Browser Dark Ages

Are we entering a dark ages of the web browser?

Now Mozilla has turned off window.focus(); method by default in FF 2.0, oh and it still seems to leak memory like a siv. IE7 seems clunky as usual and I am not sure about their CSS support yet + Eolas.... Safari seems to have random results.

I miss the good old days when a browser was controllable and a developer could control the users experience and wasn't locked down by browser 'security' or 'standards'. I never had any problems with browser security before all of these new 'fixes'. I mean the worst thing that happened to me was a bunch of Pop-ups on some porn page I probably didn't need to be visiting anyways? :rolleyes:

I just feel browsers in general are in a bad spot right now and seems to be getting worse with the latest releases.

I guess I'm on the opposite sides. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and even IE are all more DOM compliant than ever before. The choice of what objects and methods I can use are higher than before. It doesn't mean all work correctly across all platforms/browsers, but where a lot of stuff I'd rather do is now covered in both browsers across the multiple OS variations.

Far from perfect though. But better than the weird tricks we were pulling out with Netscape Communicator 3.3 Gold and IE 4.02.

I feel like it's watering things down... everyone is so friggin scared that their popup will be blocked, or their css will break we are forced to come up with these weak static sites.

This is why I'm not a proponent of full AJAX / CSS sites. With Flash, it's one plugin. All browsers use the same plugin. There's only one standard: the one Adobe sets. All designs are completely self-contained. A Flash file will display the same through Firefox as it will in Opera, IE, handheld browsers, console browsers, and just about everywhere else.

I can't understand why it's so hard for browsers to adhere to a single standard.

Don't get me wrong... I like working within the DOM, CSS, XML and standards... I just feel like all browsers are currently forcing a certain way of designing a site down my throat. I would rather provide a solid standard across the board and let me work out the implementation details.

So in other words, you want a one browser, no competition future? Let's hope that's not MS. ;)

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Originally Posted by gerbick

I guess I'm on the opposite sides. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and even IE are all more DOM compliant than ever before.

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Have to agree. Just made an ajax feed aggregator the past two weeks with nearly 1000 lines of custom JavaScript, lots of effects and surprisingly everything works perfectly in all major browsers, damn beta testers didn't even find a single bug, just one misspelled word. ;)

Only Safari bugged me for a while because of that ugly "I don't remember anymore what I've put into there if it's cloning something that's already somewhere in the page" innerHTML bug.

Fredi

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Originally Posted by Subway

Just made an ajax feed aggregator the past two weeks with nearly 1000 lines of custom JavaScript

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i wonder how that will work when the FF 3.0 is released with javascript disabled by default ;)

Then I boycott the internet and become a gardener. ;)

Fredi

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Originally Posted by admedia

i wonder how that will work when the FF 3.0 is released with javascript disabled by default ;)

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That won't happen though, specially because, whether you want it or not, javascript is one of the things that made web2.0 happen. A lot of what you see in sites, done with javascript, are things you could do 7 years ago....but now, it's easier, and works better on most browsers, so it's less of a headache. That's why javascript is being considered again as a great option for webdev. I don't think anybody would try to make a browser with javascript disabled.

And, nowadays, the tendency is to use javascript to enhance a site. With dom scripting, you can hijack every element in your page and add functionality. So, if you do it the right way, you can have your site working with javascript disabled, and probably it won't have all the functionality, but at least the basic one. When you enable javascript, you'll add all the extra functionality. But your app shouldn't be totally javascript dependent, or at least it should degrade gracefully (i hate that buzz term, but it's the best description of the issue).




Regarding flash, it's not a flash problem, but you probably know that nowadays, the best options to embed flash in a webpage involve javascript (swfobject, for example), so for something so minimal, flash is kinda javascript dependant.

You can use flash, but it also has its problems regarding integration with the rest of your site (unless you want to make a full flash site, which limits you on other aspects as SEO), and then, javascript is the bridge that lets you communicate between your flash and your html.


