Closer To The Ideal

Tragic. There is a suite of tests that measures how much each web browser complies with web standards. IE 9, to be released next year, still measures lower than even FireFox 2.0, which was released back in 2006.

Mark Pilgrim has written a fantastic article which looks back at the conversation in 1993 that lead to the introduction of the IMG tag, and draws conclusions about the evolution of HTML. He follows the conversation over the course of several months, as several ideas for new technologies are considered and rejected. Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, Tony Johnson and many others participated in the conversation.

After reviewing the full history, Pilgrim concludes:

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.

And then:

But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins.

That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. And I certainly don’t mean to say that shipping code before a standard will produce the best solution. Marc’s <img> element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.

Some articles I want to remember for later:

How to handle the CSS differences between IE6, IE7 and IE8.

Mockflow is a new online mockup/wireframing tool. Worth a look.

Massively collaborative mathematics.

FireFox can crash any machine. Not “crash” in the sense of “blue screen of death” but crash as in “uses up all memory so the machine becomes unresponsive”. This is a reliable fact of using FireFox, regardless of whether you are on Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, or Mac OS X (I can’t speak of Camino, as I don’t use it).

Sometimes I say this to other programmers and they respond “It’s not FireFox that is the problem, it is the plugins that you use – it is FireBug and Session Manager and all the others.” Of course, any programmer who reveals this attitude needs to be re-educated. If you offer a plugin system that is unable to manage the plugins, then maybe you should not offer that plugin system? It suggests a (possibly frightening?) willingness to shirk responsibility if a programmer defends a plugin system that can crash a computer.

I wonder what Brendan Eich is thinking?

One suggestion for others: if you use FireFox, every time a new version of FireFox comes out, FireFox will ask you if you want to upgrade. I used to always say “yes”. Now I realize, if your computer is more than a year old, you should say “no”. Each version of FireFox tends to be heavier and slower than the previous version. My Ubuntu machine is from 2006, and that is part of the reason why FireFox is so slow on it.

On my Windows machine, I just switched over to Google Chrome as my new default browser. I’m giving up on FireFox. On my Ubuntu machine, I am stuck with FireFox for now. I’m not aware of any other serious browsers for Linux.

For email, I would love to give up on Thunderbird, if I could find a substitute. I run Thunderbird on my main desktop machine which runs Ubuntu. Thunderbird has had a persistent bug that has survived several upgrades (of both Thunderbird and Ubuntu). The bug is with the address auto-completion. If I type an address fast, hit “Enter” to accept and start typing again fast, Thunderbird crashes. This can lose a lot of work for me (Where “work” might simply mean “Opened email and left them open because I found some that were important and so answering them will take some time.”). Apparently there is no equivalent of SessionManager for Thunderbird, no way of remembering which emails were open, waiting for a response, when Thunderbird crashes. No, instead, after Thunderbird crashes, I need to re-start it, go back 3 days, and then read through all my email again, looking for the important ones.

At work we had a deadline today, and I worked through the weekend to meet it. I kept getting feedback from various people testing the site. Some of the email I got was thoughtful, and offered intelligent suggestions about what we should do next. By this morning, I had about 20 emails open, waiting for me to have the time and focus to write a reply. Then Thunderbird crashed and they all vanished. I yelled so loud my throat was sore. Now I have to go back to Friday and read through all the email again, to find the ones that I wanted to respond to.

If I could find something better than Thunderbird, that runs on Linux, I’d switch immediately.

I find this hard to believe, but W3 Schools statistics suggest that, as of January 2009, FireFox is in wider user than all versions of Internet Explorer. For the month of January, they show Internet Explorer as now having only 44.8% market share, whereas FireFox is now up to 45.5%, a gain of 1.1 percentage points over the previous month.

If these statistics are true, or even within 5% of being true, then we are back to a world last seen in 1996, when no one web browser dominated the scene.

I am confused why Microsoft is allowing this to happen. They still have the old advantages – dominance of the desktop and therefore an easy way of distributing their web browser. Why are they not doing more to push IE?