The demise of the IE-only development house?
February 2005
The Web has come a long way since Tim Berners Lee's original vision. As a medium which has survived all attempts at domination, initial bids by browser manufacturers to corner the market by providing their own enhancements and specific features meant that pages built for one browser would not necessarily function or display in their competitor's browser.
The two leading browsers – and also the two browsers whose approaches were most strongly opposed – were Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. The equal prominence of these browsers created chaos in web development circles – some of the features supported by each were so bad that they only helped widen the chasm of incompatibility. For this reason it became standard practice to deliver a separate HTML page for each browser version, a practice which had a dramatic effect on Website construction and maintenance costs.
The age of the IE-only web development house
In the late 90's, Microsoft's dominance over the OS market allowed it to establish a near complete dominance of the browser market - from 2000 to 2004 Internet Explorer 6 was quoted as holding around 95% of the market, with IE5 and IE4 rounding of much of the rest of the market. This left lowly Netscape with a market share of less than a few per cent, with Mac users making up the final 3% of the online population.
IE's dominance had negative connotations for the web development industry. Many web programmers were happy to neglect standards-based development in favour of developing for IE alone. For some web firms the ‘real' standard was (and in some cases still is) whether the page displays well in IE6. In this way, W3C standards were dismissed as irrelevant and the client – who was happy as long as they weren't losing business – wasn't had no reason to suspect that IE's dominance would ever be challenged and that 'forward compatibility' would ever become an issue.
The escalation of Spyware and online crime
By late 2004 a variety of factors has seen IE's market share diminishing. Perhaps most important of all is the susceptability of Internet Explorer to 'drive-by' spyware and virus infection. Having not seen a major update in several years, IE's its popularity has become its weakness: online criminals and unscrupulous software producers work far harder to exploit IE's security holes, simply because the majority of online users are using it. Criminals plant trojans to capture your banking passwords, and software producers abuse shareware licensing to install hidden add-ons that send your searches to their affiliate engines and sites. Microsoft's own estimates put spyware infection at an unbelievable 80% of all online users.
This has seen many users fleeing to Mozilla's Firefox browser - which has not yet borne the brunt of spyware infection. A vastly improved sibling to the Netscape 7 browser, Firefox has received rave reviews and, in the face of little reaction from IE, has by some estimates coined up to 20% of the browser market. [Check out Internet Explorer Takes Another Market-Share Hit].
| 2005 | IE 6 | IE 5 | O 7 | FF | Moz | NN 4 | NN 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 65.5% | 4.4% | 1.9% | 19.2% | 4.0% | 0.3% | 1.1% |
| 2004 | IE 6 | IE 5 | O 7 | Moz | NN 3 | NN 4 | NN 7 |
| December | 66.0% | 4.8% | 2.0% | 21.3% | 0.2% | 0.3% | 1.2% |
| July | 71.0% | 7.7% | 2.3% | 13.8% | 0.3% | 0.3% | 1.4% |
| January | 71.3% | 12.8% | 2.1% | 8.2% | 0.4% | 0.5% | 1.5% |
| 2003 | IE 6 | IE 5 | O 7 | Moz | NN 3 | NN 4 | NN 7 |
| July | 66.9% | 20.3% | 1.7% | 5.7% | 0.6% | 0.6% | 1.5% |
| January | 55.3% | 29.3% | 4.0% | 1.2% | 1.7% | 1.1% | |
| 2002 | IE 6 | IE 5 | IE 4 | AOL | NN 3 | NN 4 | NN 5+ |
| July | 44.4% | 40.1% | 0.5% | 3.5% | 1.2% | 2.6% | 3.5% |
| January | 30.1% | 55.7% | 1.0% | 2.8% | 1.3% | 4.4% | 2.2% |
IE = Internet Explorer, FF = Firefox (identified as Mozilla before 2005), Moz = Mozilla, O = Opera, NN = Netscape, AOL = America Online
Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Microsoft's reaction: Spyware and IE7
Microsoft's reaction to this issue has been decisive: the purchase of spyware specialists Giant Software and the announcement of a major upgrade for IE (yes, IE7 has been announced) means that Microsoft is getting serious about its slipping market share. Registered Windows users can now download beta versions of Microsoft's anti-spyware solution, and IE7 is expected in mid 2005.
What effect on Web standards?
Microsoft's online dominance has taken a real hit, and what happens next is anyones guess; as competition in the browser market once again intensifies, it's a tough call to predict whether Microsoft will ever regain its former position. One conclusion is simple however: its now time to take Web standards and future compatibility very seriously indeed and, when engaging a web design house, it's important to ask whether they code and test pages for all major browsers - including Firefox - and whether they can certify their pages are W3C compliant.
Watch this space for breaking news on IE 7's support for CSS and XHTML standards.
