Forum Moderators: open
Second question: What browser feature (for want of a better word) do people see going mainstream (or more mainstream) in the coming year?
(MathML? SVG? CSS3? Others?)
Would be interested to hear opinions.....
They all work, some better than others, for different purposes. People have preferences, just deal with it and move on.
New Year's Resolution: no browser bashing threads this year.
Just scan this forum, there are dozens of threads just like the one started here.
What browser feature (for want of a better word) do people see going mainstream (or more mainstream) in the coming year?
Even though there are some new "features" I'd like to see out there I don't think we have reason to get our hopes up. If for no other reason -- IE is not going to support anything new for quite some time.
However, I do hope that most of the current standards (some of which are very old) will be better supported. I think we can hope for better CSS1 and CSS2 support. And, if the winds are blowing our way, hopefully the browsers will render pages more correctly. If anything is on my wish list it is elimination of the cross browser problems.
I'm more than happy to encourage people to state only positive reasons why they name their favourite browser, i.e. not to mention the negative aspects of their less favoured browsers.....
There's plenty of other disucssions on here!
I'm more than happy to encourage people to state only positive reasons why they name their favourite browser, i.e. not to mention the negative aspects of their less favoured browsers.....
Which is exactly what we're saying above. There are plenty of other discussion on the same generic topic. We don't need another one.
It doesn't matter what browser is the "best". IE will (continue to) be the most popular because it's preinstalled. There will be a minority of people who use others.
For a site to be marketable, the HTML / plugins will have to be coded to work with IE and Mozilla et al, regardless of their differences.
ISTM we're entering a period of stasis. Unless... something earth-shattering happens to cause a shift from IE to Moz. A killer XUL app maybe?
Some of these proposed installations are supposed to go all through the government, in Venezuela, Peru, Germany, Scandinavia to some degree, the Chinese Government is looking at a full switch, as are the vietnamese. Change will start outside the US, then may or may not trickle in.
Since IE is not available for these platforms this might not be all that abstract an issue quite soon.
Personally, I can't use IE anymore, it's too annoying, but Firebird is a geeky product which of course is why I like it, you can make it do useful things.
It appears at this time there will be no new mainstream (widely supported - i.e. new ie ) features for the next year or two
Still, Microsoft has promised to release bug fixes for IE6... and that should (technically) mean fixing the standards compliance.
However, I don't see those bugs being fixed anytime soon ;)
SVG seems pretty pointless when you have VRML already in place and with much better support (and obviously much more functionality).
Increasing uptake of Linux OS's in industry and governmentWhich means more home use because many people, once they are forced to compare, will probably switch either because they'll discover that IE isn't so great and there are other alternitives (I personally prefer Opera over Mozilla/Firebird, but I use them both), or just to have the same browser as at work.
To add a county to the list, Israel's Finance Ministry is switching to Linux. This might have a very large effect relitive dispite that Israel is a very small country since the Tech sector is very big here.
As far as which browser feature becomes more mainstream, I'm hoping for better CSS support from Web site end. I know that's not quite what you meant by "feature...going mainstream," but it is still an under utilized feature, and you didn't specify in your question why it will become more mainstream. Also, with more CSS usage by sites, the support on the browser end (read IE) will hopfully improve. Perhaps it's wishfull thinking, but then again...
What might strike you as strange is, at the company I work for, the thin-client web-based application we are developing is strictly targeted for IE6. No IE4 support, no mozilla, opera,etc. Not even sure if IE5 is supported to tell you the truth.
From many customers, we have heard that is entirely acceptable. Not one yet has complained about being forced to use IE6.
I get this doomsday feeling when periodically I run the app in mozilla and see everything go whacky. Yet, I wonder if cross-browser compatibility is really all that important for internal enterprise use.
Don't get me wrong, I would love knowing that our app runs great on both IE and Mozilla, but when none of your customers complain... do you spend the extra time and budget making it compatible for a browser that may be TOPS 4% of all browsers.
internal enterprise useDevelopment for an intranet and the Internet are two different ball games. Also, if you know which browser your target audiance uses, and you don't care about any other, the rules are different. For example, if your Web site is www.mathbrowser-users-group.org (didn't bother to check if site really exists; the browser was listed at evolt.org), what does in matter how IE renders your pages? If you know 100% of your users use IE, go ahead and use VBScript to your hearts content. The problems of browser compatibility only occur when you try to appeal to a mass audiance.
That being said, there is still an advantage to achiveing compatibility in that it gives the flexability to change browsers. Whether it's worth the cost is another story.
Here is another possible disadvantage for not having cross-browser compatibility. I visited a site today to look at appartment rentals. I was using Opera 7.23, and the site broke badly. So I tried Firefox 0.8, and it still had problems (but not as bad), but in IE6 (after I cleaned off the dust :)) it looked fine. So now I'm planning on trying to convince them why they should hire me to fix their site. (I'm sorry, did I say disadvantage? I meant to say advnantage!:))
In the end, either you build right, or someone else will.
I get this doomsday feeling when periodically I run the app in mozilla and see everything go whacky. Yet, I wonder if cross-browser compatibility is really all that important for internal enterprise use.
Probably not.
But fast-forward a few years till Microsoft has released IE7 (and patched it 15 times since release). Will your app still work correctly?
(Bear in mind that the reason it looks 'whacky' in Mozilla et al is probably because your layouts depend on bugs in IE. What if Microsoft decide to fix those bugs?)
Sticking to w3c standards helps to make apps/web sites future-proof as well as cross-browser.
That said, if you already have a large codebase its probably not worth the effort to try to convert to standards for an intranet app (just be careful what your service provision covers :))
Public web sites are a different matter tho and I personally think that anyone producing new sites today that do not follow standards or try to be cross-browser seriously needs their head examined.
However, I previously worked in a university where about 20% of people used a non-Windows OS (and browser). When salesdroids came to demo products they'd often say their product "requires IEx" and follow up by saying this wasn't a problem because "everyone uses IEx". We'd follow this up by saying "goodbye".
Point is, if you want to break into a sector like higher education, cross-browser/platform compatibility can be a major selling point. It all comes down to designing for your audience/customers.
On a vaguely related note, anyone seeing demand (or a future...) for xforms? I saw a post on a w3c list from Apple and Opera saying they wouldn't implement xforms because it was too complicated for users, and a similar response from the Moz developers on bugzilla. The WG responded by saying xforms aren't complicated, you just don't understand it... ;)
I know Mozilla strives for W3C compliancy, but I'm not sure even they are there yet. Their website still lists bugs in the browser, and most of our issues lay with style tags. Netscape still seems to have some issues with onChange events if I recall, and these little details seem to balloon a simple code re-write into such a big frustrating ordeal.
I know Mozilla strives for W3C compliancy, but I'm not sure even they are there yet.They're not, but they are probibly the closest. Opera isn't too far behind, while IE is bearly in the same ballpark (I'm not sure if I'm being to easy or to hard on IE).
IMHO, the more companies who more away from IE, the better it is for IE. They are so far ahead in market share that even if they lost 10-15% they would still be orerwhelming, but at least they would start to have more pressure to compeat. Companies go with MS because it's the safe and easy choise, not because it's the best.
But we're starting to go off topic here; maybe it's time to quit while we're ahead, or at least get back to the topic.
