OneAndOneIs2

Do you remember the early days of Firefox?

I've been using FF for over five years - I looked at the various Linux browsers and went with FF. It wasn't until I got the portable version installed at work, where they had a horrible locked-down IE, that I grew to *really* like it, but it always stood out as the best browser for the job, even in the days when version 1.0 was just a glint in Mozilla's eye.

And a lot of people said the tiny browser, built from components of an older browser long since trampled underfoot by Microsoft, would never catch on. It didn't render web pages properly. Not like IE.

Except, as we all know, it was actually IE that didn't render stuff properly. Firefox, like most browsers, did its best to be standards-compliant. IE deliberately didn't.

Me, I think MS deliberately broke IE. After all, having IE render pages differently from Netscape was an effective weapon, back in the day. You had to make your page work for one browser or the other, MS had lots of market share, so pages looked broken in NS and IE was seen as better. So it won.

I think it backfired on MS though, when they tried to use the same thing to keep FF out. Because Netscape vs Internet Explorer, you really didn't lose much by switching to IE. It didn't matter much.

But Firefox.. people LIKED this browser. They were passionate about it. It blocked pop-ups and other annoying things, it was small and fast, it was cross-platform.

And so we used it even when it showed web pages weirdly. And people who might never have even heard of "web standards" started getting annoyed at the way IE was ignoring the W3C. And as FF grew more popular, webmasters started having to go to the extra effort of making sites work for the ever-more-significant numbers of users that weren't using IE.

And today, with CSS being so popular, it's generally possible but annoying to get everything looking the same with different browsers. And everybody knows that when IE does one thing and other browsers don't, it's IE's fault, not the rest.

MS gambled that making IE non-standard would make everybody stick with it. They lost, and now they have a browser that pisses off web guys on a daily basis. And so they now have to go to all the effort of trying to get into compliance - which in fairness, they *are* gradually doing.

I'm working on learning CSS at the moment. (I recommend the Missing Manuals book on CSS for that purpose, by the way) So I'm having to do a lot of cross-browser checks. I have FF 3.5 and Safari 4.0 installed. I also have IE 3, 4, 5.01, 5.5, 6.0 AND 7.0 installed. And I only don't have IE 8 installed as well because I have certain misgivings about it.

I keep this blog standards-compliant - that's what the little buttons over on the bottom of the sidebar mean. It can be a lot of work sometimes, but there's a principle involved as well as practicality. When it comes to creating a modern web page, there are two distinct stages: Making it work properly, and then bodging it to make it work for IE as well. And that annoys me.

In Europe, when Windows 7 comes out, it will come without IE by default: MS have been forced by the EC to offer a choice of browsers.

If you know anyone likely to buy W7, for god's sake tell them to choose anything *but* IE when the time comes.

And buy a netbook with Chrome OS on it when it comes out, too.

Whatever it takes to make MS stop screwing the web up for web devs everywhere!