Craig Dennis

The Future / Death of the Browser-check

Recently there has been a lot of press about new standards coming in across all aspects of the web. HTML5 and CSS3 offering us many new features and some not-so new ones but making them standards to which everone can adhere to (I’m taking to you Microsoft).This coupled with the recent release of Safari 4 and the future release of the Chrome OS by Google promises the hold grail that web developers and designers have been longing for. Cross-browser cross-OS rendering synchronisity. In other words: one design, one build and no cross-browser testing and no layout bug fixing.

This got me thinking about the actual likelihood of this occurring. At the moment, most web sites are built to WC3 standards and comply with various levels of accessibility, but we are all still coding for IE6 to some degree. There is always a dedicated machine (virtual or otherwise) that is running the dreaded browser. It’s strange to think that the IE box model is actually a better way of viewing content on the web but it causes so many other issues that it has been demoted in favour of a more forgiving model.

So how long are we going to be checking out work on IE6? It’s been around since 2001 and has yet to die as the Twitter hashtag #IE6MustDie can attest to.The reason is that in most corporate environments it is still the predominant browser and as such has a huge user-base. This is not due to choice though.

So if that is the case then, we need to replace the corporate world’s browser to Firefox something else. With IE9 peeking its head over the horizon and Windows 7’s record breaking adoption rate, could we finally start to tell clients that we will not support IE6 in our designs? This depends on the client themselves. As the majority of work the company I work for does involves insurance companies which tend to lend themselves to a more corporate environment, will we ever be free?

Windows 7 looks like a very stable OS and with Office 2010 and their online suite looking to take off, now might be the right time for companies to overhaul their outdated systems and with it their browser. A lot more companies now are allowing their employees the freedom to choose browser and Windows 7 incorporates this into their setup (UK only).

The sad fact of the matter is that no matter how far along we go, web technology has a leapfrog progress. We constantly have to account for older generations of browser or markup. CSS1 to CSS2 and now to CSS3 means we can do more but we have to make sure that they degrade gracefully to ensure people with the older stuff can still get a good user experience. This obviously applies to HTML and all this hangs on a browser being able to render it correctly.

The only recent experience that has given me a glimpse of the death of cross-browser compatibility issues was designing a mobile site specifically for the iPhone. All iPhones/ iPod Touches are the same size, screen resolution, brower and OS. This means that if I design and build a site that works on one iPhone, it will work on all of them.

I can’t put it any simpler than this: IE6 causes longer development time, more expense and a worse user experience so stop using it and use something else.