As is widely reported on the web, IE for Mac is officially terminal. Personally, I'm not entirely sure how much of a loss this represents for the Mac community. On the one hand, there's the fact that I haven't used IE in quite a while, mostly because I have yet to come across a site that doesn't work in either Safari or Mozilla. On the other hand, it's also possible (likely?) that IE for Mac has the highest site compatibility among all Mac browsers, and may still be the browser of choice for those who don't want to switch back and forth between two (or more) browsers. But, then again, considering how IE for Mac has a completely independent codebase than it's Windows counterpart, it's questionable how far true rendering compatibility extends, and how much longer site compatibility would've been guaranteed, even if it hadn't been axed.
Personally, I'm starting to think that it's about time that all non-IE browsers acknowledged that at best each project will get no more than 5% of the marketshare, and that people may be better off if there was one fully functional alternative to IE. What we need isn't half a dozen browsers that can render 95% of the sites, but one browser (other than IE) that can render 100% of the sites (that runs on all platforms). After all, extra features are nice, but if a browser can't render a site properly, it really doesn't matter what other features you have.
In reality, I don't think this would require all browser projects to consolidate. All that needs to happen is for all projects to agree on one rendering engine, and build on that. If all developers working on rendering engines for Mozilla, KHTML and Opera got together, I don't see how they could possible not create the "perfect" rendering engine. Once such rendering engine has been created, all the different browsers (Mozilla and friends, Konquerer and friends, Opera) can be ported to use this super engine, and users will again have all the different features and choices of browser, and be able to view all websites that their IE-using buddies can see. Such a platform would then pose a real threat to Microsoft, and would likely rekindle the browser wars. It's also more likely for MSIE users to switch to alternative browsers if they knew all the sites they visited would render correctly, which would allow the various projects to further expand their marketshare.
Now, what am I missing?
Posted Wed, April 28, 2004 03:24 by Gay Hitchhiker
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