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The problem I have is that people seem to forget 10 years ago ... IE6 was the only decent browser.
I went off about targeting webkit because it is becoming the new IE6, I see a lot of people targeting webkit specific extensions, especially on mobile devices. There is no decent competitor to webkit on smartphones and we will end up with sites just not working/looking odd on other devices because webkit has been targeted.
Edited 2011-03-15 20:50 UTC
The problem I have is that people seem to forget 10 years ago ... IE6 was the only decent browser.
I went off about targeting webkit because it is becoming the new IE6, I see a lot of people targeting webkit specific extensions, especially on mobile devices. There is no decent competitor to webkit on smartphones and we will end up with sites just not working/looking odd on other devices because webkit has been targeted. "
Clarification: Konqueror uses KHTML. Opera uses its own renderer, and Firefox and its derivatives use gecko. Chrome, Safari, iOS and Android use webkit.
Amongst that lot, gecko is the most prevalent, not webkit.
With the imminent release of Firefox 4, there will very soon be a version of Firefox for mobiles:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/
Enjoy.
I think what most people forget is that Microsoft include IE with Windows for free when everybody else was charging for their software which effectively killed the browser market. In fairness standards didn't really mean much back then in the original browser war, but once Microsoft dominated the field it meant even less.
My problem with Microsoft is that when they owned the market they just stopped developing IE. By then websites were being designed around IE and not any real kind of web standards so I find it rather hard to say all other browsers sucked when websites were geared toward IE.
Flash forward to Firefox. They rekindled the browser war, but that didn't jump start redevelopment of IE. It wasn't till Firefox started gaining ground and taking points away from Microsoft that the 800-pound gorilla started working hard on IE 7 and 8 and now 9.
All that aside I don't care what browser people chose. Actually I would love to see the browser market split at least five ways with no one browser having a significant market share.





Member since:
2007-01-18
Maybe I wasn't clear in the way I said it. I don't think Microsoft has an obligation to support IE 9 on XP. I'm not deamonizing them for not doing it. I'm simply suggesting that IE 9 growth will be stunted because it's not supported on XP and will give other browsers even more opportunity to gain market share.
I expect probably all computers with Vista and 7 on them to get IE 9 at some point.
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That second part you lost me. I said competition is good and you more or less repeated my sentiment and then said my attitude is what caused the IE problem in the first place. Then you went off about how everybody is targeting webkit. As far as I'm aware IE has it's own render engine, Firefox has it's own, Chrome has it's own, Opera has it's own. Safari and Konquerer use Webkit. So I'm not real sure where you are actually going with that.