Over at Slashdot a link to an essay about the forthcoming “Browser War”. Or I mean, the “Browser War” that has never ended. Either way. I was not impressed with the article, but there is one section that attracted the eye (and that’s where the author should have been focussing on):
“Explorer cannot support today’s technology, or even yesterday’s, because of the limitations of its code engine.”
This is exactly the reason why Mozilla appears to be steaming up recently: a couple of years the move was made to radically redesign its renderer to keep an eye open on the emerging W3 standards (CSS was still under discussion). The same happened with the Opera and Konqueror engine. Now, open up the Explorer’s “About Box”: Look for the Mosaic hint. See? Since day and night Explorer has been built around Mosaic. Remember Spyglass? If you’re using Explorer, you’re using ‘second-hand’ technology. Where do you start fixing ‘second-hand’ bugs?
I start to wonder if this is the reason why Microsoft is so reluctant of updating their browser: it isn’t possible to support the new standards without redesigning the internal renderer of Explorer. So while Microsoft seems to have won the “browser war”, looking from a developer’s point of view it looks like Mozilla and Konqueror, Safari and Opera are actually the real front runners, practically stealing the show. It’s not a browser war anymore, it’s a “Browser Race”. And in this race there can be only one gold, one silver and one bronze medal.