Netscape Ruined The Web
from the did-they? dept
Kelly McNeill writes “How is Microsoft’s introduction of IE specific tags different than Netscape’s introduction of Netscape only tags? We went through the Netscape World Wide Web version 1, 2 and 3 without people complaining much, is it just that people hate Microsoft that much?” An interesting argument blaming Netscape for not playing by the rules. Nothing really new there (we’ve known this for a while). The point of the article, though, is not to just tear apart MS for the new IE, but realize that both big browser companies haven’t done a good job in being standards friendly over the years. Time to check out Opera again? If only they’d make it free.
Comments on “Netscape Ruined The Web”
a little different
The case of Netscape introducing proprietary extensions is a little different (but only a little) in that they did spend a lot of effort to become compliant once the standard was rolled out. The complaint about MSIE, on the other hand, is that they are sacrificing work on standards compliance for work on the new proprietary standards.
Zorn
/ is the root of /all/evil
It's different in that IE won and Netscape lost
No one cares whether Netscape supports the standards because frankly, no one uses Netscape, or at least not enough people to drive webpage creators to write Netscape-specific pages like we’re seeing with IE.
I have a few gripes about IE and about MS’ tactics in general but I don’t think that there was ever a doubt that IE was a much better browser than Netscape’s. It’s faster, more stable (ever notice how a single message box in Netscape will freeze ALL your browser windows until you click ‘OK’?), and more standards-compliant. Now if we could only get the big boys to play nice and ditch those neato “extra” features that AREN’T part of the standard so the average joe makes webpages that EVERYONE can read. I mean, that was kind of the original point of the WWW.