Alas no more, browser wars

The days of the great browser wars are long gone. Most people would probably say this is no bad thing. I would have to largely agree. Microsoft's determination to produce a product good enough to make it too much bother for users to download and install Netscape resulted in a better browser experience for everyone.

Today, the browser authors seem to rest on their laurels. Even the newcomer Firefox doesn't seem to have added anything new since launch, and some old bugs remain unfixed. Opera makes the claims of being foremost in innovation, but in practice this doesn't amount to a great deal.

I find myself hankering for the days when competition between the browsers led to improvements for everyone. It looks like we've reached a position where IE is entrenched in its own bugs and quirks and will never need to change: it's the de-facto standard. Set against this is the W3C with their actual standards, which the other browsers attempt to follow to the letter, not always successfully.

Or maybe I'd just settle for a few improvements to Firefox or Opera. The latter would be a great browser apart from the lack of any useful plugins. It ends up missing a lot of the functionality of Firefox, and ultimately is not really better at emulating IE.

While it might be a bit of a retreat of principles, it would make perfect sense for the authors of both Opera and Firefox to incorporate a mode that can be toggled on called 'IE emulation mode'.

I suppose there will always be people who think it's a good idea to write things in .asp so Microsoft have ultimately bundled their way to victory with that one. Perhaps with Linux usage rising, the .asp camp might start to rethink their position. Is it really necessary to run a proprietary plugin system when there are so many open script languages? jscript as quite powerful enough to begin with, and the install for java isn't such a big thing for broadband users.

This raises the old ghost. Did Sun do the right thing by stopping Microsoft from introducing arbitrary and proprietary extensions to their Java vm in breach of the licensing terms? Did MS do the right thing by turning on Sun and refusing to distribute Java? Certainly, from the cynical position, Microsoft did the best thing for themselves. It is rather doubtful that it was best for their users.

Despite Microsoft's ire, Java is still around. It's by no means a perfect language (what is?) and it might even be that C# is somewhat better, but it remains one of the better languages available for multiplatform development today. Could a future deal between Google and Sun see a resurgence in Java? There's certainly no evidence that's likely to happen right now, but I suppose some of us are hoping...

posted by Peter Wake @ 12:48 am