A Web Designer's View on Browsers

Web designers have a more intimate a connection with their browser than most users. After all, for a web designer the browser is his canvas, and the internet an often overlooked conduit for delivery - rightly so as broadband becomes more and more ubiquitous. In the comedy of sorts that is often slated as the cringe-worthy 'browser wars' by too many respected new media outlets, it becomes all too easy to form an affinity to one particular browser, and manifest an illogical hatred towards the others.

The demands of a web designer are always-changing these days. For those who foster the illusion that the web is still about appropriating text unto this shiny new medium perhaps it's time you saw what's been happening over the last two decades. As technologies come and go, there's been one fact that has rung true – there are always going to be competing products attempting to do the same thing.

This is especially true for browsers. Netscape Communications Corporation was the first to gather a sizable user-base with its Netscape Navigator. This prompted the software giant Microsoft to react, releasing Internet Explorer in 1995. Opera also entered the fray the following year, although at the time its excellence was obscured by several other lesser known browsers.

As the corporate world began to realise the cataclysmic effects the web was having throughout the world, huge conglomerates began turning their interest towards the browser scene, and just as the free-for-download Microsoft Internet Explorer had a multi-billion dollar backing, so too needed Netscape Navigator, which found it in the form of an AOL acquisition valued at $US4.2bn.

AOL's inexperience in software development saw Netscape Navigator eventually become succeeded by independently owned Mozilla Firefox, whose core functionality shares some of the same code as the later versions of Netscape Navigator. Meanwhile Opera grew to become one of the most stable and efficient browsers available, constantly improving upon its HTML engine, sticking closely to the W3C specifications and eventually releasing it ad-free after licensing it for use on low-power and mobile browser platforms to reap in huge royalties.

In the same time WebKit was formed, marking a collaborative effort between several large companies. WebKit's partners are vested in open-source browser development where W3C compliance precedes all other requirements and with the release of Apple's Safari a following began to take shape. Headed by Apple and Nokia (and now Google), WebKit has always been the most democratic attempt at the most compatible web browser.

The W3C-compliance-comes-first attitude of WebKit and Opera is a sentiment seemingly not shared by Microsoft and Mozilla; and the open-source ideals of WebKit and Mozilla are also apparently dismissed by Microsoft and Opera. As it stands there are many products offering what may seem like the same thing but it's hardly a case of one being clearly superior to the other.

As a web designer it is important not to ignore any of the major browsers. The so-far idealistic attempts of the W3C to unite all browsers in their HTML rendering offers a lot of assistance but at the end of the day there are always going to be differences in the way pages are presented between each browser. It's usually these very differences that serve as the reason people choose their browser – be it Safari's impressive font-rendering, Opera's hyper-efficient rendering engine, Firefox's innumerable developer add-ons or Internet Explorer's close integration with Windows.

Of course, even as a web designer I have a favourite browser; but that's not to say the audiences of my websites won't have a different one. To take sides in an over-inflated argument about 'browser-wars' would be to undermine the very thing that the web, and indeed most new media was built on - the ability to have a choice.

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