HTML, XHTML and CSS All-In-One for Dummies - Andy Harris [28]
Mosaic/Netscape — the killer application
In the beginning, browsers were written by small teams. The most important early browser was Mosaic, written by a team based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign–Urbana, Illinois.
Several members of that NCSA team decided to create a completely commercial Web browser. Netscape was born, and it quickly became the most prominent and important browser, with 97 percent market share at the peak of its popularity.
Microsoft enters (and wins) the battle
Microsoft came onto the scene with Internet Explorer (IE). A bitter fight (sometimes called the Browser Wars) ensued between Microsoft and Netscape. Each browser added new features regularly. Eventually, entire sets of tags evolved, so a Web page written for IE would not always work in Netscape and vice versa. Developers had three bad choices: pick only one browser to support, write two versions of the page, or stick with the more limited set of features common to both browsers.
Netscape 6.0 was a technical disappointment, and Microsoft capitalized, earning a nearly complete lock on the browser market. Microsoft’s version of standards became the only standards because there was virtually no competition. After Microsoft won the fight, there was a period of stability but very little innovation.
Firefox shakes up the world
A new browser rose from the ashes of Netscape (in fact, its original name was Firebird, after the mythical birds that rise from their own ashes). The name was later changed to Firefox, and it breathed new life into the Web. Firefox has several new features that are very appealing to Web developers:
♦ Solid compliance to standards: Firefox followed the W3C standards almost perfectly.
♦ Tabbed browsing: One browser window can have several panels, each with its own page.
♦ Easy customization: Firefox developers encouraged people to add improvements and extensions to Firefox. This led to hundreds of interesting add-ons.
♦ Improved security: By this time, a number of security loopholes in IE were publicized. Although Firefox has many of the same problems, it has a much better reputation for openness and quick solutions.
Overview of the prominent browsers
The browser is the primary tool of the Web. All your users view your page with one browser or another, so you need to know a little about each of them.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8
Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE or simply IE) is the most popular browser on the planet. Before Firefox came along, a vast majority of Web users used IE. Explorer is still extremely prevalent because it comes installed with Microsoft Windows. Of course, it also works exclusively with Microsoft Windows. Mac and Linux aren’t supported (users don’t seem too upset about it, though).
IE7 featured some welcome additions, including tabbed browsing and improved compliance with the W3C standards. Cynics have suggested these improvements were a response to Firefox. IE7 was quickly replaced with the most recent version, Internet Explorer 8. IE8 has much improved speed and standards-compliance, but it still lags behind the other major browsers in these regards.
If you write your code to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards, it almost always displays as expected in IE7/8.
IE versions 7 and 8 do not fully support HTML 5. If you want to experience these features, you need to use one of the other modern browsers described in this chapter.
Older versions of Internet Explorer
The earlier versions of IE are still extremely important because so many computers out there don’t have IE7 or IE8 installed yet.
Microsoft made a version of IE available for programmers to embed in their own software; therefore, many custom browsers are actually IE with a different skin. Most of the custom browsers that are installed with the various broadband services are simply dressed up forms of IE. Therefore, IE is even more common than you