More Thoughts on Mobile Browser Standards

This week an editorial for Six Revisions went live! Originally titled ‘Occupy Browser Standards‘ (a reference to the Occupy movement which was more relevant when I had the idea than when it went live); the post ‘Will the Browser Wars Invade Mobile‘ had a fair bit of offline discussion!

I was surprised when .net Magazine emailed me a few questions on the topic for a post of their own – to see my name on the site of a magazine I’ve been reading for the last 6 years was pretty astounding (I’m on a last name basis with Magazine!).

The Debate

The really great thing that came out of this was the discussion. A few people (notably Bruce Lawson) pointed out that a browser monoculture would be a terrible thing (he linked to an amazing post about South Korea which basically has this in place now with Windows XP). I conceded the point in my comments and added an amendment to my post, stating that I was getting a bit too focused on the means rather than the end.

I need to be more careful in the future when getting into editorials. I should have been more clear that it’s not so much the IE browser that I have issue with, but rather how it renders CSS. IE7 has been a pain in my neck for ages. How much time have I spent on work-arounds for it now allowing display:inline-block?! I have only just started looking at IE9 when I was finding some of the same bugs on a site. My point was that WebKit would never have this issue; and if it did, enough major platforms used it that it would be default in the mind.

Another problem I created for myself in my post was that I was speaking about the default browser on mobile platforms. I was disregarding third-party browsers like Opera and Firefox – which to their credit seem to get along fine with the CSS WebKit does well with.

My Take Away

I never intended to come off saying I wanted WebKit to rule the world, but I guess I kind of accidentally did. I agree that browser competition can be great (but I don’t think innovation enters into the equation as far as rendering CSS goes).

Another thing I never said in the post, is that I am actually resigned to the fact that I’ll be making IE specific stylesheets for mobile in the not-too-distant future. I can see this isn’t work I can avoid. This can still be a browser war, and we’ll need to draw the line somewhere. If (when) Amazon makes a browser will we support that too? OK, fine. What about when Sony does? Sure? What about Joe the Plumber? Ugh. There’s enough information online that I could probably make my own browser – I feel like the onus is on browser makers to comply with some set of CSS standards.

In summary what we need is more browser standards. I think everyone can agree with that!

If browsers don’t render the fundamental CSS properly this could lead to one scary thing – lazy developers going back to predictable, ‘safe’ tabular layouts that can be easier to make universal across browsers. And no one wants that.

Categorized in: Personal

This post was written by ArleyM