When Acid2 was released, it took a few months for Safari to pass it (webkit), a year for Opera (presto) and 3 for Firefox. Internet Explorer took 4 years, with the release of Internet Explorer 8.
Now that Acid3 is released, both Safari and Opera managed to pass it under a year, quickly followed by Google Chrome which also runs a build of webkit (Safari’s engine). Although not complete, beta versions of Firefox 3.5 are already ready near passing the test.
On top of that, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome’s latest versions all support the CSS 3 @font-face property, allowing custom fonts to be embedded in web pages. Some other CSS 3 niceties are being supported as well, such as multiple backgrounds, etc.
Internet Explorer is nowhere near.
Developer Frustration
The result is developer frustration. Since IE is still used by the majority of the world, supporting it is not an option if you want your web business to work. So because of one browser, you’re stuck on not using features which have been included in all major browsers since the dawn of time (CSS Tables, although finally supported on IE8) and you’re also stuck waiting another round for those newer features, like embedded fonts, that could make your website better.
Google, Chrome, Wave and HTML 5
Google knew what they were doing in picking Safari’s engine (it’s open source!) for Google Chrome. Afterall, webkit is the fastest moving engine out there, not only in terms of shear web page render speed, but also in terms of standard. Beating everyone else in the standards race isn’t new to Apple. Strategically, it would have been ideal if Google couldn’t have put their hands on that engine, speaking in Apple’s favor of course. But webkit wouldn’t be so advanced if it wasn’t for its open-source nature. Everybody wins in that case, especially developers. It’s one less browser to care for, because virtually anything that works in Safari works exactly the same in Chrome, and vice-versa.
Google is a fairly innovative company, but more specifically, they’re freaks of doing everything strictly withing the browser’s capabilities. Forget about RIA frameworks like Flex or Silverlight at Google, everything happens in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The prospect is interesting though: What happens when Google wants to do something that’s not yet possible in browsers? Wave.
As mentioned in their Google I|O presentation, Google Wave, literally e-mail re-invented, is a web application + protocol that needs HTML features that aren’t even in the HTML 5 spec. Of course, they managed to make it happen with JavaScript, but Google is still applying to put those specs in HTML 5, and considering their position and especially their participation in webkit, it’s almost guaranteed they’ll get anything they want in there, including very early support in Safari and Chrome.
If you watched the keynote about Wave, you’ll notice that it ran in Chrome and Safari, on Windows and Mac OS X respectively. It looks obvious at first, they both use the same engine, but wait, ask yourself that: Why didn’t Google show it for Firefox? Why did Google bother to show it on Safari at all? It’s almost a given what Google meant; webkit is the most advanced engine and not even Firefox could follow.
Is it possible Google, in both an effort at further eating away from Microsoft, and as a gift to the developer community, intends to leave the non-standard browsers, in other words IE, without support for Wave? They’d even have a very good reason to do it, and Wave is a protocol so Microsoft could just make its own IE-compatible Live Wave.
History Tells
It actually doesn’t tell much as of the current situation. In the 1990s, Netscape got eradicated by IE simply because Microsoft’s resources far outpaced anything Netscape was capable of. Internet Explorer was both more stable, free (Netscape wasn’t free until 1998), and especially more widely distributed; bundled with Microsoft’s OS, a first in that industry. Since IE won because of Windows, both on a finance and availability measure, attributing IE’s success to its engine isn’t very exact. That makes history totally irrelevant as far as the web industry goes right now.
It’s even more unclear how a browser manages to gather popularity since both reasons feed each other. The first is that the features are better and users like it more and the second is that developers prefer developing for that platform. The third might be accessibility (ie. bundling with an OS) but it doesn’t count in something that really makes the user switch.
As far as it’s going, Firefox has largely gained its popularity because of its clear superiority to IE 6. Tabs and better security, seen in the form of more efficient pop-up blocking, a stop to malware, and arguably speed, prompted people to switch to Firefox. However, brewing behind was the developer community, who suddenly realized there was much more out there than what IE 6 was capable of. Very quickly IE 6 became hated for its quirks and lack of proper functioning and the whole IE suite still retains that perception amongst developers today.
As the Mac increases in popularity, Safari becomes more popular, much in the same way IE originally won the first browser war. But Firefox keeps eating away from Internet Explorer’s market share while the others keep growing. Really, the only browser losing market share is IE. Some websites even lack support for IE completely and Firefox has recently seen its European market share get the majority. Developers even test their websites in IE after having developed them in Firefox.
Game-changing Mechanics
There’s a very inevitable game-changing mechanism coming up, if users see that their websites don’t work properly in IE anymore, they’ll switch. Take Opera for example, most users who’ve heard about it say they’ve decided to stick with IE/Firefox because Opera is broken; it doesn’t render pages correctly. The reality is Opera is a much less broken browser than even Firefox, it’s always been faster as adopting new standards and passing Acid tests, trailing behind Safari. But that doesn’t change the perception for a regular user that it’s not the website that’s broken but the browser.
Some less knowledgeable developers even talk about “fixing an Opera quirk” while it works very well in Firefox. In reality though, if they have to do that, they’re code is wrong, not the browser. Fixing an Opera quirk essentially means making your code right because Firefox interprets it wrong.
So theoretically, looking at IE’s state of support for standards and the speed at which it supports them makes it an ideal candidate for abandonment. Microsoft can keep doing all of their advertising, it doesn’t matter, the other browsers have better engines that very tightly keep up with one another more than ever. If Microsoft doesn’t invest serious energy into making IE a top browser engine, they’re going to lose the 2nd browser war, and probably much faster, because of Google, than the current rate of decrease.
