Never thought I’d see the day when Microsoft pulls the plug on IE. If I had told anyone about this ten years ago, they would laugh out loud and say that it would be too absurd to take seriously. I remember the day when Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer in 1995, by acquiring Spyglass Mosaic and rebranding it. And for a decade it seemed that nothing could withstand the onslaught of Internet Explorer.
IE10 was previewed yesterday at the MIX conference in Las Vegas. They have added lots of CSS3 support, but it makes me wonder why they didn’t put in the recently released IE9? And who will ever use IE9 when this one is approaching at the horizon?
IE6 is more stubborn than Rocky Balboa, it just won’t go down and die peacefully even though the entire planet is cheering for the other guy. But a few days ago an unexpected opponent turned up: its own creator Microsoft.
I remember a day in 2003 when I first tried Phoenix, a daring offspring of the bloated Mozilla suite. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the horrible IE6. It was later renamed Firebird, then Firefox, and finally version 1.0 was released on November 9 2004. It felt faster than any browser I had previously used and I instantly found myself addicted to using tabs instead of opening new IE windows all the time.
If you’ve been living under a rock for last months, you might have missed the buzz surrounding a new kid on the block: Google Wave. As usual, most people seem to misunderstand it but still claim it’s better than sliced bread.
One of the things that make Firefox superior for web development is the great addons. Here are some of my favorites.
The first sharp version of IE8 will be released today at Microsoft’s MIX09 conference in Las Vegas. The last months has seen a harsh public humiliation against the so called browser IE6 where large sites actually warned users that they were using deprecated software. Campaigns were started and it felt like a crusade.
As I’m writing these lines Bill Gates is sitting in a church a few hundred meters away. Bill is attending the wedding of Charles Simonyi and a girl from my hometown Gothenburg. Simonyi is one of the main responsible for abominations such as Word and Excel, and also the man behind hungarian notation (are you still using it?).
There’s a new guy in town. Apart from being a good song by VNV Nation, Chrome is a new browser developed by Google. As you might expect, it’s fast, memory efficient and slick. The user interface is simplistic and the viewport is very large. By default, Chrome imports the settings from your default browser. It is completely open-source and since it uses WebKit, sites that work in Safari should work fine in Chrome as well.
Despite the waves of culling, a lot of IE6 installations are still at large in the browser highlands, fighting against impossible odds. Even Microsoft tries to get rid of it by their nasty weapon called Windows Update. It’s simply a dinosaur that should have been extinct long ago.
