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I find it amazing that so many sites aren't browser independent.
It actually takes effort to make a site dependent on a particular set of browsers. It's rather easy to make one that works in all of them.

"It actually takes effort to make a site dependent on a particular set of browsers. It's rather easy to make one that works in all of them."

You are not a web developer, are you? Usually it goes like this: "Good, it works on Firefox/Opera/Safari but... not on IE. OK, lets make it work. Oops, now it only works right on IE." Back and forth a few times until it works in both camps or ran out of time (meaning: "leave the last version that IE rendered OK, since that's what most of our users will have").

Firefox users are increasing, IE 7 is a bit more standards complaint, and the "forced update" will help, but there are still lots of people with broken, outdated browsers out there.

I think the developers made a good point in the video--just because a user is using an outdated, minority-platform browser, does not mean it should be blocked without any means of circumvention. If the user is using Konqueror, they already know that there might be one or two minor quirks in rendering, especially if they're using an ancient version! But far better to let the user access an improperly rendered site, and then maybe decide to upgrade their browser, then to simply build you're website so no one can SEE it at all unless they have a specific version of IE or Firefox.

It actually takes effort to make a site dependent on a particular set of browsers. It's rather easy to make one that works in all of them.

Uh.... no. I wish that were the case.

With IE7, CSS is a bit less of a mess and png supports transparency, but that's about it.

IE's DOM is still awful. Trying to get AJAX to work on all browsers as well as IE is a nightmare. What's even worse is that IE still doesn't support XML namespaces, so all the cool XML based stuff like XHTML, XForms, XUL, XBL, SVG and many others can't be used.

IE still parties like it's 1999.

Edited 2006-12-14 03:00

It'd be really nice if more big sites would become browser independent. The browser string thing REALLY bugs me. Trying to visit sites in opera or Konqueror can be a horrible task sometimes.

It's not as bad as it used to be.

Opera's pretty good though I used to get the odd site where some element was layed out right in the middle of the page or something silly like that. The only two sites I couldn't use properly were my online banking site and my hardware firewall web gui (?).

I started using Konq once I moved to 86_x64, and am actually impressed with how well it works now, less issues than with Opera. Came across a few that were strange, but I switched the useragent to Safari and everything mostly works. Even my online banking, which was formerly the sole domain of IE and sometimes Firefox.

Still, the situation is a bit ridiculous. I mean, really, I have to have my built-in linux browser emulate the built-in OSX browser in order to avoid using the built-in Windows browser.

One guy's doing that (although it's Webkit), and it renders pages DAMN fast.

http://try.swift.ws/index.php/Main_Page

But the whole "alternative to IE" thing takes another turn with XUL (and XAML), and if a working equivalent could be made for KHTML/Webkit or any other layout engine. XUL-on-Gecko makes Mozilla's famous extensions possible, and constitutes the main moral dilemma for those who would *like to* opt for Safari, Konqueror, or even Opera to spite Firefox for its infamous/controversial memory leaks.

BTW, I think its worth mentioning that George Staikos worked on a project called KaXUL back in 2003 which would allow for XUL to be handled in Konqueror.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaXUL

If anyone wants to combine his work with WebKit sometime, KaXUL still resides in KDE's WebSVN:

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdenonbeta/kaxul/

Konqueror doesn't need XUL to have plugins. KDE has KXMLGUI.

We're talking about extensions of the browser itself (Adblock, Greasemonkey), not plugins into the browser from other applications (Flash, Java).

Extentions or plugins, it does not really matter, Konqueror do not need XUL to get any of those. It already has plenty of them, most are called tools. Try opening the Settings->Configure Extensions.

From my prejudgement, Konqueror's "Extensions" sounds like they have to be installed as executables into the operating system rather than into the browser itself.

In that case, it sounds just like every other browser which depends upon the host OS's native shell (Win32) or widget set (Cocoa).

In the video Staikos said a Qt4 version of WebKit would find its way to Windows in the near future--so I expect we'll see improvements soon (whether under the Swift project or elsewhere).

Aside from Swift, Adobe is porting WebKit to Windows as well for use in their Apollo project. This will be really cool once it is released, cross-platform (*NIX, OSX, WIN) desktop applications built with html, js, css, flash, pdf. They mentioned that their work with WebKit will be given back to the open source community as well.

webkit by itself isn't going anywhere. it has to be in full featured browser. and it has to be promoted...anyone heard of k-meleon?