Slashdot Mirror
Browser Wars Declared Over?
Kelson writes to mention Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google took the stage this week at the Web 2.0 expo and in addition to discussing pressing issues have declared their intent to avoid another browser war. All the panelists agreed that security was the largest concern currently facing browser developers. "Brendan Eich, the chief technology officer at Mozilla, said that security was hard and always will be. 'I don't think we should take security lightly; it's an end-to-end problem and we have to step outside the current model to win on this front,' he said. For his part, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, said one of the scenarios that kept him awake at night was offline access to the browser and what that meant from a security perspective, particularly on the user-to-user front."
The Ass, the Fox, and the Lion
The Ass and the Fox, having entered into partnership together for their mutual protection, went out into the forest to hunt. They had not proceeded far when they met a Lion. The Fox, seeing imminent danger, approached the Lion and promised to contrive for him the capture of the Ass if the Lion would pledge his word not to harm the Fox. Then, upon assuring the Ass that he would not be injured, the Fox led him to a deep pit and arranged that he should fall into it. The Lion, seeing that the Ass was secured, immediately clutched the Fox, and attacked the Ass at his leisure.
MORAL: Never trust your enemy.
Appropriate parameter assignments for ass, fox, and lion are left as an exercise for the reader.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The objective never was to make firefox or opera the next king of the web, but to have competition in the browser market. By having serious and various competitors in various platforms, we need standards in order to make web pages equal independent of your preferred client.
Right now I can't remember the last time I saw a "best viewed in IE X.0" warning, and that should be an indicator that people know there's a diversity of clients in the market, and making you site exclusive to a particular browser, instead of compiling with standards everyone can implement, means greatly limiting your customer base.