As the design specifications for web pages became more precise and user"s expectations grew, another battle in the web browser war began. The more detailed a web page"s design and the more feature rich its functionality, the larger the divide between the browsers. Not only did this gulf exist between browsers, but also between platforms. How Netscape worked on the Macintosh was significantly different than how it worked on Windows. There were differences in the browsers themselves, but also in the systems. For example, fonts tended to display smaller on Macs, and larger in Windows (even using the same browser). Color tended to display darker on a PC than on a Mac. Certain features available in I.E. 4.0 on the PC might not for available for Mac users (ain"t that always the way).


If only we had to deal with two browsers and two platforms. Unfortunately this is not the case. To get an idea for how complex these issues can become, let"s try and itemize the number of browsers. We"ll use only browsers currently in use for this exercise.

[Note: As of July 06 the browser world is even bigger!]

Netscape"s most current release is version 6.2.3 (7.0 is soon to be released - be afraid, be very afraid). While Netscape 4.x browsers are used only about 3% of the time, we"ll include them for the sake of being thorough. Netscape skipped version 5 (not sure why). Before we count Netscape as having two browsers available, we need to keep in mind those pesky ".2.3" suffixes. Netscape 6.0, for example, has been out for almost two years. The first release was an absolutely horrible browser. Just about everyone avoided it until they released 6.01. In the past two years, seven versions of the 6.0 browser have been released (6.0, 6.01, 6.1, 6.2, 6.2.1, 6.2.2, and 6.2.3). The 4.0 series has about twenty distinct releases. Each of these versions has its own subtleties and bug "fixes" from previous releases. So that"s a total of twenty-seven Netscape browsers. Each of them has the potential of not supporting, or supporting in different ways, the various features used to display content on a given web page.

I.E. has been a bit more restrained in their browser releases. They have had only eight major releases since 5.0.

That gives us a grand total of thirty-five browsers between Netscape and I.E., each one having differences in how they handle tags and display layouts. But there"s more. Don"t forget that we have the two major platforms, Mac and Windows. This means that we need to double our count, making the total seventy distinct browsers. That"s a lot of browsers! Wait, there"s more…. We can"t forget that each of the two platforms has more than one operating system. It"s not just Macintosh, it"s Macintosh system 9, and system X (plus all the intermittent ".2.1" releases as well). Then there"s Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, and XP. I guess that means we can"t just double our original count, we need to multiply it by at least seven - hold on, I need my calculator now… that"s 245 browsers!


The browser war has been intense and frustrating. Every web developer has horror stories about trying to make their sites work in most of these browsers. In the early days the battle lines were divided pretty evenly. That made things very hard. The upshot was that we often had to develop to a lower level, to keep the browser problems to a minimum. Today we are able to do more. Fortunately some of the older, more problematic browsers (Netscape 4.x for example) are so rarely used, that we can confidently ignore them. This still leaves us with plenty of problems addressing issues of browser compatibility. In general Netscape usage has declined. As a result, Netscape is less motivated to add its own unique features and instead complies with existing standards. I.E. has even made some attempts at complying with standards. On the other hand, the advanced features that current web sites demand open up other and sometimes more significant browser compatibility issues.   next >