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Death to the king! Long live the king!

Over the last ten years the internet has gone from strength to strength. Those that remember the early days during the 1990’s will know how unfriendly and proprietary the World Wide Web was.

The first popular internet browser was Netscape. When released in 1994, Netscape was pretty much the only graphical based browser available for most platforms (Operating Systems). This didn’t last forever.

In 1995 Microsoft released Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) as part of their Microsoft Plus! pack for Windows 95. In the tradition of most software companies, Microsoft purchased Spyglass Mosiac to base their browser on. MSIE 1.0 wasn’t included as part of Windows until later the following year, probably in part due to the fact it was very poor when compared to Netscape’s offering at the time.

But Microsoft aren’t the sort of company to worry about that. Just as Windows 1.0 was poor and Windows 2.0 was only a little better, MSIE 2.0 came and went completely unnoticed by the community.

However, in August 1996, Microsoft released MSIE 3.0 with Mail and News, plus an Address Book. MSIE 3.0 was the most standards compliant browser of its day and the world took notice. It had taken three versions to get there, but Microsoft had produced a browser that was better than Netscape and the public were getting it free with every copy of Windows they purchased.

This is when the tides turned for Netscape. They were purchased by AOL and each new version of the browser was getting more cluttered and unfriendly. Both Microsoft and Netscape tried to launch proprietary content channels systems, best described today as an early attempt at RSS, but both failed. As Netscape began to slip from users Start buttons, Microsoft was beginning to rule the web. In 1999, MSIE became the most used browser in the world.

This I refer to as the dark ages, because while Microsoft were busy destroying any competitor in this emerging market, and new group were emerging. The Mozilla Foundation were a bunch of former Netscape developers who didn’t (or couldn’t) work for AOL. For a few years the Mozilla group were very quiet. But silence is deadly. AOL weren’t interested in developing browsers, they just wanted a good one that wasn’t MSIE to use in their own online toolchest.

So AOL commissioned Mozilla to write the web core that would power future versions of Netscape, which gave Mozilla enough money to survive. Mozilla took it upon themselves to write the most open and standards compliant browser they could, reading and implementing every line of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) guidelines regarding HTML, CSS, DOM and XML with open technologies like JavaScript.

During this time Microsoft were sitting comfortably with over 70% of web surfers using their browser. Microsoft even did the unthinkable and developed MSIE for Mac OS and Unix. Needless to say, neither of these projects survive today. But dogged with security flaws and bugs, Microsoft spent more time patching and fixing MSIE with each revision that they took their eye off what the W3C were doing. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in particular were developing and becoming the only way to style web pages.

When Mozilla released Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape Communicator in 1998, the Mozilla engine was better than Microsoft’s Mosiac. But at this point Microsoft had too much momentum and Mozilla could do nothing but watch every last Windows user switch from Netscape to MSIE.

Like Microsoft, Mozilla had one goal - be the only platform that people would want to use. The name ‘Mozilla’ was chosen because it stood for the goal, Mosiac Killer, with a pinch of Godzilla for good measure. So Mozilla went away and continued working on their core, now called Gecko. It must have been during this time that engineers realised that if Gecko was coupled with a clean, fast and friendly interface would make a much better browser than Netscape, Mozilla and MSIE. This scaled down version would be quick, secure and fully W3C compliant. It would still be cross platform, at the time supporting a dwindling Mac community as well as Linux and Unix. It’s name was Pheonix - no! It’s name was Firebird - no! Ah, it’s name IS Firefox.

Pheonix appeared in 2002 as a small insiginificant project being developed by two members of the Mozilla team. It basically demonstrated that the Gecko engine could be embedded in any application (on any platform) unlike MSIE. It had back/forward and stop buttons, plus a URL field. It didn’t set the world on fire, but then it was only a test of concept in reality.

In 2003, Pheonix became Firebird after a dispute with Pheonix Technologies, a creator of BIOS systems. Firebird didn’t add much to Pheonix and it wasn’t until 2004 that after another dispute with a database engine, Firebird became Firefox.

During this time, another new engine was brought to the forefront by Apple. Safari was announced in 2003, adopting for Mac OS X the well-established KHTML engine from the KDE Linux project. Like Firefox, the engine behind Safari is open source and available to all. Safari became the default browser in Mac OS X in June 2003 killing the Mac MSIE immediately.

Unphased by this and taking note of the sudden death of MSIE on the Mac platform, development on Firefox continued. With each release of their Alpha’s and Beta’s, Firefox was starting to turn into a small, but very powerful web browser. Unlike MSIE, it was very secure. There were flaws in the security, but mainly due to the Windows operating system that Firefox ran on. The speed of page loads and rendering was astounding. As broadband took hold of the world, people noticed how much faster Gecko was compared with Mosiac.

In 2004, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 and the response was amazing. In the space of two years, Firefox has reclaimed 25% of web surfers across every platform (I am writing this in another Mozilla applications, Camino). Firefox is fully compliant to W3C guides regarding almost every standard their is, including CSS 3 which isn’t fully ratified yet.

This year Microsoft are fighting back with the release of Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). IE7 represents a typical Microsoft knee-jerk reaction to Firefox. They have made a real effort to release a browser that is secure, but they are also making in-roads into being W3C compliant. But this is the problem, although Microsoft have tried to support as many areas of W3C documentation as possible, why didn’t they just support it all. It is hard to believe that Microsoft with all their money and developers, still can’t beat Firefox on standard compliance.

Why does this matter. Well if like me, you develop for the web, then you quickly come to realise that MSIE (particularly 5.5 and 6.0) are the worst piles of junk for viewing web sites. You can design a site that looks beautiful in almost every browser out there, from Opera to Safari, but open it in MSIE and it looks nothing like the intended design viewed in other browsers. This is because Microsoft seem to have a selective approach to adopting standards, only adopting the ones that suit them.

Now, a group in America have launched a new campaign to encourage MSIE users to switch to Firefox. I am fully supporting this campaign, mainly for selfish ‘this will make my life easier’ reasons, but because I feel there should be no one company (or country) controlling the most powerful information platform out there. If Firefox gains 50% of the worlds web surfers, I’ll be happy - although I feel they’re going to do much better than that.

Go to http://www.killbillsbrowser.com and http://www.explorerdestroyer.com to follow the campaign to kill MSIE, and earn some money while you do it. (Sponsored by Google no less)

Below I have compiled my list of browsers I use for general web browsing, Camino and Safari are my main surfing browsers. Camino doesn’t support RSS though, which is a shame for an otherwise excellent full-featured browser. Safari is also a very compact and pleasant browser. Firefox is the best all rounder and is the backbone of my development for the web due to the large amount of extensions for web development freely available.

Mozilla Firefox [Highly recommended]
Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix