\jeff{krimmel}

Why Care About a Browser?

Since last fall, I have seen tons of articles around the web comparing Mozilla’s Firefox to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Some of the articles even mention Apple’s Safari or the Opera web browser. I honestly had to sit down and ask myself, “Why do I care about a web browser? Is this just overkill, reading article after article about Firefox moving from a 4% market share to a 6% market share?”

I think I have answered both of those questions, and the answers are “freedom” and “yes”. I think the fundamental reason I care about which web browser I use (and which web browser other people use) is because of the impact such a decision has on the standards that govern how information contained within a web page is coded and displayed. One of the fundamental differences between Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is their implementation of various web standards. I hesistate to make sweeping statements about all of this without having hard research to back up these claims, but from what I understand, Firefox has implemented more of the body of standards issued by the W3C than Internet Explorer has. The specific example I always draw upon is the CSS standard. For some reason (and I can guess a few), Microsoft refuses to implement the entirety of the CSS standard, a standard which governs how web designers can change the way a website looks.

I worry about standards because in a fictional Internet in which 100% of the users browsed the web with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Microsoft would have de facto control of each user’s web experience. If Microsoft wanted each user to see a mangled version of the Linux Today website while allowing a picturesque viewing of their own website, nothing would be stopping them. It would get terribly old trying to read Linux news in, say, a one inch strip of text that ran several screens in length. A lot of people interested in such news may just stop reading, because it’s not worth the discomfort and inconvenience.

While the previous example is obviously absurd, today’s Internet is not as far from the above picture as I wish it would be. Because Internet Explorer is used by approximately 90% (or more) of people who browse the web, web designers usually go the easy route and just design their sites to display nicely in Internet Explorer. The problem with this route is that Microsoft does not fully implement the standards recommended by the W3C, and other web browsers (that presumably do implement such standards) render the (non-standards-compliant) website awkwardly. What is the result? The person browsing the web decides Internet Explorer performs better than these other browsers and forgets the issue entirely.

Why does this scenario cause a problem? Because some of us can’t (and, more importantly, don’t want to) use Internet Explorer to browse the web. I use Linux. I use it on my home computer, on my laptop, on my lab computer, on the cluster, and on the file servers I maintain. I don’t want to use Windows. If all web designers follow the standards issued by W3C, my experience browsing the web can be just as pleasant as anyone else’s. That’s important for a few reasons. While it may not matter now, in the future online businesses will not want to lose the business of those customers not using Internet Explorer simply because their page is ugly. And it’s not a page being ugly that really matters; it’s when links are chopped off, or data entered into a form is not visible, or required fields on a form are not even displayed. Who wants to place an order online when they can’t click on a “review order” button because said button is not even displayed? I don’t. If Microsoft is the one deciding how websites are rendered, why couldn’t they decide (in some sense) where those people can shop who aren’t using their web browser. And if I’m not running their operating system, I’m definitely not using their web browser. See the problem?

I could write pages and pages more about this, but I will refrain from doing so for now. I just read an article the other day explaining how Firefox was many people’s first experience using open source software, and many of these people enjoyed the experience. I don’t sit around and root for Microsoft’s demise. In fact, the contrary is true. Microsoft has been the driving force behind a lot of the development in computer software in the past fifteen years, whether through their own software or as motivation for competitors at Apple or community-based developers for Linux. Without Microsoft, a lot of the motivation for continuing to improve other operating systems or cross-platform applications at such breakneck speeds may disappear. I would just like to see a world where no single company dominates such an important landscape as the Internet like Microsoft currently does. The W3C publishes open standards for a reason. Let everyone who would like to be involved in developing a web browser participate in the definition of these standards and then let them create their browsers with the same target in mind and see who does better. Let companies participate. Let open source developers participate. Let everyone participate.

What can we do about this problem? Use a different web browser. I do. My girlfriend does. A lot of my friends do. My mom does. It’s easy. It may be the easiest application you can change on a computer. Go to http://www.getfirefox.com, download the file, install it, and browse away. A lot of websites record what browser their visitors are using, and you can vote quite easily for an Internet with more freedom for people like you and me by simply double-clicking on the globe with the red fox rather than the blue “e”.