In the last 9 months there has been a major new release from each of the big players in the Web Browser market, and yet this is not something out of the ordinary in the IT industry.
If you are a Windows user, you have quite a range to choose from, and they are all competing to be the best, for you, for free. Depending on the target audience of your site, you can have drastic differences in browser usage statistics, as a simple example, a site selling a Mac application will have almost zero percent Internet Explorer users.
Many sites like to keep their personal usage statistics close to their chest, but some sites specialise on broader usage statistics across the web, like marketshare.hitslink.com with May 2009 having the following:
Browser Usage May 2009 from marketshare.hitslink.com
Why don’t people upgrade?
Windows Internet Explorer
Unfortunately for Web Developers, you have people from all walks of life, young and old, tech-savvy to computer illiterate, IT professionals to hobbyists who want to use some of the same websites, and many of these people are still using old browsers.
I can’t imagine my grandmother upgrading her second hand Windows 95 computer that you would have to pay someone to take off your hands, to download the latest version of Internet Explorer 8, and I feel sorry for employees that go into work, forced to use Internet Explorer 6 because their company doesn’t have the time or budget to update internal systems for cross-browser compatibility.
How does this affect people that do keep up to date?
Mozilla Firefox
This means, as Web Developers, we have to build our websites to cater for everyone. Although the list of ‘hacks’ that are needed for each of the old browsers is pretty well defined by now, it still increases the development time and complexity seemingly exponentially. The most frustrating thing for Web Developers is that the majority of this list is dedicated to Internet Explorer 6, and almost all of the remainder to it’s successor, Internet Explorer 7. No matter how perfectly standards compliant you have made your web site, without these ‘hacks’, the page is more often than not completely broken in Internet Explorer 6 and won’t be quite what you asked for in Internet Explorer 7, yet is usually what you asked for in Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
Web Developers have to deal with this every day, but for seasoned Web Developers it is standard fare, so there’s no problem, right? For the majority of sites available now, this is just part of the job and no big deal, but it begs the question why new browsers are being released so frequently.
Why are there new browsers anyway?
Google Chrome
New browsers aren’t just about displaying web pages more ‘correctly’. If we ignore the extra features like tabs and bookmarks and all the things unrelated to what Web Developers do, new browsers are displaying web pages better, doing it faster, and adding compatibility for new and better web page standards and features. My favourite example of this is CSS3 and it’s ability to have rounded borders, taking all of 3 seconds to implement, while achieving rounded borders in older browsers requires creating images, strange code, and an assortment of ‘hacks’ for various browsers, sometimes taking upwards of half an hour just to make a ‘simple’ rounded rectangle let alone all of your boxes to be displayed in such a way.
It doesn’t stop at making things easier for the developer, it allows for a huge range of options for developers. Web sites are being used for more and more things, which in turn requires more computer power to process information, and if used on a large scale, this requires a whole network of server computers to do the user’s work. But if the user has a computer capable of sharing some of the processing, then it can lead to faster Web Applications, faster response times and load times, and a whole host of other advantages. A site that runs with the idea of using the client’s computer to carry out some of the operations rather than the host server is referred to as a ‘thick client’ (also called ‘fat’ or ‘rich’ clients) with the opposite, a web page that does little processing other than to simply display html, is called a ‘thin client’ (also called ‘lean’ or ’slim’ clients).
What is a “thick client”?
Google Documents
An example of a “thick client” is Google Docs. This has the basic functionality of Microsoft Office, but from within a web browser, for free, and your documents are accessible worldwide no matter what computer you’re on. Gmail is another example. And Google take a proactive approach here - if you use Gmail with Internet Explorer 6, you get a notification that you can run it an average of twice as fast by upgrading your browser to Internet Explorer 7.
What do the End Users get?
A high level look at this new version of the browser wars, sees the major players fighting for mind and marketshare. Microsoft (Internet Explorer) is always out to win at any cost. Apple (Safari) creates a smooth integrated experience. Google (Chrome) is creating a platform to deliver it’s webservices without being beholden to others. And Mozilla (Firefox) aims to provide a true open-source alternative.
Whatever the result, this fierce competition can only benefit end users in the long term.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice article. On top of CSS3 I would also list HTML5 support as being an important benefit of modern browsers, particularly when you consider the possibilities it brings with “thick clients” and rich internet applications. For example, if Google Wave is to be widely adopted it will require average Joe Consumer to have a browser/client with CSS3 and HTML5 support. Hopefully cool technologies such as this will increase people’s motivation to upgrade their browsers.
You are right beattz. And Google Wave is something I am particularly excited about at the moment. If implemented correctly, and with enough uptake, it has the capacity to evolve online communications to another level.
Unfortunately I honestly believe we will be stuck with Internet Explorer 6 having a significant market-share for quite some time - perhaps up to 5 years. The primary reason for this is corporations, and the fact that so many internal web apps are built to only run on IE6 (yes - very bad / frugal decision making by someone). It will take some time before these guys have the budget to migrate their internal tools to be browser compliant, and embrace newer browsers.
Unfortunately, I agree that IE6 will hang around like a bad smell for a while yet, but I question whether their primary users (corporate intranet types) would fall into the target market of many web apps, meaning that depending on your product you could probably get away with dropping support for IE6 and not lose much of your audience. Plus you could arguably justify that loss of audience by the gain in performance and features, not to mention the drop in development time.
Also, further on the HTML 5 discussion, this article discusses whether third-party technologies (Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX) will become obsolete:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/html-5-could-it-kill-flash-and-silverlight-291
I actually wrote the article before the Google Wave preview, but after seeing it I thought that it would have been a really good example. I totally agree about these kind of things being motivation to upgrade, but I also wonder if it will be too intimidating for many.