Browser 2.0

Ok, I'm sure most of you have heard of web browsers, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Webkit, and various others. I'm also pretty sure that most people arn't aware that the browser market drives the Web 2.0 market. This is caused by a few things, which I'll get into, in a moment.

So most know that the biggest function of Web 2.0 companies are their web services, and we really wouldn't be able to access their services, if we didn't have a web browser. There are a few companies who produce web browsers for us, some are for the tech savy crowd, and some are for people who know next to nothing about computers.

Internet Explorer is, of course, created by Microsoft. It has been in version 6 for a few years now, and is currently in a dying state. It doesn't render CSS correctly, and it doesn't even support alpha channel transparent PNG files. This single browser has severely effected the Web 2.0 market.

One of the biggest challenges are cost as most new Web 2.0 companies don't have a lot of money to go around. It is safe to say that companies have pumped tons and tons of time and money into making their services completely compatible with the bugs that Internet Explorer promotes, as over half of all Internet users use IE.

Now the way that Internet Explorer got into such a mess, was years of basically controlling the market, and doing whatever they wanted with it. What they said, went. So when Mozilla came along with Firefox, and basically said "Hey, that's not how CSS is supposed to work", Microsoft was left in the dust, as Firefox moved rapidly ahead in the market, with greater support, for more features (things like transparent pngs and CSS which are a huge part of the Internet now)

Having a 500 pound gorilla doing something incorrectly, and a bunch of small monkeys (companies) doing it correctly, is bound to attract someone's attention. So people started to switch over to the more compatible platform, and as I'm typing this, more and more users are experiencing the magic of Firefox, over Internet Explorer.

Now a split market, is good and bad in some ways. It is good, in the fact that the smaller companies will keep the larger companies in check. So if there are a bunch of smaller companies making better products than Microsoft's' browser, then they are toast!

The bad thing about a split market is the battle for dominance and standards. Right now, to my knowledge, Firefox is still only supporting CSS 2, and other browsers like Safari, are supporting some CSS 3 elements. This makes a pretty big gap. Some companies want to be able to use CSS 3 elements, but have to hold off, because of lack in support.

This really has to change, I think that the top five browser companies, should get together, and have a conference, on what should be done, and how it should be done. Once they all agree, or are at least on common ground, we could move on, with "Browser 2.0".

Browser 2.0 is a simple concept, make it easy for developers and small companies to develop with standards, and quality at the same time. This really has not been a reality, until now, considering a lot of companies say let's just work out the kinks for the majority of people and hope it works for the others, if not, big deal.

I think that the industry is taking one giant step forward with the next generation of web browsers. Microsoft has released it's beta for Internet Explorer 7, and has fixed many of the bothersome, and plain out frustrating bugs that many people have had to suffer through.

Hopefully the final release of IE7 will send out a wake-up call to people, and tell them that they don't have to develop for that broken browser anymore, they can develop for just about any browser, and should be assured that their product will work universally, with all browsers.