OpenIDMissing the point
The Register’s coverage of the end of development for IE on the Mac makes some worrying conclusions:
Had Apple worked with inspired vigor since January to improve Safari, users might feel safe without IE. This hasn’t happened. Plenty of improvements have been made, but Safari still lacks the widespread Web site compatibility needed to be the sole browser of choice.
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In addition, the horrid state of IE makes life without it seem a rather pleasant concept. Who needs a rectangle with no tools when add-blocking, fast, feature-rich options like Safari and Opera exist?
Sadly, Apple users do.
Unless Apple can prove without question that it can handle any Web site with its final release of Safari, users should start to get very nervous and hope Opera and Mozilla developers take charge.
This misses the point entirely. The problem isn’t the quality of the browser, it’s the quality of the web sites themselves. IE for Windows has a ridiculously loose HTML parser that will interpret and display just about any garbage you care to throw at it. Since its market share is so high (more than 90% for many commercial web sites) lazy web developers write for IE rather than writing standards compliant markup. The only way a competing browser could render those sites in exactly the same way as IE would be for it to reverse engineer the IE rendering engine in its entirety, which kind of eliminates the point of having a different browser in the first place.
Safari’s most important feature (at least according to Steve Jobs) is its speed. This speed is achieved mainly thanks to a highly optimised rendering engine. If they were to add in enough code to completely emulate IE’s broken behaviour, the speed advantage would be gone.
What worried me is that a publication with more technical awareness than most could misunderstand the issues this much.
Incidentally, the only way this problem is going to get any better is through persistant advocacy to the many sites that have broken HTML. If a site doesn’t work in a modern standards compliant browser, tell them! The best way to do it is over the ’phone (if they list a number on the site) as that will cost them more in terms of customer service expenses, but a polite email to the right address is almost as good. If you don’t get a favourable response, the Mozilla Tech Evangelism team may be able to back you up (especially if the problem is with a major site)—see this page for details of their procedures.
And finally, if you develop sites yourself learn to code to the standards instead of coding for a specific browser. A one-browser web would be a very boring place indeed.
I was so disappointed in that article (compared with the Register's usually top-notch Mac reporting) that I nearly sent an email complaining about it.
I need to get a blog to vent on.
No-one seems to realise that only people who would test on Safari would test on IE5Mac, which since it is a different render engine, is not compatible with IE6.
And despite the many ominous things about this move, the design community on Mac switching en masse to Safari can only be a good thing for the Mac websurfers and the web in general.
dave - 18th June 2003 11:44 - #
First of all writing great software means excellent error handling. Writing more strict is easy. Just because Apple and Safari team is lazy and they couldn't come up with intelligent algorithms, doesn't mean that people who use the web is guilty.
It is absolutely stupid to accuse the web and people who use it of being lazy. Without them you are nothing, web is nothing. So just ranting those people just to show that Apple is an excellent cool company who designs the pretiest interfaces is not justful.
Trying to teach others how to code is nobody's business, especially if those people advocate for designing sites which are not going to work in one of the major browser, IE. Nobody is going to take them seriously.
Sergio - 29th January 2004 13:06 - #
You don't know what you are talking about. Coming up with decent ways of handling errors in HTML is fairly straightforward. Safari's problem is that it has to handle errors in exactly the same way as Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer has been around for almost a decade, it has layers upon layers of special workarounds and fixes that I'm fairly confident nobody, not even the Internet Explorer dev team, understands exactly what they do. They've already given up on one rendering engine and implemented doctype switching because they can't keep track of all the error-handling.
When Internet Explorer 6.0 came out, and when Windows XP service pack 2 came out, it broken plenty of websites. No doubt the same will happen when Longhorn comes out. Internet Explorer can't even maintain bug-for-bug compatibility with itself, and you are calling the Safari team lazy for not being able to either?
Jim - 11th November 2004 16:47 - #