Representatives from Microsoft (Dean Hachamovitch), Opera (Christen Krogh), Mozilla (Mike Shaver) and Google (Sundar Pichal) met at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley tonight for a panel called “Browsers are Hot Again!”, moderated by Businessweek columnist Steve Wildstrom.
The event is timely. There has never been such robust competition in the browser space. Google recently brought Chrome out of beta, and Microsoft’s GM of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch told me earlier today that the Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 8 would be released in the next two weeks.
Notably absent from the panel was Apple, although their Safari browser was brought up repeatedly as an important mobile platform, and Safari’s underlying Webkit javascript engine was also praised as innovative.
Most of the panel discussion focused on the browser ecosystem, including add-ons, standards compliance and security. The panelists noted that web developers have a harder time today than a few years ago because they have to build for more than one browser. But as Firefox and others have gained market share, competition has sped feature advances, accelerating the development and evolution of javascript and other languages and standards. Krogh from Opera noted that the next big battleground is mobile.
An audience question asked each of the panelists to describe the essence of each browser. The responses were varied. Microsoft’s Hachamovitch said his team starts with looking at what the user wants and building from there (and pointed to IE 8’s impressive feature list). Krogh from Opera said they wanted to supply a standards compliant browser for literally any Internet connected device. Google’s Pichal said speed (of javascript) was their primary goal (Hachamovitch then dubbed him “Mr. Speed” in a later comment). Mozilla’s Shaver said Firefox was about “putting the web first,” and creating a standards-compliant browser in as many languages as possible to ensure that no one was left out of the Internet.
Hachmovitch also confirmed that Microsoft has no current plans to build Linux or Mac versions of Internet Explorer. Google’s Pichal confirmed that Chrome for Mac was coming “very soon.”
Mozilla’s Shaver said Firefox was about “putting the web first,” and creating a standards-compliant browser in as many languages as possible to ensure that no one was left out of the Internet. yeah
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Hopefully that RC of IE8 is better than the beta I tried…it was slow and had several rather obvious bugs.
The browser war will always be lead by MSFT, due to the bundling of IE with Windows. IE 8 is slow and behind times. Firefox is becoming the best browser with security and add ons being the best for users. Chrome is getting there with speed and usability, but needs enhancements for add ons and other facts. Opera and others will flail around as #4 and #5 for a while.
Google and Mozilla can do deals with OEMs to bundle as well. They have the cash.
opera, nuff salid
and it hurt to see so little love to that beautiful browser. also, better than firefox with css
Couldn’t make it cause i’m sick at home, but very interested to hear their take on the evolution of the browser as an application platform. A step forward is the futuristic question of ‘whats more important’ – Browser or OS?
Ohad Eder Pressman
http://www.bubbleshq.com/
IE needs to get its act together regarding standards compliance. I’m really sick of them breaking the web.
Clearly the IE problem is bigger than one anecdote, but I’ll share this one anyway. One of my current projects is a web app written in HTML 5. It renders beautifully in all the good browsers, but looks more accurate in IE8’s compatibility mode than its ostensibly-mostly-compliant standards mode. What the hell?
Also, I have no idea if this is going to log me in with Facebook or what. Commenting Options is blank, and there are no name/email/website widgets in the Leave Comment zone.
Lighten up there buddy!
Hey there — can you send me a link to the site you’re working on and some more detail? thanks!
“The panelists noted that web developers have a harder time today than a few years ago because they have to build for more than one browser.”
What??? I’d like to know which panelist said that. It’s *easier* to develop today because browser developers are finally following and advancing common standards. It was much, *much* harder several years ago when every browser acted according to its own rules. Whoever said this knows very little about browsers…
it wasn’t that long ago that the only browser that people bothered with was IE.
With all due respect, the only people that ever developed exclusively for IE were not actually web developers; they were hacks. Even in 2003, when I led the first major media site redesign to explicitly and vocally support web standards — ESPN.com — there were issues to consider well beyond IE.
There may have been a period for about a year or two when a measurable portion of people didn’t care about anything but Internet Explorer, but the web development/design community has never gotten behind that browser, and certainly never ignored the promise of other, more capable browsers.
But back to the premise: it has never been easier to develop for the universal web than it is today. It is easier in 2009 than it was in 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, and 2000. I hesitate to go back any further than that because you could argue that in 1999 and earlier, the web was so low-fi that a bunch of text and a few images was all anybody did anyway.
