Firefox Paradox

A particularly astute reader of this blog has been emailing with me about an issue that results from the emerging popularity of alternative broswers, led by Firefox.

As I've posted a couple times, my audience is somewhere between 25% and 35% Firefox users.

And I made the assertion in my most recent post that developers of web sites that don't work well with Firefox need to do something about that.

So here is the paradox.  Firefox is great for the user because it provides a new open source browser that the community of users can maintain and improve. I use it almost exclusively unless I come across a site that doesn't work well with it. Then I fall back to IE.

But Firefox is not great for the developers of the websites because now they have to support another platform.  Since the death of Netscape in the late 90s, web site developers have only had to support one browser, IE, and that has made their life so much easier.

That's not true anymore.  Over 5% of the Internet audience uses Firefox and probably another 1-2% use Safari, Mozilla, and Opera.  And these alternative browsers are all gaining market share against IE.

My reader suggests that he could apply his scant resources to making his web site better for the IE users or he could apply them to making his web site available to the Firefox users, but he may not be able to do both.

And this situation gets worse if we end up with three popular browsers.  What happens if Firefox and Safari each end up splitting the market with IE at 30% each?  And what if Google is really building their own browser based on Mozilla and Firefox.

Then every web developer has to support three or more platforms and that may lead to less innovation on the web as more resources get applied to supporting the browsers instead of pushing the envelope on new functionality.

I don't think that's where this is all headed, but its a concern.  My reader and I are interested in what all of you think about this.  So please comment liberally to this post.

Comments

[Chris]

Web developers should not be developing to a browser, they should be developing to a standard. HTML / XHTML / CSS / are all open standards that anybody can and should support. It's actually a good business decision because by developing to the standards you ensure the widest possible availability of your content.

AFAIK, there are zero proprietary standards in Firefox. The browser is completely built on the open standards. I haven't used Opera in years, but I believe it does a fairly goos job with the standards, and IE does a much better job than it used to. I think content creation is converging around the standards, and that is a good thing. Developing for any particular browser would be a set back.

[W.B. McNamara]

Absolutely agree with Chris' comment above. From sad experience I can also add that if you're creating a site to browser rather than to standards, you're opening yourself up to a world of hurt.

In designing to the browser you're not actually designing a site for "IE" or "Opera" -- you're designing a site for the quirks of a specic release and patch level of a specific browser on a specific OS...and that behavior may not even appear across all the recent releases/updates of that browser. What's worse is that because that behavior that you're optimizing for often isn't a documented "feature" of the browser itself, the browser's developer may decide to change or remove that behavior at any time, without warning.

IE's dominance has really just allowed us to get lazy with coding and testing Web content...and even though I'm a really lazy man, I'm happy to do the extra work if it means a healthier browser ecosystem.

[Helmar]

To Chris: To the best of my knowledge, Opera is the most standard-compliant browser available. Other than that, I FULLY second your views that sites should be developed using the W3C standards, but would like to add that browsers should be rated more strongly according to their standards compliance. IE's compliance, as we all know, sux. There are so many CSS directives that IE6 doesn't understand that it's a PITA to actually make sites IE-compliant.

[george]

For a "VC" to be postuating that having M$ own the Internet (essentially the same thing as having all websites be IE compatible only) might be a "good thing" is either astoundingly naive, or is just a troll of a post to your blog. I wonder which it is?

[Adam]

As someone who has been developing sites since Netscape 2, I understand the issue of worrying about browsers. The process has grown easier each year. Seeing a standards-compliant product like Firefox get so much love makes me feel like the problem is going away--not becoming a bigger issue, as this post suggests.

However, there are issues that standards still needs to address. Javascripting tabs seems either impossible or unpredictable (since IE still has no tabs). And though I loathe IE, some of the coolest stuff I've seen has incorporated Flash and IE through a Javascript ActiveX connection. At this point, IE running Windows is the only way I can use or create these features.

What's good for developers--everything being the same--is not necessary good for a business who wants to set their browser apart from others.

[rick gregory]

"Then every web developer has to support three or more platforms ..."

As noted above, you can code to standards. It's not three platforms, it's ONE. Yes, you will have to adapt to each browser's bugs regarding the standards, but if I, a single person who develops web sites part time, can do this, I'm betting others can too.

And as far as your corresponden's problem, they're creating a false dilemma. As you summarize it, they feel that they can continue to support IE only or all browsers, but not both. Well, why NOT both? Why NOT create new features in a standards based method so that these features work in IE AND Firefox AND Opera AND Safari? Will it require more care in coding and more testing?? Yep. But they will make it easy for their customers to use their site and isn't that the idea? Doesn't a company's website exist to make it easy for their customers to do business with them? Or does it exist to make the development team's life easy?

Now, it may well be that the dev team is signed up for this but senior management is not - they don't want to invest in this stuff. Well, what will they do if the trend away from IE continues and IE's share drops from 93% to 83%? 75%? They can phase in these changes as a part of the work they're doing anyway, they can bet that the trendline will not continue and sacrifice 5-10% of their customer base or they can wake up, find that 20-25% of their customers can't use their site well and embark on a stress-filled crash redesign of the site. I know what I'd recommend...

