In The Browser War, We All Win
If you’ve been around the Web development business for about 11+ years as I have, you will no doubt remember all the steps we’ve been through in the “browser war”. Remember how much better Netscape 3.x was compared to Internet Explorer 3? Or how truly attrocious Netscape 4 was once IE4 was released? Back in the Netscape VS IE days, web standards weren’t quite as established and prominent and with each release came new non-standard HTML tags. Good old Marquee tag. Remember the Layer tag? Each new release brought new headaches for developers trying to figure out compatibility between releases.
These days, the browser war is quite different. Ever since the rise to prominence of Firefox several years ago, we’ve seen what basically amounts to 3 important Web rendering engines: IE, Gecko and Webkit. With IE 9 coming sooner or later, IE finally seems to be catching up a little, although it’s too bad Microsoft still won’t adopt one of the other 2 engines and simply build IE around it.
Last week, news came out that for the first time, Google Chrome had surpassed Safari in Market share.While they may be newsworthy in itself, the much bigger news in my opinion is that combined, Safari and Chrome have about 10% market share. Since both use the Webkit engine, it’s a great news for both parties. At the end of the day, who controls the frame around the HTML renderer doesn’t impact us much. The really crucial bit is the renderer itself and Chrome’s popularity only helps here.
Apple has been the main driver behind Webkit ever since its release (as a port of the Konqueror engine) several years ago but Google’s participation has been increasing along with its own usage of the engine for the Chrome browser. With HTML5 and CSS3 still not completely implemented, it’s great to see 2 giants working together on that aspect. As much as Google and Apple might be competing these days, both of their phones are using the same HTML rendering engine and it’s a great example of how open source can sometime help. With the Web, what we need is a standard compliance, not a bunch of smaller rendering engines that each have their own bugs and features.
As for Javascript, each player has its own engine. Google’s V8 engine is extremely fast but Safari’s engine is not slouch either. Firefox is also making advances here but since Javascript has been fairly stable, multiple engines aren’t hurting us at all. While these 3 battle for speed, we reap the rewards.
At the end of the day, we all win. Let the war continue and let’s hope that Microsoft will at some point ditch its own engine and pick of the open source ones. Google and Apple have proven that you can compete and still share the headaches and costs associated with developing a complex rendering engine.