Standards

There are quite a few features that are dictated in the W3C specification for CSS3.  You can do things like generate graphics on your page that are fully scalable without using something like photoshop.  You can add drop shadows to your text.  You can embed fonts in your website.  You can create rounded corners without the use of a graphics program.  You can use multiple images in your background instead of just one.  Element borders can have images instead of just a single color. The list is quite impressive.  Unfortunately Internet Explorer ignores all of that, even with the latest version IE8.

The shining light is that IE9 has been announced and has been said to fully support HTML5 and CSS3 with Scalable Vector Graphics.  We don't know for sure how well the standards have been implemented because it's not available just yet.  However, there is hope for the future.  A lot of the latest browsers, like Chrome and Opera, are advertised as having really fast javascript engines to make pages load and perform faster. In fact, Microsoft announced that IE9 includes a brand new javascript engine to load pages even faster. 

The worst of it is that regardless of IE9 on the horizon, we still won't be able to use a lot of these new standards for years to come.  We are still waiting for IE6 to expire right now, and the browser is getting close to 10 years old.  It was originally released in 2001.  Since IE6 through IE8 are not standards compliant, it could be a long time before we see these new standards actually available for us to use as developers.

To illustrate this point, there's a website called "When can I use..." that shows a breakdown of the browsers that are currently out there and what they support.  It lets developers know when they can use certain elements of the current web standards.  After taking a look at it, it's pretty clear that most of the red flags are in Internet Explorer's column.  At the bottom it shows that as of right now, the most compliant browser is Google's Chrome at 88%.  Firefox is close behind at 86%.  Safari is next with 85%, followed by Opera with 80%.  Then there's Internet Explorer... The latest production version of IE, which is 8, is at a pitiful 28%.  Even with the preview information about IE9, Microsoft is still far behind with a 45% ranking.

If you'd like an example of what you can do with all these new web standards, take a look at a website for an event at the SXSW Interactive Conference.  You can find it at http://sxsw.beercamp.com/.  If you look at this website in Internet Explorer vs Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Opera, you can see a very big difference.  All of the website's graphics are done using CSS3.  The only exceptions are the logos provided by sponsors to the event.  Even simple things like mouse overs are done with CSS3.  Admittedly you could do a lot of what is featured on this page with graphical content, but the difference is that this page is fully scalable.  It'll render faster.  There's no waiting for large image files, and there are no plugins to make any of the animated effects happen.  There are many other examples out there.

Summing Things Up...

So, are these web standards all that important?  Your web page still loads, right?  That really depends on what you want the internet to be.  The FCC recently unveiled its national broadband plan that treats the web as what it is: the dominant media form of today.  It's going to continue to evolve into a much more dynamic medium.  If you're looking for a very interactive, beautiful, immersive experience with a lot of dynamic content that runs quickly, you may want to reconsider which browser you use.