Taco-
I think it's more of a complex situation than that. I'm sort of sick of all the browser hoopla as well, and I've only been into designing for 5 years. Back when I was a consumer in the browser wars, that was a good time as well - fun to kick back and watch the dust fly :)
I doubt there will ever be THE BROWSER 1.0 FINAL ... There's too much sharky business stuff that goes on behind the scenes for the browsers to all work the same. Without some sort of branding, there only would be one browser probably. I'm not sure why the browser wars were so damn violent - so if anyone with more knowledge of that stuff wants to send out a verbose email on/offlist to me I'll be happy to turn on sponge mode. As I see it, Netscrape VS Internut Exploder was simple brand name competition - technically, possession is 9/10's the law as they say. More market share, more branding awareness, more business.
Now, at least the browsers are starting to all adopt standards which is definitely less of a headache for us as designers and coders. Even though they all agree on the standards though, each browser has it's own agenda - even Mozilla's Firebird has its own special CSS element properties that can be toyed with to do different things. You can see them all when using the DOM inspector within the program and loading up Computed Style, they all start with -moz from the bottom of the styles list up.
The engine deal goes right in hand with the branding - because in order to set themselves apart from others, every browser will at least have their own tweaked version of a standard engine. I think that right now with the rise of standards the big dogs are going to start to flop out unless they can keep up with the open source development of the Mozilla team. And to their own credit, Netscrape's 7.1 browser is actually very pretty and works quite well. Of course, it is driven by Gecko - Mozilla's open source web engine.
I dread seeing Microsoft's next IE release in the upcoming year. After this long without an update at all, they better be damn well sweating over hot keyboards with a new built-from-scratch engine driving the circus along. If they still have that same old legacy code plopped in there from IE6 I'm giving up on them as far as hope is concerned completely.
Of course, given they still hold top market share, we'll still have to support their lousy browser.
-Ryan
Taco Fleur wrote:
Will there ever be such a thing as a Standard Browser Engine/Parser or what ever you want to call it?*****************************************************
12 years ago when I first started web design I was already sick of the differences between how browsers display and handle things, back then I figured that after some time (12 years maybe) everybody would get their act together and at least use a default engine/parser for every browser..
Whats the deal? Is anybody working on this, will it ever happen?
Why do so many designers still use and code for browsers that are not within the top highest browser market share?
Isn't it time to say, "we now know what the users use" (even though we don't agree with what they use) and completely forget about the rest?
If we all would do this and set our pride aside, I reckon we might have that dream we have come true!
Or am I just babbling away again, and talk about things I have no clue about??
*Taco Fleur 07 3535 5072* Tell me and I will forget Show me and I will remember Teach me and I will learn
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