I ran into an interesting problem yesterday. All I wanted to do was some simple tokenizing of a partial HTML document, an HTML fragment (it was article content from the website I work on) based on certain elements. At first it seemed like a really simple string manipulation thing, but quickly blew out of proportion into something crazy.
Remember back in the days of the browser wars? We chose a browser and that was what defined our web experience. In the end Microsoft won with Internet Explorer. They had the desktop marketshare and IE was integrated into the OS to the point that it was (arguably) the fastest and easiest to use. Eventually sites were just built for IE only, or Netscape Navigator only. But a new browser war is forming. In these “modern times” the web browsers are integrated into the phone’s OS as IE was with Windows 95, and we pretty much live with them the way they are: Safari on iPhone, whatever is labeled “Browser” on the Android and BlackBerry, Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, etc.. But a new battle for browser market-share is forming with Opera and Mozilla drawing battle lines.
I downloaded the latest Internet Explorer 9 beta this morning and ran it against html5test.com, and it scored 96 points out of 300. Chrome gets 231 points and even Firefox 3.6 gets 139 (4.0 beta gets 215).
I’m more than a little disappointed. It looks like Internet Explorer is going to continue the tradition of obsolescence and suckage.
Chrome has been my default browser for a long time, and I’m glad that it is! The new IE9 is fast, but that is probably because it doesn’t do anything yet.
Here is hoping that the IE9 team brings in more adoption before IE9 releases.