Until recently, the Internet Explorer V8 group had been a pretty taciturn bunch. However, a few weeks ago, Dean Hachamovitch suddenly popped up with a blog entry announcing that the new IE8 browser had passed the Web Standards Project 'Acid2' test. The blog was full of aspirations about Microsoft's commitment to standards, and their Acid2 test was held up as a sign of this.
There was a time that this sort of news would have been significant. No longer. Safari passed the Acid2 test over two years ago, with Opera managing it soon afterwards. Besides Internet Explorer, only the Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox are yet to pass, but Gecko 1.9 beta already passes.
Microsoft's decline in their share of the Browser market has been slow but remorseless. The other day, I suddenly noticed that I was no longer using Internet Explorer, other than for testing Web sites against IE 6 and 7.
The breaking point for me was the advent of the Firebug debugger. Debugging JavaScript reliably in IE is ridiculously difficult. By contrast, with Firebug, along with IDEs such as that provided by Aptana, the process is as easy as pummelling out VB.
It's not just me. On Simple-Talk.com, the usage of Internet Explorer has dropped slightly from 75% to 70%, whereas Firefox has increased its share from 20% to 26%. Extraordinarily few of our readers have bothered to 'upgrade' from IE6 to IE7 in the past year. Just under half of our Internet Explorer users are sticking to IE6. In the past year, the proportion of stalwarts for IE6 has dropped only from 65% to 45%.
Ten years ago, the Gecko project seemed doomed. Now, under the wing of the Mozilla Foundation, and their Firefox product, it is all coming right for Gecko.
It is not just the ghost of Netscape that has come to haunt Microsoft. Safari too has made inroads, due to its resilience, and clever marketing by Apple. Opera too is looking like a viable alternative.
The improvements in browsers in the past two years have spawned a number of sophisticated JavaScript frameworks that start to make browser-based desktop applications look viable to mainstream business. E-bay Desktop http://desktop.ebay.com/ and AOL's Top 100 videos http://music.aol.com/help/syndication/desktop-widgets are already out there and there are plenty more in development. It seems to me to be a sign of health in the IT industry that there are now so many alternative ways to create applications.
What do you think? Once again, just add your comments to my blog, and all entries will go into a prize draw to win a $50 Amazon gift voucher!
Cheers,
Tony.