Comments on: Should there be only one browser?

By: J Phill

J Phill — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:30:26 +0000

I definitely think there should be multiple browsers that have the same rendering engine. Like why can’t browser makers get together and say, let’s make this right(with rendering).

Then they can have their own features, for competition sake, and let the public decide what they want. Firefox and Safari render fairly the same but I like using Safari more because it’s more light weight and doesn’t hog memory. That’s the kind of competition I’d like to see.

Who really benefits from having all browsers render differently?

By: Carlos Eduardo

Carlos Eduardo — Tue, 22 May 2007 20:36:00 +0000

“There should be more than one browser, but every browser should use the same rendering engine.”

It’s exactly what I think.
Competition is very good to us, users and developers, because there’s more chance to raise new technologies…

But the different rendering engines makes me angry, a lot of time is lost because of it…

By: patrick h. lauke

patrick h. lauke — Tue, 22 May 2007 20:49:49 +0000

here would be my amendment to the conclusion:

“There should be more than one browser, but every browser’s rendering engine should follow the same standard; where the standard isn’t clear, all browser developers should work with the standards bodies to fill the gap in the standard.”

i don’t care if the rendering engine itself is the same or different, as long as the end result is the same. if one browser comes up with its unique way of rendering things internally (in terms of how it handles the code, how it takes advantage of OS or accelerated hardware, etc) to gain speed benefits etc, fine…as long as the final output is consistent.

By: Dan Bowling

Dan Bowling — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:19:31 +0000

I disagree with Issue 1. Competition doesn’t drive innovation, demand does. If there is demand for a feature, in a single browser environment we could assume the feature would be integrated somehow (through plugins, or the core code.)

By: dragonfly

dragonfly — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:12:36 +0000

There should be more than one browser, but every browser should use the same rendering engine.

I disagree, we did live in a one browser world for a while, and the rendering engine sucked. If everyone rendered pages the same as IE6, there would still be a problem, as in a one engine world standards would take even longer to be adopted than they do now.

By: NatalieMac

NatalieMac — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:23:05 +0000

Multiple browsers is the way to go - everyone uses the web for different things and has different needs. No matter how flexible and extensible a browser is, it’s not going to be the perfect choice for everyone.

As for the rendering - I don’t mind if they’re different rendering engines as long as they follow web standards.

By: Ted Goas

Ted Goas — Wed, 23 May 2007 01:19:45 +0000

Comments:

“Competition drives innovation” (not demand…). AMEN Andrew! No single organization has all of the best ideas, nor will one ever.

Security - Again, AMEN! If a single browser existed, it would constantly be hacked, broken, and fixed. It’s vicious, but inevitable circle. User experience would suffer.

“Multiple browsers is the way to go - everyone uses the web for different things and has different needs.” nicely put NatalieMac. It’s our job as designers and devlopers to deal with it.

By: Matt Davies

Matt Davies — Wed, 23 May 2007 05:51:05 +0000

As long as Microsoft have nothing to do with the “one browser solution” I might be happy ;-) …

By: Andrew Faulkner

Andrew Faulkner — Wed, 23 May 2007 08:18:15 +0000

Good point, Dan. I’m not saying demand AND competition can’t both drive innovation. I think demand does play a role. But competition seems to have the edge in pushing technologies through in my view.

A lot of you seem to be happy with more than one rendering engine as long as they all render according to web standards. I’d be cool with that. Maybe the way to phrase it would be to say that we’d be happy with multiple browsers that render correctly?

Also, a comment on Digg about this article:

There is.

It’s called Internet Explorer, and it’s used by 95% of the people online.

I see no reason to worry about that last 5%

Thoughts?

By: Rob Ferrer

Rob Ferrer — Wed, 23 May 2007 08:20:13 +0000

All valid points. My only problem with having only one rendering engine is that different applications may (quite rightly) want/need to render a site differently. For example, viewing a website on a small-screened device such as a mobile phone would need different rendering to a full screen device.

As designers the best we can do is to use valid markup with CSS ‘recommendations’ on how it should be displayed.

Just my thoughts!

By: ocdude

ocdude — Wed, 23 May 2007 09:35:47 +0000

“There should be more than one browser, but every browser’s rendering engine should follow the same standard; where the standard isn’t clear, all browser developers should work with the standards bodies to fill the gap in the standard.”

