One of the biggest constantly on-going battles on the Internet has been going on for a number of years, almost from the start of the Internet as the average person knows it. And that, is which Internet browser should we use while online.
The problem dates back some time. At the beginning of the Internet's popularisation, there were only very few browsers that were actually fit-for-purpose. The leading browser of the time, NCSA Mosaic, shaped our modern browsing experience by providing a graphical page, with common page navigation functions such as Back, Forward and even bookmarks/favourites.
Later on, our story draws the spotlight towards Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser. At the time, Netscape Navigator was the de-facto standard for surfing the Internet. It was a user interface that people were familiar with and would find almost anywhere that they wished to get online. Microsoft, wanting a slice of the market share, released Internet Explorer as a direct competitor to Netscape. The trouble came when Microsoft started bundling Internet Explorer with their Windows operating system, quickly meaning that the typical computer user at home would already have Internet Explorer on their system without having to install Netscape. As such, people started adopting Internet Explorer as their new standard browser.
But there's a very good reason now why Internet Explorer still struggles for standards compliance and never quite reaches it; back in the Netscape vs Internet Explorer days, the IE development team added certain features quirks into Internet Explorer that would make pages render slightly differently to other browsers. Since Internet Explorer was so widely distributed, the average web developer would develop using Internet Explorer and expect their target audience to be using the same browser (hence the "Page designed for ..."-type things that you would commonly find on webpages). In making your page fit the IE quirks, the page would then look broken in other browsers. This was fairly integral to Microsoft's game: make the page look broken in other browsers so people would look at it in IE instead.
Microsoft even had an agreement with Apple, which made Internet Explorer the dominant Mac browser at the time, which was shipped with all Macs for five years. For a while, Microsoft had a huge juicy portion of the browser market share.
Just like that, the dominant browser became Internet Explorer. It was widely available, and it was easy for people to find. It also became used frequently due to the amount of pages on the Internet that were designed to be viewed in Internet Explorer. But some years later, we are now presented with another browser battle.
A lot of recent discoveries found Internet Explorer to be very potentially unsafe, and other browsers started to pop up as competitors. Examples are Apple's Safari browser (originally on the Mac platform, but these days ported to Windows also), Mozilla Firefox (originally the Mozilla Suite project, which is cross-platform), and Opera's browser (also cross-platform), all boasting superior performance, compatibility and security.
Firefox recently has gained a lot of media interest as the "perfect browser", which is standards compliant and secure, claiming to be stronger against threats on the Internet. Because of this, the competition between Firefox and Internet Explorer has soared. Millions of people have chosen to adopt Firefox instead.
Then there's the Mac world, where the relatively new Safari browser has taken a stand. Based on the WebKit (KHTML) engine from the Konqueror project, Safari claims to be one of the fastest and most standards-compliant browsers available. For Mac users, it is certainly the most reliable browser, although it has just recently found itself brought over to the Windows platform also to compete with Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
But the browser battle isn't just limited to desktop and laptop computers as we know it now, but it's also extending to mobile devices. The iPhone boasts complete Safari compatibility - that's a pretty high standard web browser for a mobile device, as well as Nokia adopting the same WebKit functionality for their browsers. Microsoft have stayed to their own in creating a mobile version of Internet Explorer for it's Windows Mobile devices, and Opera have taken a pretty good stab at taking their browser to every platform they can get their hands on.
The iPhone actually brought a huge amount of interest towards the Safari browser, with hundreds of web-based applications being designed for the handset that work perfectly in Safari, but not in other competing browsers. Likewise, other software vendors are writing software that works perfectly either in Internet Explorer, or in Firefox or Safari, without always being able to support all of the major browsers.
This is no surprise; every browser works differently and uses different rendering methods, which often means that the same web application must be edited four different times to support each major browser. Just imagine how wonderful it would be if every page on the Internet worked in every browser. It's here that the possibility of rendering engine solidity comes into play. Is it possible that every browser in the future will use the same rendering engine, meaning that the entire Internet is compatible everywhere?
A number of people suspect that WebKit could become the basis for future Firefox versions, which creates a huge stand against Microsoft Internet Explorer in terms of compatibility. And in a world where web applications work on Safari and Firefox but not on Internet Explorer, will people continue to use IE, or will Microsoft have to take the same type of action, accept defeat and use a foreign rendering engine in their browser also?
The browser war is an interesting one, and there are so many arguments for and against each browser, but with mobile devices heading straight into the spotlight and web applications becoming a Web 2.0-style must, the fight for which browser will ultimately prevail will be a long and active one.