Anyway, point being: it has clearly gotten easier — and not harder — to develop for multiple browsers over the last few years. Once IE6 is not a consideration anymore, it will have gotten an order of magnitude easier still…
some of us remember back before 2003
Speaking of ESPN, I’m totally digging the new redesign they just did.
It’s still a PIA to design everything then make it relatively backwards-compatible for the 20-percent on IE6; I wish MS would do something draconian to finally kill that beast.
Can someone explain why Microsoft still develop it’s own rendering engine for IE? Both Gecko and WebKit work on Windows, so what’s the point? They can still build their “security enhancements” on top. Surely it’s just wasting their time and getting them even more bad browser press when things don’t work as they should.
MS is in the Operating System market, the web browser is the new Operating System…. They know it.
Browsers have always been hot*
*Browser Definition anything other than IE
They do feel like browser wars because the leaders make the decisions – right or wrong and our time becomes the casualty as we try and be compliant with all the wacky nuances that primarily IE throws your way.
I would say that they are far better now than they ever were – however after every rev on your side you see some thing that goes sideways in IE6 and unfortunately 12% of your client base still have not upgraded.
Ahh well – at least it is nice to see them all at the table trying to work together.
Cheers,
Eric
Let see how many of the bugs will still be there plaguing the system.
I stick with IE – easiest to develop for and the most popular. If it doesn’t look the same in opera or firefox I really don’t care!
@Ryan Townsend – Exactly. It’s insane.
@Mary Leander – That strategy worked great 10 years ago.
If I was there, I would have asked the IE team why they insist on wasting a collective millions of hours of developers’ time every day with their mockery of an HTML rendering engine. Trident is a nightmare. Thanks to IE 8 we will now have THREE nightmares that don’t follow standards that need to be fixed, so that a website renders properly. What a shame. The web will not evolve as it should until IE (especially IE 6) is in the minority and is thus forced to be truly standards-compliant.
@Mary Leander
You are a retard.
Please tell me the name of your software so i can make sure that i will NEVER buy or use it.
@Ryan Townsend
Dean (Microsoft) made the point that Apple controls WebKit, so anyone depending on WebKit is depending on Apple. “It is open source, but the people running the project all work for Apple”.
Of course this begs the question – Why doesn’t MS make their rendering engine available as Apple does?
The browser wars have increased the cost associated with delivering a broadly available web application….and I am happy to pay that tax in exchange for performance gains.
While we’ve applied performance learnings to our app over the past 3 years, improvements to the delivery vehicle (the browser) account for no less than 50% of the realized improvement.
Keep funding this war! Incredibly healthy for Microsoft to see a bunch of Ferraris circling IE. As much we love seeing the faster browsers gain share…Internet Explorer still sits atop the mountain (albeit a somewhat eroding mountain).
Smartsheet customer traffic over the past month breaks down as follows: (browsers with over 1% share)
Internet Explorer – 57%
Firefox – 34%
Chrome – 4%
Safari – 4%
Where did things stand same period last year?
Internet Explorer – 67%
Firefox – 30%
Safari – 1.5%
Competition is good.
Here’s to keeping the (browser) war effort going.
im not sure i can get all excited about a browser war. overall if it ain’t one browser its another. we already have so many browsers and app plug-in funtionalities we could ever want. the real war will be “location based offerings” and who can best position consumers and businesses on a natural language location network. the battle ground for mobile is the interenet and how good you can bridge the two. the killer app for the ipone is the safari tab and its free.
Sorry I’m so late in posting this but I was on a plane all day. I just want to clarify the question of Apple’s participation. They were invested, repeatedly and most recently at MacWorld last week, but they declined.
That’s a pretty generic mission that FireFox is advancing. Between Chrome and IE8 I have little use for FireFox outside of its world of plugins.
Yes, IE6 needs to be pushed out.
Great, another crapy MS browser to support. I swear it costs 20% more resources to support IE7 and another 20% on top of that to support IE6. Now IE8 is poised to cut even MORE into R&D bottom lines…
Microsoft is bad for the Internet. Period.
The new security and privacy features in IE, Firefox, and Chrome are a welcome addition, but check out ArmorSurf. It goes one step beyond.