We know about the problems of firefox, but you have to keep one thing in mind. Firefox has been a great aid in the evolution of the web. It's raise awareness and has made microsoft realize (somehow) that their browser also needed improvement (though i think they fail with ie7), and that developers are screaming for good standards and not. Browser competition is good, as long as they don't try to get all the market by closing their solutions (propietary implementations) but offering standards.

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Originally Posted by admedia

Are we entering a dark ages of the web browser?

Now Mozilla has turned off window.focus(); method by default in FF 2.0

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I see that as a good thing

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I miss the good old days when a browser was controllable and a developer could control the users experience and wasn't locked down by browser 'security' or 'standards'. I never had any problems with browser security before all of these new 'fixes'. I mean the worst thing that happened to me was a bunch of Pop-ups on some porn page I probably didn't need to be visiting anyways?

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Honestly, I'm a complete 180 from that. Standards allow you to make one page that looks identical on all browsers. No voice-family CSS hacks or * body hacks. If the browsers followed the standards, then testing and debugging a web page would be a hell of a lot easier.

I've always approached web design off the idea that I'm making this web page for the users. Not for me. I think the worst thing you could do to a web page is control the users experience. That includes forced pop-ups, disabling the back button, or my personal favorite, opening a new window fullscreen with no title bar or other browser features. Flash hasn't helped with this, in fact it has only made the problem worst.

If someone wants to open a page in a new window, then they have the ability to do that with their browser. I shouldn't force that on them. However, I can understand that in some cases it really might be necessary to open a new window. Well, then your design should let the user know this.

As a side note, there exists a difference between what a user will expect to happen and what actually happens. Designers need to take the time to look at their design from the users perspective. We have two links that look identical, one open in a new window, the other opens in the same window. What will the user expect? Does this choice have implications (like no more back button)? This is one of the simplest examples, but it makes sense.

In short, having standards compliance and javascript pop-up disabled are a good thing.

And all designers should go read The Design of Everyday Things

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Originally Posted by yasunobu13

I see that as a good thing

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I thought as developers we were getting the hang and starting to self police ourselves, what is good and proper when vs. what is not. Full screen sites and Flash intros were falling far from fashion... I didn't feel like we needed the browsers to step in and start mandating these things for the benefit of the user.

We maybe, but there are tons of devs, especially in the ad business that just don't give a ****, all they care is the amount of money they make and nothing else. Something like self police ourselves will never work.

Fredi

I'm on all 3 sides of the fence. I was doing page layout long before the internet, only it was for books and magazines. Talk about design standards, everyone who picked up the book was going to see the same thing. Seems silly to think about it that way but given speed bumps of todays designers it's more of a best case scenario.

What I mean is, design used to be just that, design. As soon as I decided what I wanted to see, I'd let the computer know and be done. Sure it required some prep work but it was the kinda stuff you macro or flight check and get back to the enjoyable part of being creative. It was an amazing time for me and believed the future would only get easier and more enjoyable.

Today it's almost criminal the amount of creative deterrents we have. The list of things you can't do is longer than the things you can. Some of you might argue, "But what about the DOM and ajax?" but what I'm saying is, I DON'T GIVE A FK! I want to let the computer know what's in my head and be done with it! I'm talking solely UI here but where the hell are the REAL page layout apps? The ones that feel like illustrator instead of word? I should be able to use a wysiwyg ONLY app, drop in graphics of any format I choose, enter text at will and basically never have to think about how search engine friendly or standards based the mark up is. I don't care, I never did, it's not why I became an artist. The app should generate exactly the style sheets, div tags, and javascript that a perfect web site needs. I can say this because it seems we are finally starting to standardize what perfectly compatible is. Perfect meaning works in all browsers, is spider friendly and is still your original vision.

Don't get me wrong, I love writing code to solve complex tasks, but only for the work people can see. It's hard to explain to your boss that you need to take a couple weeks to make the page look exactly the way it already does.

HTML is almost unique in that it has more than one parser. Flash has Flash (even though its an open fileformat), Java has Java and so on. There are hundreds of web browsers that all interpret and parse HTML their own way. If HTML (and js, css and so on) only had one parser (web browser), then it would all be fine, and nobody would complain. People would wait anxiously for the next release of 'the Internet', speculate on what new features it would have and we would see photoshopped screenshots.

