Targeting WebKit is not like targeting IE6
Short By Dave Ward. Posted February 17, 2012There’s been a bit of controversy lately concerning the rising dominance of WebKit-based browsers (e.g. Chrome, Safari, and Mobile Safari) and the potential that we’re repeating past mistakes:
Not so long ago, IE6 was the over-dominant browser on the Web. Technically, the Web was full of works-only-in-IE6 web sites and the other browsers, the users were crying. IE6 is dead, this time is gone, and all browsers vendors including Microsoft itself rejoice. Gone? Not entirely… IE6 is gone, the problem is back.
However, I believe there’s one gigantic difference between IE6 then and WebKit now that’s being overlooked.
Microsoft put the brakes on Internet Explorer development after IE6 because they realized that they were helping build the runtime for their own competition. If Internet Explorer releases had continued at the same pace, most everyone would probably be using IE15 today and IE6 would be as memorable as Chrome 4 or Firefox 7.
Conversely, Google has a vested interest in Chrome’s ongoing success (and WebKit’s success by extension). Instead of threatening Google’s primary revenue stream, WebKit and Chrome serve to enhance Google’s golden goose. So, unlike the past situation with Microsoft, Netscape, and IE6, Google has no motivation whatsoever to shutter active development on Chrome and WebKit if it overtakes Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Does that make vendor prefixes and targeting experimental features a great idea? Maybe not. Frankly, I’m not qualified to speak intelligently about cutting edge CSS features.
What I do know is that just because the current climate seems similar to the one ten years ago, that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to assume history is repeating.
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What do you think?
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You could argue that Microsoft took their eye off their web stuff to concentrate on building out the .NET platform. The timing is quite similar as to when IE6 was finished and .NET was released, maybe not coindicental
There’s a HUGE difference here. The difference is that there’s very few bugs in Webkit, and as of Google Chrome at least, you can be sure people will have the latest version of the browser (thanks to Google Update).
Microsoft didn’t even include IE7 in XP SP3! And, IE6 is terrible at everything it does.
And also, IE6 was popular because of dirty tactics that caused a costly lawsuit for Microsoft, not because it was well-developed. It was (is, unfortunately) terrible.
It’s easy to forget now, but IE6 was technically superior to the competition at the time. Netscape had grown into a sluggish, bloated beast, and IE was a pleasure to use by comparison. I think I recall switching from Netscape to IE sometime after Netscape 4, and it was like switching from IE6 to Chrome would be now.
Sure, IE6 is still good if you see an HTML4 page with little CSS and lots of tables. But Microsoft made crappy browsers all the way up to IE8. IE9 started catching on with everyone else, since it can now borrow code from the competition (Chromium and Firefox are open-source).
My point being: as soon as you add a bit of javascript and CSS to IE6, everything starts falling apart and you need to hack this and hack that all the way through as if it was a big castle of cards that would crumble at any moment.
It’s not the same with Webkit, absolutely not anything like it. Plus, if a bug is found, Google auto-updates their browser, unlike MS.
And the fact that MS got sued for anti-trust still stands.
I don’t think anyone would claim that IE6 is a good browser today. However, it was much better than the competition in 2001.
If Chrome becomes an over-dominant browser and then development halts on it, it will probably be a big problem in ten years too. That scenario is unlikely though, which was a central point of my post.
Microsoft’s anti-competitive bundling certainly didn’t help them make a better browser. If anything, that would have reduced the pressure to compete on quality, but they were clearly ahead on that front by 5.5 or so anyway. Even if you blame Netscape’s ultimate demise on Microsoft’s business practices, Netscape did bungle that long rewrite on their own.
I understand that IE6 may have been very competitive in 2001, but you have to agree that pages were being made with IE in mind, which is radically different today.
My main argument against comparing the two is that when IE introduced a feature in the IE4-IE6 era, most of the time it worked when it wanted to and didn’t respect standards. When Chrome/Webkit introduces a feature, it works, it doesn’t crash the browser, it’s not quirky, etc.
If in 10 years someone still uses Chrome 17, I can be sure I won’t have to worry with hasLayout, backwards box model, javascript memory leaks, and many other things we had to cope with in IE6. That’s my problem with IE6, maybe it did a lot for the time, but it did it wrong. Chrome may lack features, but it doesn’t poop on my code.
The exact issue that I’m responding to in this post is precisely that Chrome has been adding non-standard/experimental features. If you missed that kerfuffle from a couple weeks ago, be sure to read the full blog post that I quoted.
…And what I’m saying is that while Chrome is indeed adding a lot of features (actually many of these come from Webkit), they work. That changes the whole game for me!
Most even work when the code is adapted to other good browsers (Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari, etc)
That’s simply not true. A few minutes searching Twitter will find Mozilla and Opera employees lamenting sites targeting experimental -webkit features that don’t work in browsers with comparable HTML5/CSS3 features not implemented with competing browser prefixes.
Okay, maybe this was a misunderstanding. I fully agree with targeting webkit, as long as we also target other browsers with similar capabilities. There are a few features not (easily) supported by other browsers (such as background-clip: text), but most of them aren’t going to break a page anyway.
I believe developers are responsible for either tracking the ongoing changes in the CSS3 field or using libraries that do.
Microsoft put the brakes on Internet Explorer development after IE6 because they realized that they were helping build the runtime for their own competition.
By this, do you just mean the net-as-platform, or am I missing something? If that’s the message, how did “putting on the brakes” help MS stop contributing to their competition at that point? Seems the cat was out of the bag at that point. Are you just suggesting that they could move those resources elsewhere?
Glazman’s post is interesting, but (and, I’ll add, as a web application developer) I’m not sure why I should be against a survival of the fittest in this case. I didn’t mind coding to what worked most efficiently 10 years ago, and don’t really mind it now either. And no, I never made a works-only-in-IE site, thanks very much.
The web as a first-class application platform wasn’t really feasible until somewhere around IE5.5-IE6 (XMLHttpRequest was added in 5.5, I believe). As the over-dominate browser of the time, the more sophisticated IE became, the more it threatened Office (and even Windows). Next thing you know, the IE team was all but dismantled for years. Maybe continued browser innovation was inevitable, but what happened after IE6 undoubtedly had a chilling effect.
Interesting. It was right about IE5 and Moz 0.7 that we *could* build good, dynamic, even cross-browser dynamic apps, and then it’s between IE 6 and 8 that the jQuery/ExtJS/framework of your choice that “ECMA/javascript-as-platform” explodes.
So it’s precisely when MS turns *away* from the web that the web explodes, and WebKit (and, somewhat separately, Google services) “wins”. Makes you wonder what would have happened if MS had kept the developers on IE.
From ericsink.com via the ever-reliable Wikipedia;
News.com: “The original Internet Explorer team was just five or six people. By the time Silverberg and others decided to rewrite the browser almost completely for version 3.0, released in 1996, the team had grown to 100. By 1999, it was more than 1,000.”
I had no idea. Thanks for the info.
When I see experimental css, 90% of the time it looks similar to this:
Once again, it’s the older versions of IE that breaks the pattern, not web-kit. More likely than not, there’s not even a filter option to simulate the css that other browsers support.