A narrative on the future of web browsers and web browsing

The Mozilla/WebKit Arms Race

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Biologists talk about a phenomenon called the evolutionary arms race. Cheetahs, for example, only survived if they were fast enough to catch the slowest gazelles. Gazelles, on the other hand, only lived to produce offspring if they could outrun the fastest predators. These are powerful evolutionary forces, and as a ...

Microsoft, Good Standards Citizen

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

In response to widespread outrage at their decision to make the Internet Explorer 8 handle web pages by default in the same broken way as IE7, Microsoft has now announced that they have seen the light: Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” ...

Do We Really Want the European Commission to Regulate the Web?

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie continues to promote and defend his company's legal action against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices with a guest editorial in The Register. One thing seems incontrovertible: Microsoft should not be allowed to tie Internet Explorer to Windows and strong-arm hardware manufacturers into refusing bundling deals with ...

Why Doesn’t Dell Bundle Firefox?

Friday, February 1st, 2008

A tad less than a year ago Dell launched a forward-thinking customer feedback website called IdeaStorm, modeled on social news sites like Digg. The site appears to be a thunderous success (as its name would suggest), and one of the most popular requests, shipping machines with Linux preinstalled, has already ...

Håkon Wium Lie on Microsoft and Acid2

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Last month, Microsoft announced to general astonishment that the upcoming release of Internet Explorer will pass the Acid2 test of standards compliance. They even went as far as to publish a video containing interviews with leading members of the IE team and a fascinating inside look at their Acid2 quest. ...

Is Web Standardization Obsolete?

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Most people seem to labor under the misconception that web standardization is a well-regimented, orderly process with a clear set of rules. In particular, the uninitiated believe that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the anointed standards body for the web. Vendors get together, agree on some new markup ...