Internet and Technology

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Software development is now a global effort.  It's also very frustrating.  We now have four browser choices in North America.  We won't count the those with less than 1% of the market.

The major players are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.  Their approximate market share is shown below:

Browser	Market Share for Browser
Internet Explorer	79.1%
Firefox	14.8%
Safari	3.6%
Chrome	1.8%
Other	.7%

Browser Market Share above*

Market Share Operating Systems above*

What's annoying about the Browsers is how much they differ internally and externally.  The Saugeen and Kincardine Times has to test with all of them and it's a pain.

The most open browser for the developer is Internet Explorer.  Firefox is next.  Firefox can be annoying because it is always updating itself and interrupting work.

Both Safari and Chrome have bugs in them that cause a developer a lot of trouble.  That is, not to say that IE and Firefox don't too, but they have established themselves and they act and do things like each other.  They are the standard.  The standard groups think they establish the standards, but it is the big players who do.

Safari has only a small percentage of the market, but compensations for the bugs that it has have to be taken into account because MAC uses the guts of Safari on the Ipad.

Google's Chrome has an even smaller market share, but we have to pay more attention to it than Safari because it is written by Google and will be the basis for all its work on the Cloud.  The interface will be Chrome based.

So what's the big deal, then?  Here is what happens:

• Chrome developers get a bee in their bonnet and they refuse to support certain things that are standard on IE and Firefox.  They claim that some of these things violate some standard and they ignore that at present they only have 1.2% of the market, so why should they not support what others do?

• If you peek into some of the bug report blogs you will see that not only don't they believe that they have certain bugs, but they continue to insist they don't exist, even when some of their own developers tell them they do.

What can be done?  It's very difficult to code around the bugs and make what you're doing work seamlessly across all  of them.  This haggle is both a benefit and a liability of so called "Open Standards".  A developer is often hung up on something simple in order to agree with the lowest common denominator.  Eventually the shear weight of complaints forces things to be done correctly.  The Internet isn't always right, but it gets to the truth eventually.

*Statistic for the year 2010 taken from approximately 100,000,000 hits

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Thursday, March 17, 2011