Why, just why??

by on Jan.11, 2007, under Programming, Rant

Why do we have to have so many different ways of browsers implementing standards.

Someone’s set the standards so why cant the browsers come up with a standard way of displaying the same thing?

It doesn’t help that we have to develop for older browsers too but the new ones should all treat what they implement the same.

As it is a web developer needs to make their pages work in ie5.5, ie6, ie7 and Firefox to cover the largest market share, I’d also include Opera and Safari, but to be 100% complete you would need to test on around 10 browsers if not more and make sure it works.

I don’t want to have to do that, I want to be able to make a page/site that works in the browser I’m using on the OS I’m using and I want it to just work in the other browsers without hacks or multiple stylesheets.

As it is to fully test a page or site you need a Windows machine, a Linux machine and a Mac either separate, virtual machines or multi-boots.

In my opinion Firefox or Opera should be the leading browsers as they do a pretty good job with the standards, I’ve not used Safari so can’t really judge that, but as most people don’t know better they’re happy using the bundled browsers and never upgrading to get a better experience.

That said Ie7’s a big improvement on 6 but I still prefer the “alternate” browsers and any pages I make get developed and tested in Firefox, then checked in IE, and lastly in Opera more out of curiosity than anything else.

How nice it would be for everyone to use the same rendering engine and the browser around that just be extras. I’m not going to suggest one in particular, but if everyone used the one maybe open source base engine and added to that but with an easy engine upgrade route then all our browsers will display all pages the same, apart from when a custom piece of code is used (activex or something else).

That would at least make it easier for us poor web developers.


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