Monopolies might be bad for consumers, but for Web designers, the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser made their lives easier to some extent. When it came to testing site content for the various browsers of the past -- Netscape, AOL, et al -- the pre-eminence of IE meant that designing and testing was simplified.
Now along comes the exploding growth of the open-source Firefox browser, and things are back to where they were: competing browsers, more complications. But times have changed. Designers are finding that if they work with accepted Web standards, their media sites will look fine for surfers using IE or the alternatives.
And when it comes to Web feeds, Firefox offers "Live Bookmarks" so readers can get Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds right in their bookmarks. And the next version of AOL's Netscape browser offers a way for people to see sites in both Firefox and Internet Explorer easily, while also integrating news headlines and weather reports right in the browser's interface.
In short, it's an exciting time to be browsing the Web again. I've been using the Firefox browser off and on for the past couple months and have been impressed with its speed and simple interface. While I have experienced quirks with some sites, like buttons not working within Yahoo Mail, the main attraction has been tabbed browsing, which lets you see all your open Web pages within one window.
Plus, Firefox and other browsers aren't prone to most security problems that Internet Explorer has been suffering. One recent problem is illuminating, especially for online publishers. In Europe, hackers used a security hole in Internet Explorer to redirect banner ads on a number of sites, including The Register in the U.K., to malicious sites that loaded spyware onto readers' computers. The Register didn't run ads for three days.
Security problems have helped shift the landscape in browser usage. Dutch firm OneStat.com found that in late November, Internet Explorer's share was at 88.9 percent, down 5 percent from May, while the Mozilla and Firefox browsers -- both produced by the Mozilla Foundation -- were up 5 percent to capture 7.4 percent of global usage. While it's still small, percentage-wise, Firefox has come out of nowhere, with more than 9 million downloads of Version 1.0 in the past month.
Browser beware
For people browsing the Net, the experience on alternative browsers has been pretty decent so far, with Firefox or Opera or Apple's Safari. However, some sites, like Verizon and Sprint, still look better with IE, while others require IE in order to function at all. Movielink, the downloadable movie service, won't work at all with Firefox; a visit to the site without IE brings up an apology. The free MSN Video service requires Internet Explorer as well as Windows Media Player. However, the MSN portal works well with any of the alternative browsers.
Scott Moore, general manager of the MSN network experience, told me that MSN video is a complex Web service that requires IE 6.0, Macromedia Flash 7, Windows Media 7 and a broadband Internet connection.
"The reason we made the decision not to support other browsers or media players is that we simply wanted to build the best integrated user experience possible for video playback, selection and play list editing," Moore said via e-mail. "Supporting other browsers would have limited our ability to offer the unique and compelling set of features that you find in MSN Video because we use unique aspects of all three technologies."
So far, the IE limitation doesn't appear to have hurt the popularity of MSN Video, which serves 40 million video streams to 6 million people per month, Moore said. That might change if Firefox and other browsers grab a much larger share of the browser market. Still, it's not surprising that MSN would choose to optimize its video experience on a Microsoft-owned and operated browser.
There have been few pure content or news sites that have been "broken" -- that is, made unusable -- by alternative browsers. When the All Music Guide did a full redesign this past summer, many of its elements were broken if viewed in Firefox and other open-source browsers. That brought a firestorm of protest from bloggers who had also been fans of the free music site, which has an incredible database of more than 250,000 album reviews online.
Adrian Holovaty, lead developer for the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World's online division, actually wrote an extension for Firefox just to fix the All Music Guide's site for people using that browser. Eventually, the All Music Guide fixed its problems with Firefox.
"Among other things, the rise of Firefox is a necessary kick in the pants for lazy Web publishers who make site features available only to Internet Explorer," Holovaty told me via e-mail. "Firefox puts pressure on such publishers not to be lazy Web developers and to do things the right way."
