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Most web designers will have copies of each of the leading browsers installed on their system — for testing purposes — and so can decide themselves which browser they like the best. However, given the percentage of readers who come to HTMLSource still using Internet Explorer 6, there are obviously a huge amount of people out there who haven’t been told that there are better browsers available.
First, a little history, for the benefit of those who weren’t around during the infamous “browser wars.” Believe it or not, there was a point, a long time ago, when Netscape Navigator dominated the market. At around version 3 the browser was, for the time, excellent. HTML was simple and relatively pure. Eyeing Netscape’s success in a field that they had previously shown no interest in (Bill Gates himself once dismissed the Internet as a passing fad), Microsoft released their own browser, Internet Explorer (IE), with the sole intention of dislodging Netscape.
IE quickly became popular. Then came a period of flurried activity, with the two browser manufacturers releasing updates to their browser on ever-decreasing time scales. New HTML tags and DHTML extensions were created and then loosely documented. A designer could use these elements, but at the cost of having them fail in the competitor’s browser. A split started to form as pages designed for one of the “big two” browsers would not work in the other.
Netscape released Navigator version 4 in 1997. It was a very poor browser, laced with bugs and new abilities that broke backwards-compatibility. What caused most pain among developers was that it happily blundered into advanced CSS and JavaScript code that it should have had the sense to ignore. Microsoft released the superior Internet Explorer 4, and the tide started to turn very quickly.
Eventually it became obvious that Netscape were fighting a losing battle. Because IE came pre-installed on every Windows machine, most users just used that instead of seeking out alternatives (this is the same problem that plagues any competing browser to this day). By the time Internet Explorer 6 was released, its market share had grown to a high of about 95%.
In the years that followed, lazy or ill-equipped web designers began to design their sites to work only in IE, as making a site look the same in other browsers required a lot of knowledge and effort. This only encouraged users to stick with IE, no matter how many advances were made in other browsers. Even when Netscape belatedly released the vastly improved Navigator 6 in the year 2000, it barely made a dent in the market.
And so, the war ended. Lying in its wake was a web of incompatibilities and sites that only worked in a certain version of one browser. HTML had been blown off course as a structural markup language and was now bloated with presentational elements like the much-maligned font tag. It took years to even begin to undo the damage that had been done.
Happily, things have finally started moving back towards a level playing field. Internet Explorer’s dominancy is no longer absolute, and web surfers now have lots of choice when deciding which browser they should use.
Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE6’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. Netscape 6 was decent, but didn’t cut it. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.
Firefox is a browser designed from scratch to be secure, fast and customisable. It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components so often used to install spyware on IE-users’ machines. Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders, many of whom worked at Netscape in its heyday. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.
Firefox uses the same powerful rendering engine (code named “Gecko”) which is found in all Mozilla products. This means it has superb support for all those things we web developers love. Its rendering is accurate and fast, and it has advanced stylesheet support up the proverbial ‘wazoo’. DOM support is present and accounted for.
Firefox has an open architecture which allows the installation of themes and extensions. Themes, like ‘skins’ in many other applications, give the browser a whole new look. Extensions are even better — anyone can write one to make the browser do something special, like check your Gmail account when you open the browser, or block all ads. Head to » Mozilla update to load up on extensions. Of particular use to any webmaster is the » web developer toolbar, which is essential.
All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like » tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open webpages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer popup blocking by default. Once you’ve used either of these features, you will not ever want to go back.
