By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
I have been writting HTML before Netscape released their first browser. I was very exited when the first Netscape browsers came out because the used the table tag.
This marks the tenth aniversary of the first Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft was late to the game, but they worked very hard to make it a better browser than the netscape browser. Many of the web developers I worked with gave up writting their code so it would work with both browsers. IE quickly surpassed Netscape as the most common browser.
I certainly started to write my code so that it would correctly on IE first, and I would check that it worked on other browsers and operating systems.
I jumped on the IE bandwagon for a couple of reasons. That was because they made it easy for developers to write for their browsers, and they supported open standards.
With that, I would like to say, "What have you done for me lately?" It is almost like Microsoft has droped the ball. I still write my code so it will run on IE browsers, but I also make sure it runs in Mozila and Safari. I also test my HTML on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X computers. I believe that IE still holds around 90 percent market share.
Hopefully Microsoft will catch up and embrace open standards again, but I am not holding my breath.