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2003 - The year in browsers
As users upgrade from older versions, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 has acheived the market dominance that has long been expected of it. At the same time, Microsoft appears to have lost all interest in improving its rendering engine. The next major enhancements are not now expected until Longhorn - which is still at least a year away. The initial rumours of its complete stagnation, however, seem to be unduly pessimistic, with talk of some updates arriving with Windows XP service pack 2. Tough luck for anyone still on Win9x.
Way back at the start of the year, Apple revealed their Safari browser, which quickly gained a pretty good reputation for standards compliance. Safari also appears to be grabbing a major slice of the Mac browser market. A few weeks later, Opera released Opera 7 for Windows, which brought several major enhancements, notably much improved DOM support. A Linux version followed soon afterwards.
The remains of Netscape corporation were finally scattered to the winds by AOL. This proved mixed news for the mozilla project. Many of Netscape's developers lost their positions at AOL, but several were promptly rehired by other corporate supporters of Mozilla (notably IBM and Red Hat) and by the newly-formed Mozilla Foundation. Of course, many core developers weren't at Netscape anyway. The Foundation, freed from a commitment to follow AOL/Netscape's requirements, struck out in a new direction, albeit one long foreshadowed. Development of Mozilla Firebird was stepped up, with the explicit aim of replacing the browser component of the suite in the future, and a new emphasis placed on direct support for end users.
While Microsoft seems to have consolidated its hold on the browser market, close inspection reveals some major changes happened in the last year. The version 4 browsers have all but disappeared. Both IE4 and NN4 have lost nearly all the users they had at the start of the year. This trend is mirrored by the steady rise of the modern browsers, lead by Opera, Mozilla and Mozilla's siblings.
Among those who actually choose their browser, the new kids are starting to gain ground back from IE - particularly notable is the world of weblogs, where many popular sites are now reporting mozilla-based browsers at 10-30% and rising.
Elsewhere, despite a few frothing exponents of the "CSS is the spawn of Satan" viewpoint, many web designers have got the message that standards are good, and are starting to apply them. With the disappearance of the version 4 browsers, IE/Windows is the new whipping boy (as in "it works in everything but *$%^#ing Internet Explorer")
It remains to be seen how things will go in the future (especially with Microsoft ramming IE down the throat of everyone who buys a new computer) but 2004 could be the year that IE finally gets some serious opposition.
Way back at the start of the year, Apple revealed their Safari browser, which quickly gained a pretty good reputation for standards compliance. Safari also appears to be grabbing a major slice of the Mac browser market. A few weeks later, Opera released Opera 7 for Windows, which brought several major enhancements, notably much improved DOM support. A Linux version followed soon afterwards.
The remains of Netscape corporation were finally scattered to the winds by AOL. This proved mixed news for the mozilla project. Many of Netscape's developers lost their positions at AOL, but several were promptly rehired by other corporate supporters of Mozilla (notably IBM and Red Hat) and by the newly-formed Mozilla Foundation. Of course, many core developers weren't at Netscape anyway. The Foundation, freed from a commitment to follow AOL/Netscape's requirements, struck out in a new direction, albeit one long foreshadowed. Development of Mozilla Firebird was stepped up, with the explicit aim of replacing the browser component of the suite in the future, and a new emphasis placed on direct support for end users.
While Microsoft seems to have consolidated its hold on the browser market, close inspection reveals some major changes happened in the last year. The version 4 browsers have all but disappeared. Both IE4 and NN4 have lost nearly all the users they had at the start of the year. This trend is mirrored by the steady rise of the modern browsers, lead by Opera, Mozilla and Mozilla's siblings.
Among those who actually choose their browser, the new kids are starting to gain ground back from IE - particularly notable is the world of weblogs, where many popular sites are now reporting mozilla-based browsers at 10-30% and rising.
Elsewhere, despite a few frothing exponents of the "CSS is the spawn of Satan" viewpoint, many web designers have got the message that standards are good, and are starting to apply them. With the disappearance of the version 4 browsers, IE/Windows is the new whipping boy (as in "it works in everything but *$%^#ing Internet Explorer")
It remains to be seen how things will go in the future (especially with Microsoft ramming IE down the throat of everyone who buys a new computer) but 2004 could be the year that IE finally gets some serious opposition.