Amen to this. I used to design pages for a living and worrying about how pages were going to display in different browsers at different resolutions would get really tiring. I ended up having at least 3 or 4 browsers (firefox, IE, IE5, KHTML(webkit)) always on hand to test my pages to make sure they worked.

By: Matt Davies

Matt Davies — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:00:41 +0000

It’s called Internet Explorer, and it’s used by 95% of the people online.

What a pointless comment that was! - it depends on your target audience. Just because Bill Gates has taken over world wide, it doesn’t mean in the country you live that the statistic is the same. For example I’m based in the UK, and on my web stats I have currently 37.2 % of visiters using IE, 35.7 % using FIREFOX and 13.9 % using Safari. My site is also aimed at design professionals so I have to consider my audience who don’t, generally like IE.

That stat, if true, is a world wide stat, taking into consideration 3rd world countries - it doesn’t mean you can ignore the other browsers.

Also, as we all know, even between versions of IE we get different variations on how it renders our CSS. So the quote says 95% of users use IE but you still need to develope for the last 4 versions which are all different! I HATE IE! Wastes so much of my time!

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:44:20 +0000

Competition does, in fact, drive innovation. Dan Bowling, competition will not exist without demand, but it does not mean that demand drives innovation. For example, monopolies supply goods that are highly demanded and you, generally, don’t see any innovation from such organizations.

Monopoly, in fact, leads to stagnation because there is no point in innovation, since you already own most of the market.

By association, single browser is a monopoly and therefore won’t be innovative; multiple browsers lead to competition and will lead to more innovative features, although a big pain for designers/developers.

By: Silv

Silv — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:57:31 +0000

Having only one browser rendering must subject to competition too. Who will spend money on implementing css3?

Competition is always good! I am happy that Microsoft pushed Silverlight because Flash needs competition.

By: Montoya

Montoya — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:54:33 +0000

Having only one rendering engine isn’t actually a good idea… imagine if we were all stuck with IE’s rendering engine… we would never see new CSS and (x)HTML specs become a reality. Having newer, more powerful rendering engines such as that for Mozilla, Webkit and Opera puts the competition on Microsoft to improve their own.

By: Kai Malloy

Kai Malloy — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:15:34 +0000

“There is.

It’s called Internet Explorer, and it’s used by 95% of the people online.

I see no reason to worry about that last 5%”

Actually IE’s market share world wide has been significantly diminished over the past few years:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp. With Firefox’s global share at almost 1/3 it is important to design for other browsers besides IE.

By: Ray Stone

Ray Stone — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:12:07 +0000

I’m not entirely sure that there is a world of variety between browsers as far as the average audience is concerned. From a web designer’s perspective there is a world of difference, and there is probably a small population of relatively web literate users who appreciate the difference between Firefox and IE. But a world with just one browser? Picture a world where we all drive the Toyota Corolla…

By: Ron S

Ron S — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:58:40 +0000

Multiple browsers are the ideal situation, because if there was only one browser, what would it compare to? What competition would there be to push it to better standards?

By: Ted Goas

Ted Goas — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:14:52 +0000

I’ve heard the same as many other commenters on the list concerning IE’s share of the browser market. I thought it was closer to 30% IE7, 30% IE6, 30% FF and some loose change? This still give IE the majority, but not close to 95%. Thoughts?

By: Andrew Faulkner

Andrew Faulkner — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:50:53 +0000

Ted,

It’s hard to say what stats are actually the most realistic. I’d like to think that the “30% are firefox users” is correct but from personal experience most ‘normal’ people I know (as in friends/family/etc) don’t even know that there are other browsers. So I’d guess that 30% is a little optimistic.

By: Jared Christensen

Jared Christensen — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:36:36 +0000

I think all browsers should render HTML the same, but using one rendering engine would be like all cars using the same engine. If a browser can change the engine to increase speed and so on go for it. Just follow the recommendation of the W3 and put my padding and margin where they should be. Really how hard can it be to draw a box the same in all browsers? I really don’t care if browsers treat a few things differently as long as the core elements work. It is a sad thing that we can not draw a box with a width or a height. Set a font size to the exact size we want with out a hack and so on. Just get the simple things right and we would all be happy.

By: Matias Etchevarne

Matias Etchevarne — Wed, 23 May 2007 18:40:48 +0000

I think, as there are w3 standards to follow, we must have an organization or consortium that validates browsers.

This organization make a list of features that every browser have to accomplish, css/html/dom/js, embedding and every browser maker have to include in their browser no matter their rendering engine.

