I am currently developing web applications that would blow your socks off, if you ever were to see them (you won’t because they’re internal tools for my company). The World Wide Web and its associated technologies have matured to a startling degree, and things that I never dreamed possible are easier than I can believe. Functionality that nobody ever intended the web to have is now normal, or is becoming the norm. Intro AJAX, yadda yadda, if you’re here and you know what AJAX is then you don’t need me to tell you about it, if you’re here and you don’t know what AJAX is you’re either still producing cutting-edge 1997 websites or you’re of that peculiar breed of webuser that wouldn’t care any way (for that genre: no, I’m not talking about the cleaning agent).

Yet through everything I see, everywhere I visit, and everything I code, there is a disease. Even during this golden age of Web 2.0, there is a pestilence that, while all the world looks bright and everybody thinks things are finally looking up, begins to gnaw away from the inside, producing a blackened core fraught with trauma. I’m not just being dramatic here, it really exists. This slag heap of a fetid inner core is left over from the browser wars.

Take a look at some of those links: the browser wars were a real thing. Look at all the results on Google about it. These things rocked the web world (and ultimately the computing world), and we are still reaping the consequences and suffering because of them. To wit: Netscape had this thing called a “web browser”. Everyone used it because it was the only one. It started to take off and caught Microsoft’s eye. Microsoft wanted in, so they used their massive market power give Netscape the middle finger and take over the market. During this period of about four years, both Netscape and Microsoft hastily and frantically tried to make their browser better than the other guy’s. What this entailed was adding hundreds of features to the browser, but because there was no standards organization in those days to say “This is how the web should work”, each side implemented things differently. Sometimes one side would come out with something and the other side would steal the idea and implement it themselves in a different way and sometimes the other side wouldn’t implement things at all.

What this led to is a massive bifurcation in the web browser world. There was (and is!) the Microsoft way to do things and the Netscape way to do things. You could build your website for either one but not usually for both unless all you did was straight up HTML like bold and italics. Sometimes you couldn’t even build your website for a single one of the browsers because the feature sets of the browsers were changing so fast they didn’t even implement their own things well enough.

Straight up Netscape lost the war. Microsoft was bigger and badder and had a helluvalot more money to throw around, and Netscape did a really poor job of being consistent within their own browser. Rather than deal with the peculiarities of Netscape and try to code for both browsers, most website designers (those whose livelihoods depended on it, anyway) began to design only for IE. Some even went so far as to lock out other browsers out of their sites rather than even think about performing the nightmare of cross-browser testing. Eventually around 1999 Microsoft had something like 95% of the web using Internet Explorer. Soon, however, the dot-com bubble went “bip” and instead of Microsoft absolutely crushing every last breathing thought of resistance against IE, it began to be crushed itself by its own weight.

Microsoft won the war very well, but they failed to maintain their viselike grip on planet Earth. Instead of cleaning up and rebuilding after the war, they left IE as the broken, bombed-out shell it had become in the midst of battle. As the economy recovered (is still recovering) and people started looking to the Internet to save them again, they realized that IE was not a very good browser. These people formed things like the W3C, and they defined how the internet should behave. IE could have been there to welcome them. Instead, arising reborn from the smoldering ashes of Netscape came Phoenix Firebird Firefox, which began to take space away from IE. Other browsers began to join in the fight and that brings us to today.

Today the bifurcation of the browser wars still exist. While there are at least ten different browsers out there, they generally fall into two categories. The first is IE. The second is what is known as EOMB, and it stands for Every Other Modern Browser. IE does things its way (still! still they do this!) and everyone else does it Mozilla’s and the W3C’s way. Go to any Web 2.0 website you like and look at the source code. Look at their JavaScript and the way they access the Document Object Model. You will see that there are two ways to do things. Look, and you will notice that there are usually two sets of code. One works with IE, and the other works with EOMB.

Every day when I come into work I get to go into this wretched black heart of the web and try to deal with it. Every day I open my text editor to build a website and I wonder how hard it will be to get it to work in both browsers. And every day I am frustrated by the incompatibility of IE with the standards. I curse Microsoft’s name for not doing what they should have done at the end of the war. I can get everything to work oh-so-nicely and easily in EOMB but then I go to test it in IE and find out that IE doesn’t support half of the standard, there are features out there, DEFINED AS REQUIRED by the standard, but I can’t use them because IE doesn’t have them. To me this bespeaks laziness on Microsoft’s part, and I believe it will be because of this that the second browser wars will not turn out in their favor.

Yes, make no mistake, dear reader. The Second War is coming. The web cannot go on living and breathing when the inside of it is deteriorating, as a zombie outside the grave deteriorates. The players this time will be EOMB on the side of compliance and light, and IE on the side of propriety and darkness. Microsoft could choose to avert the war and be seen as a worldwide hero by making IE7 a compliant browser, but they will not because they are lazy, and so they cannot see the storm on the horizon. They cannot see the troops of the other side moving and marching into place. They cannot see that the population is turning restless with their mindless cruelty. The sides are gathering their forces. Mozilla, Safari, Opera, and the others have already teamed up and formed organizations. Microsoft has already drawn one partner to its side in the form of AOL (who, in case you didn’t know, just release their IE-based browser on a website that I can’t find right now).

What terrible things will the Second War unleash upon us? What magnificent new advances in technology will lead to the destruction and despair of the Intarweb populace? What kinds of gloriously terrible inventions will herald the downfall of the desktop computing platform? The mind boggles at such unanswerable questions even as it trembles in fear of the coming age.

Prepare now, for the end is near!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.