"... and that may lead to less innovation on the web as more resources get applied to supporting the browsers instead of pushing the envelope on new functionality."

Excuse me, but just how much innovation has been fostered by Microsoft's dominance of the browser market? After all, they disbanded the IE team entirely, only reconstituting it recently in the face of Firefox. What did that do to encourage the development of cool new web-based services and applications? And since when does a monopoly encourage innovation? In fact, doesn't open competition do that??

[Will Pate]

Yep, glad to see that your other readers have jumped in with the answer to your question.

Ask any web designer that makes standards compliant code: their pages pretty much just work in browsers that support those standards (Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, OmniWeb, Opera). Making that standards complaint code work properly in IE is a pain in the neck, a frustrating process that often takes exponentially longer than making the original code.

More players in the browser market isn't a bad thing, it pushes innovation and allows users to find one that suits them - just like the blog tool market. Imagine if all Six Apart products put out some wacky proprietary RSS format that was very difficult to get aggregators to read properly. The browser market is dominated, though less so every month, by a beast that has reading problems and gets sick a lot. We need more competition in this space.

[Astute Reader]

To establish vocabulary, what I called “plain web site” in email is what readers correctly call “developing to standards”. For “standard” web site that’s absolutely way to go. But what if you want go farther then that?

Why? The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.

We going into world where web will be used (already used) to deliver experience similar to that of rich client apps. That comes at price of having to go far beyond W3C standards. The cool, interactive, wow-factor stuff is hidden in browser-specific DOM details, and events, etc.

Readers summarize my points:
Adam: “And though I loathe IE, some of the coolest stuff I've seen has incorporated Flash and IE through a Javascript ActiveX connection.” I will add “advanced DHTML” to the list. Things did got a lot easier since 95 yet still different browser = different DOM.

Rick: “Will it require more care in coding and more testing?? Yep.”

The dilemma I presented to Fred is efforts/reward equation:
For complex, interactive, “rich-client-like” web application – does it worth spend extra 30% of dev team resources to code up same experience for 5% of FireFox visitors? I think we are not there yet. May be at 15%+

Personal opinion:
“Web is so democratic because its cheap to make websites. Its cheap because for good or bad IE is a standard. Browser balkanization will without any doubt lead to increasing costs of web content creation. If say IE/Firefox/Safari get 30% each, we are in the world
where companies with financial resources to effectively develop 3 sites instead of one will have big advantage over small guys.

There is one huge benefit Firefox may provide. Discipline Microsoft enough so they restart IE development and starting adding more features to browser. The best outcome I see for the web is for Firefox to blaze, trigger IE upgrade cycle, and then die off (or remain in low single digits) leaving market fully standardized under IE with advanced and evolving feature set. Web remains cheap and standardized, rich-client/browser dichotomy disappears, users web experience is greatly improved.“

Flame is welcome.

[simon]

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Ima web developer and since the introduction of fire fox it really hasn’t made our jobs that more difficult in terms of cross browser compatibility (CBC). If anything firefox has made our job easier by being a browser which renders code correctly. Firefox which runs from the same GECKO engine as netscape,camino etc also shows the faults and errors in ie more. Cross browser compatibility is just a skill a web designer must have in their toolbox, its part of our job. Keeping in mind that CBC has become a lot easier then it was 3 years ago, believe me. Also we must remember IE is quite the old fix these days, I think the last actual update IE received was back in 2003? So we are comparing a piece of software 2-3 years older and outdated then firefox. Don’t get me wrong I dislike IE just as much as the next person in the know, Firefox atm does that & more. Its great firefox have made a slight indent on the browser wars.

However with the release of Microsoft’s new longhorn browser it will change the face of how we use the web. It will be innovative and more interactive then any other browser we have seen. And all those other browser companies(Mozilla,Opera , etc) will be back at the end of the line again where they will start playing the catch up game again.

[Peter Hoskins]

Religious wars aside, the point of the post was the fact that with Firefox climbing in popularity we have a bit of return to the old when we had multiple browsers. Back then MSFT tried to differentiate their standards based product by building special bells & whistles that had to be taken into account when building web apps. Macromedia did the same thing by building plugins that had to be accounted for - heard of Flash? Well MSFT became the standard with 95% of the browser market Flash has similar coverage. So the argument that browsers should be pure standards based is bogus. Flash is standard right? I want competition in the market otherwise you get what happen to IE for a while - stagnation. By the way, take a look at msn.com through a IE 6 browser. Insane integration and innovation. Screw the website developers - make them support Firefox and IE. We all win. Full disclosure - I use Firefox.

[Mike D.]

To echo some of the comments above, yes, coding to standards is easier than coding to IE. It might surprise you, not being a web developer, that makes things work in IE is actually *harder* these days than making them work in every other major browser combined. These days, we code to standards and hack for IE. All the more reason to quit using IE.

[spamus]

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