[Edit] I completly agree with you! CSS is the worst language I have ever used. It has so many limitations, not because different browsers parse it differently, but because of the standards. All new CSS users try to put together things that can't be put together. For example, you have a div with 2 divs inside, one is the menu and the other is the main content. What do you do? you float the menu to the left, the content to the right and put a black border and blue background in the containing div. It makes sense to do this, but it wont work. Simply getting two divs to float to the right needs work done on the html side, because the first div will be floated furthest to the right.

There should be an alternative, a stylesheet that is logical, with simpler commands. Width should be the width of the box, the borders should come on the outside, and the padding on the inside. You can place it relative to the parent element and set its size to expand as much as possible. It should contain a scale-9 property, so you can give it rounded corners using 9 simple commands and no nested divs. If you want to help me with this stylesheet (called commonsense stylesheet, csss), send me a pm!
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Flash has flash

I will never understand the animosity flash is treated with even at flashkit.
It's consistent thru in thru out (with the exception of macromedia/adobe's poor performance with mac players)

Dom compliancy with all browsers still has irregularitlies although admittedly has gotten better. The Browser giveth and the browser taketh away.

When Northcode gets that F9 player embedded I may never come back to web based flash. It's getting rediculous.

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Originally Posted by admedia

Are we entering a dark ages of the web browser?

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I believe its more than that. The flawed model of having a standard and expecting multiple platforms with various motivations, capabilities and every other characteristic is just getting slowly closer to death. I believe critical mass was reached when myspace came out. :)

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Originally Posted by Genesis F5

This is why I'm not a proponent of full AJAX / CSS sites. With Flash, it's one plugin. All browsers use the same plugin. There's only one standard: the one Adobe sets. All designs are completely self-contained. A Flash file will display the same through Firefox as it will in Opera, IE, handheld browsers, console browsers, and just about everywhere else.

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I couldn't agree more. There was a major resistance to plug-ins (for very valid reasons at the time) that has simply resonated too far and been largely exaggerated.

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Originally Posted by Genesis F5

I can't understand why it's so hard for browsers to adhere to a single standard.

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Imagine the sometimes chaotic atmosphere of any technology production shop with dead-lines, office drama, good and bad managers, too many meetings, too few meetings, etc. and I think its easy to understand how they arrive at different interperetations. Additionally, people cling too much to the idea that W3C is some grass roots for the people anti-corporation che guevara organization. They take money from all of the major browser companies or "members" as they call them. They actually continue to exist because of browser reliance. If they really wanted to fix the problem, they could develop a W3C plug-in (call it a love-in if it will make the hippies happy) that would be the same in all browsers.

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Originally Posted by Frets

I will never understand the animosity flash is treated with even at flashkit.

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me neither. but, its good to have diversity of platform. :)

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Originally Posted by Frets

Flash has flash

I will never understand the animosity flash is treated with even at flashkit.

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3 words. No Back Button. (without the use of a weak hack and frames)
Between that and vague screen reader stats, trying to build something indexable can make you hate the thought of flash. And lets face it, unless you can afford banners on youtube and myspace, there's not much point it making a site that isn't indexable.

traditional desktop applications have survived just fine for many years without back buttons. its an expectation that users have developed by using browsers to view an antiquated model of information. many highly intuitive UIs dont need them or can incorporate their own. to me, relying on an external back button for navigation just becomes a weaker argument each year as more browser-removed applications are connected to the internet in some way.

the current indexing for search engines is also dated, imo. i rarely use it to find contextual information anymore because theres such a sea of bad information and manipulated hit-results to go through. instead, i use it just to find out the exact domain for an already well-known product ( like a movie title ). for information, more controlled sites like wikipedia do a better job than shotgun-blast search engines of delivering info. i believe that searching will become more generic and separated from "engines" as everything becomes more connected.

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Originally Posted by FlashLackey

traditional desktop applications have survived just fine for many years without back buttons.

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Such as? There are quite few application that deliver content the same way as internet browsers. Different applications such as word processing would be unusable without undo buttons at this point. Things like this are expected from users because they are so useful that they should be there.