Anyone remember the Browser Wars of the mid-to-late 90s?
That was back in the day when Microsoft and Netscape were pretty much the only browsers worth considering. It's amusing to read some of the comparisons that appeared in the press back then. Consider a report about the release of Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. The big focus was on the speed at which pages loaded and displayed, the level of HTML eye candy support, the availabiilty of plug-ins, and the debate over Java versus ActiveX.
With Windows 98, Microsoft started wiring Internet Explorer into Windows so that people would be inclined to use it instead of downloading the multimegabyte bundle that Netscape was purveying. With lots of people getting the Internet via dialup, it was a shrewd strategy, working so well that by the dawn of the new milennium, Microsoft owned the browser market.
What's happened over the years? Broadband became pervasive, making downloads less of a hassle. HTML got standardized, and site designers started moving away from table-based hacks to CSS. The mortal remains of Netscape's source code got rewritten into Mozilla and then Firefox. Microsoft took its market share for granted let its browser development stagnate. Alternative browsers, like Apple Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome.
But a few other things happened...
I was thinking about all of this as I read a report on some recent browser comparison tests that were published over at Lifehacker. A nontrivial amount of the article was devoted to discussing JavaScript performance. That's because most of the heavily used web apps, like Gmail, rely extensively on JavaScript to work their magic, and the continuous improvement of JavaScript performance enables future enhancements to those applications.
By the benchmark accounts, Internet Explorer is getting left behind, and that's not a good place to be with the rise of a new browser war.
That was back in the day when Microsoft and Netscape were pretty much the only browsers worth considering. It's amusing to read some of the comparisons that appeared in the press back then. Consider a report about the release of Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. The big focus was on the speed at which pages loaded and displayed, the level of HTML eye candy support, the availabiilty of plug-ins, and the debate over Java versus ActiveX.
With Windows 98, Microsoft started wiring Internet Explorer into Windows so that people would be inclined to use it instead of downloading the multimegabyte bundle that Netscape was purveying. With lots of people getting the Internet via dialup, it was a shrewd strategy, working so well that by the dawn of the new milennium, Microsoft owned the browser market.
What's happened over the years? Broadband became pervasive, making downloads less of a hassle. HTML got standardized, and site designers started moving away from table-based hacks to CSS. The mortal remains of Netscape's source code got rewritten into Mozilla and then Firefox. Microsoft took its market share for granted let its browser development stagnate. Alternative browsers, like Apple Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome.
But a few other things happened...
- JavaScript got standardized enough across browsers that writing portable code (aside from events) became a manageable task. Toolkits were developed to help close what gaps remained.
- Computers began to have enough CPU horsepower that it became possible write substantially complicated JavaScript programs that were still responsive.
- The XMLHttpRequest object, the wellspring from which AJAX flows, became available on more browsers than just Internet Explorer.
I was thinking about all of this as I read a report on some recent browser comparison tests that were published over at Lifehacker. A nontrivial amount of the article was devoted to discussing JavaScript performance. That's because most of the heavily used web apps, like Gmail, rely extensively on JavaScript to work their magic, and the continuous improvement of JavaScript performance enables future enhancements to those applications.
By the benchmark accounts, Internet Explorer is getting left behind, and that's not a good place to be with the rise of a new browser war.
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