Standards still on the horizon
2008 is looking like a good year for standards, or is it? The browser wars continue to rumble on, Firefox, Opera and Safari all have recent updates which push their standards compliance forward yet another notch. IE continues to lag behind, but has a new browser round the corner with better, if not ground breaking, support. Could development finally be getting easier for us developers? I’d like to think it was, but the sad reality is that even with all these advancements in support it will be a few years yet before we can reap the rewards.
Even though it is two years since IE7 was launched and IE8 will hopefully be released at the back end of this year or early next it doesn’t mean a great deal to the now. IE6 is still around and is likely to be around for some time to come. The simple reason behind this is that IE6 still commands a high percentage of browser share, likely due to corporations who have applications that are dependent on IE6 features and people who are unable to update IE6 for lets say “legal” reasons. The lack of adoption of Vista contributes to this, all of which means that although it is a blot on the browser landscape IE6 will continue to be a thorn in our sides.
It would take a very bold client to ignore such a high percentage of their potential users, especially when one of the users tends to be themselves or their boss. So for all the strides browser vendors are making in standards support, if we cannot reliably use it, the frustration remains! Some people are making tentative steps in the “right” direction, 37 signals, for instance have announced that from August they are dropping full support for IE6 for some of their products. Unfortunately cases such as this are very much in the minority.
So the future still promises to be rosier, but for the moment it’s still a distant dream…
One Response to “Standards still on the horizon”
Five by Five » Blog Archive » IE6 stats, could they be skewed? Says:
[...] is a bit of a followup to my post in July about ‘Standards still on the horizon’. Given that according to some figures IE6 still commands about 36% of browser market share is it [...]
August 27th, 2008 at 11:22 am
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