And this organization can come with new requierements for future browser, and as an option, browser makers have to update their browsers to meet new standards in a delimited period of time.

This way, we all benefit and the web moves faster all in the same direction and make space for innovation on rendering speeds and other functions, and for we, developers, we get an unified platform that, non only renders things the same, but handle dom and js the same.

By: Frustrated

Frustrated — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:40:01 +0000

Some people here think that the multiple browserworld leads to innovation, i say it’s the cause of the stagnation we are faced with today.
With a single rendering engine for all browsers we would have had HTML 5 and CSS 3 years ago.

By: Bruce Boughton

Bruce Boughton — Wed, 23 May 2007 23:00:38 +0000

Multiple browsers, one rendering engine? How would that work for my mobile phone. There is more than one way to browse the web and more than one way to render a website. Get over it. This isn’t print, this is an intangible medium. You should design for different media.

Also, if competition is good for security, why shouldn’t it be for presentation? What if no browsers used ClearType and we froze at that? There wouldn’t be adequate competition to put the emphasis on nice font rendering.

By: Allan

Allan — Thu, 24 May 2007 07:45:59 +0000

You are missing something from your argument. When you state that security wins with multiple browsers, this is correct. However then going on to propose that the rendering engine should be common to all browsers doesn’t follow the security argument. It is quite possible for the rendering engine to have a security flaw, just as the ‘browser wrapper’ might.

Multiple browsers all the way. Although I have to admit if everyone used a decent engine like WebKit or Presto, my life would be so much easier.

Choice is the spice of life.

By: Andrew Faulkner

Andrew Faulkner — Thu, 24 May 2007 10:50:59 +0000

Allan, good point. I think that the solution of having different rendering engines that produced the same visuals could get over this issue. But then Bruce’s point that there’s a need to render differently based on how content is accessed comes into play. It all comes back to multiple rendering engines that render according to standards. I can only wish at this time though!

By: Matt Robin

Matt Robin — Thu, 24 May 2007 12:38:25 +0000

Damnit, Andrew (Faulkner) beat me to the punchline! :)

Most people already there’s only one browser…(Internet Explorer)…so, for much of the population - the choice is largely academic.
The successful adoption of Firefox (at least on the PC) has shown that
a rival broswer is healthy for competition though…’raising the bar’ - so
that would suggest that more than one browser is a good thing.

I think it would be great if there was just one broswer - so long as it
was a really good one, and…(like Matt Davies said)…so long as Microsoft
aren’t a part of it!

By: trench

trench — Sat, 26 May 2007 21:43:27 +0000

Multiple browsers is the way to go IMO. We all have different reasons for using a particular browser. I think we should continue to use the browsers we want. If people dont like it, it will fade out with time.

By: YPM

YPM — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 15:38:21 +0000

The effect of competition is very important I think, too bad Microsoft doesn’t fully understand that part.The hassle isn’t a big problem, if you code a valid website, it won’t take much changes to make it work in IE6.I don’t want my browser to be useless, omg, keep it multi-browser.I guess this makes it multi-browser for me.

By: DeeDee

DeeDee — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:35:27 +0000

I found this page because in my frustration with CSS/XHTML rendering so completely differently in IE and Firefox I put, "there should only be one standard for browsers" in a google search and found this page. I still think that there should be several browsers, IE, Avant, Opera, Firefox, Netscape, whatever, but just like the code used to make the sites have be standardized so should the dang browsers. I had to read through several books on IE hacks just because my great CSS image menu would not work in IE. I got so ticked I just used a table to organize it and I hate it because I’m a tableless coder, only using them to organized data when absolutely necessary, not to control the layout. It’s making my code look nasty and now there’s unnecessary Java code on my page for the "mouseover" affects, it’s starting to look sloppy.

By: Joe Milbach

Joe Milbach — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:13:33 +0000

I think competition is what drives pretty much all industries. So I welcome all the different browsers I just think that there should be an over all standard, like everyone is saying, for the rendering engine. This will make building and viewing site more pleasant for both the viewer and the designer. That way everyone can have their favorite browser and not have to worry about viewing problems and design problems. Having just one browser would be very bad. Mainly it is beause of the security issue that pop up. I usually keep my eyes open for security problems have no problem going to a different browser until the problem is resolved. I just relate it to how there are way more viruses for microsoft based computer than there are for macs. PC take up the majority of the market and some that is where the focus is for hacking and attacks. So if there is one browser there is only one thing to hack.