SBala

At first glance at this update from 37Signals, I shrugged and said my usual cynical, "Who cares?" until I realized the drastic progression ensuing the process of companies slowly ditching support for the outdated and bug-ridden Internet Exploerer 6. 37Signals is phasing out Internet Explorer 6 support on every single product they distribute, and is starting a trend that is much appreciated by almost every web developer. If this catches onto more mainstream markets, in which major online players eventually decide to cut Internet Explorer 6 off, more websites will focus on creating semantic and standards-compliant code rather than violating standards and ruining clean code in order to properly display in an outdated browser. The catch, 26.5% of web surfers are using Internet Explorer 6. Although that number may be a minority, it is still a large audience.

Microsoft has updated Internet Explorer to version 7. Many people view this browser with mixed emotions; it heavily improves upon its prior releases, but it still is a far way from true standards compliance.

Firefox, however, is slowly changing the complications commonly associated with technologies surrounding web site presentation. With its 41% market share, Firefox has heavily optimized both resource usage and rendering. The improvements made by Apple and Opera are also putting pressure on the not-so-dominant Internet Explorer for change.

The pressure put on Microsoft by the browser developments made by Opera, Apple, and Mozilla are still not enough to reduce the 26.5% if people still make the web work well on Internet Explorer. What most developers who consider the needs of Internet Explorer users are missing is the fact they they are encouraging the use of an outdated browser that cannot properly handle modern tasks. Programmers are supplementing proper coding with hacks, and hindering the future implementations of CSS3, JavaScript 1.6+, and XHTML 2.0.

Once users see a majority of the web as a disfunctional mess, only to realize it was their own fault for ignoring the pestering Windows Update notifications, they will adopt browsers that give them a better experience whilst also allowing developers to use the web-based technologies they want to implement.

There is some news bubbling about Firefox and Safari duking it out on performance enhancement and quickening the pace of Javascript interpretation. Apple claims that Safari has significant performance increases.

Safari 4 has just been seeded to the developers at Apple's developer conference. The manufacturer claims that the software has a 53% faster JavaScript engine than the preceding and current version 3.1 (based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test conducted on iMac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.8 GHz, with 2 GB of RAM and running under Mac OS X Snow Leopard.) Although Firefox 3 RC3 was the first to deliver significant JavaScript performance improvement, Apple apparently is exceeding those gains with Safari 4.

As always, Microsoft manages to do exactly what is expected of them, and provide another piece of bloated software. According to the TG Daily article, the responsiveness of Internet Explorer 8 is slower than that of Internet Explorer 7. This is a huge step backwards as most people are still going to continue using the browser bundled with their operating system. And again, the Microsoft engineers are still incapable of making a product that both functions the way developers want it to function, and perform in a way the user experience is enhanced. If Internet Explorer is unable to keep up with the rapid rate of growth displayed by Firefox and Opera (my two favorite browsers), their market share will slowly decrease until a majority stop using Internet Explorer.

Gladly however, this only means the amount of simultaneous Javascript is limited to that of which allows the user to continue navigating the page with ease. Unlike previous internet Explorer releases, Internet Explorer 8 claims to fix many of the display issues particularly when dealing with unsupported CSS, or incorrectly coded pages. The only fear I have of Internet Explorer 8 is the introduction of more bugs that create further complications when coding and generating valid XHTML documents that do not display properly in the invalid browser.

TG Daily - Firefox 3 and Safari 4 in browser speed race