Thursday, November 13, 2008

Browser Wars

In 1994, Netscape put up the first fences on the Web in so-called browser wars. In order to attract users, they threw universality to the wind and created a set of extensions to HTML that only Netscape could handle. For example, Web surfers using Netscape could view pages with different size and color text, photographs in JPEG format, background color and images, and in later versions, Multiple pages in a single window, called frames. Surfers with any other browser would get errors and funny looking results. Or nothing at all.

But people liked those extensions so much that they flocked to Netscape. By June of 1996, it had become the most popular computer program in the world with 38 million users.

Microsoft soon joined in, and started putting a fence in its own chunk of the Web. Again, to attract users they added non-standard extensions to HTML that only Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser, could recognize.



So who do you design for? Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Flock users? It's a designer's nightmare and the web is suffering because of it.

By:
Elizabeth Castro
HTML 4 for the World Wide Web, Fourth Edition
Visual QuickStart Guide

16 comments:

dede said...

I use mozilla firefox, faster...any suggestion whic one better?

Icymar "Iceman" Tagimacruz said...

Hi I also use Mozilla firefox and flock.. there faster..

Anonymous said...

I mostly design have IE in mind but also use other browser to see how it looks on them

Anonymous said...

based on my opinion: it's still FF is the best for browsing , with lot of extensions you can use, make your browsing great and astonishing :)

Aldhis said...

I can't really tell the different related with fast web browser.
But again, maybe because the connection in Indonesia is not that good.. :P
I'm using Mozila at home with Mac, and IE with PC at office.

Anonymous said...

I surf using Firefox... and testings on IE as most of my clients are still using IE... =D

Anonymous said...

I think mozilla is perfect one..

Unknown said...

I use Safari. If you check current speed tests Safari and Opera actually are the fastest, especially when it comes to loading JavaScript & CSS. Firefox does have nice extensions though.
I despise IE.

Icymar "Iceman" Tagimacruz said...

hi guys thanks a lot for droppin by.. I also use IE,FF, Opera, Netscape and safari for testing..

Anonymous said...

I love my OPERA browser! I just find it so convenient! I don't really need to re-open the sites that I've been to. It's not like when you close the browsers, it will not restore the sites when you open it again.

Icymar "Iceman" Tagimacruz said...

hi X..how are you? thanks for droppn by., I also use flock and opera..

Anonymous said...

me opera and fx. i shelved ie a long time ago & later flock

Icymar "Iceman" Tagimacruz said...

hi pinoy apache.. thanks a lot for visiting.. i used flock now..

Kangaroo said...

Hi..thanks for the share infos about web designing..keep it up!!!

Icymar "Iceman" Tagimacruz said...

thanks kangaro..

Jimmy said...

Safari 4.0 is the fastest on my mac. I miss the add-on's that firefox has but I prefer the look and feel of Safari!

Cheers