… there are so many to choose from. (sometimes credited to Andrew Tanenbaum)

I have been labouring under the misapprehension that browser technology was at long last reaching maturity. The w3c (World Wide Web Consortium) has standards on the representation and presentation of documents, and on the ways for a programmer to access elements on the page and their size, colour, etc. I don’t think the standards are right, but they do nearly everything I want them to do, and - which is more important - they are standard.

When I worked in the intermerweb, in the days of the dot-com hysteria, it was an inordinate amount of effort to make a simple thing happen like changing an image when you moved the mouse over it. The problem was that you wrote the code for your site, but the thing executing the code could be any browser. How internet explorer chose to refer to the filename of the third image in the document would differ from how netscape did it, so you ended up having to write a piece of code that first worked out what browser it was being run in, then jumped to a piece of the program that was meaningful to that browser.

This is why you saw lots of “Best viewed in Nestcape Navigator 3+” badges and the like all over the net.

Well, for some time I’ve been using firefox, and very nice it is too. I won’t try to convert you because this is one of those “religious” topics where it’s “whatever works best for you but if THAT’s what works best for you you are wrong and deserve to die”… but suffice it to say, I switched to firefox, grumbled about it for about 3 weeks, and then never looked back. When someone gets me to help fix their computer, they sometimes find internet explorer has disappeared and firefox has taken its place…

I just tried looking at my oldyorksalsa page in IE6. Oops. Also this page: Oops again. Microsoft are STILL not playing ball and supporting published standards. Cheeky Buggers.