The right way means developing content using accepted Web standards, rather than optimizing for one browser, usually IE. The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has been evangelizing designers to use specific types of computer programming languages such as Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) when designing their sites.
Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing for the Guardian, says that he loves using Firefox and is one of many new media folks I contacted who sung the praises of tabbed browsing. He also seconded Holovaty's call for following standards.
"We don't so much optimize our sites for individual browsers as try to make sure that everything we do is as standard-compliant as possible," Waldman said via e-mail. "This is the way we see the Web moving, and for a whole host of reasons, we have to move that way as well. I think that having a browser whose mission is to be standards-compliant ... can only be a good thing."
Craig Saila, Web producer of globeandmail.com, noted that many Web designers and developers at large news organizations use standard-based browsers such as Firefox, Netscape, Safari and Opera -- so they can't help but notice if their own site has problems with these alternative browsers.
"Ironically, by using CSS-based layouts and simpler HTML, sites are much easier to convert over to other media (mobile, RSS, and TV)," Saila told me via e-mail. "For site developers, one of the best tools in Firefox and Mozilla is the DOM Inspector which offers a very simple way of exposing the skeleton of a Web page and suggesting where display problems might be happening."
RSS baked in or half-baked?
For those who read the majority of their news online -- which is getting to be a crowded lot -- RSS has become an important way to see the latest headlines from news sites and Weblogs. Firefox lets you place RSS feeds right in its bookmarks, though these so-called "Live Bookmarks" don't seem to work for every RSS feed.
Waldman says that Live Bookmarks are more of a power-user tool, because it's not apparent exactly what you're doing as you subscribe to feeds and headlines pop up in your bookmarks. Plus, it would be difficult to keep track of more than a handful of feeds in your bookmarks because they would soon overwhelm the interface.
Michael Horowitz is a New York computer consultant who runs an excellent site, Computer Gripes, tracking compatibility problems with Firefox and various sites and services. He wrote that Live Bookmarks strikes him as "not yet fully baked." His complaints? The browser's documentation doesn't explain what a Webmaster should do so that Firefox will detect the feed; the feeds only display headlines and not summaries; the user can't control when feeds are updated; and the feeds look like normal bookmarks and aren't differentiated enough.
Meanwhile, America Online is preparing a public beta test of its next Netscape browser, Version 8.0. While AOL has not commented publicly about the browser, some insiders, like Alex Bishop of Mozilla, have seen a prototype of it and spilled the beans on some interesting features. One is the way the browser will include the engine from Firefox and from Internet Explorer. So, for instance, if you pull up Movielink and it won't work, you can choose "Display like Internet Explorer" from a menu, which brings up the page using the IE engine. The browser can remember that setting for future visits.
Many developers were angry about this dual personality, because users will basically lose any security blanket they get from Firefox if they switch on IE and get infected. Bishop's "First Look" review of Netscape 8.0 was scathing about what he called AOL's "surrender" to IE, as well as the cluttered look of the browser.
"We suspect Netscape hopes they can please everybody with all these options but in reality they're likely to satisfy a handful of geeks, confuse a large number of others and have no effect on the majority who will never touch any of these options and just use the defaults," Bishop wrote.
Some of that clutter includes two news tickers and a weather report built right into the browser's "chrome" interface, so to speak. The tickers are basically scrolling headlines from RSS feeds you choose, while the weather is based on the Zip code you punch in when registering.
At first blush, it seems like a great way for people to have their news and weather at their fingertips. But perhaps this is taking RSS feeds too far. Are people ready to get their news headlines up in the toolbars of their browsers? Is this something they would expect? Something that the average user has been craving?
Time will tell. AOL still has a long-term deal with Microsoft to use Internet Explorer, so the chances of them swapping in Netscape as the default browser are pretty slim for now. But if Firefox continues its meteoric rise and Microsoft can't shake off the security holes in IE, the browser landscape could shift dramatically -- something that standards-compliant sites will be ready for.
