Mozilla has emerged from its long nuclear winter to become a pillar of the Linux desktop. Alpha geeks everywhere (including Sun and Microsoft) are running Safari on their PowerBooks. But here's the reality check you knew was coming: cross-browser and cross-OS compatibility remains nearly as elusive as ever. I won't bore you with the details. Let's just say that testing CSS and JavaScript effects on the three major OS platforms, in six different browsers, isn't a good use of anybody's time. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
From which.....
There's no single culprit. I hammered out a compromise solution for my upcoming talk because neither browser was a clear winner. Each is ennobled by unique strengths and plagued with infuriating bugs. In nirvana, we'd have all of the former and none of the latter. Why can't that happen in the real world? Oh, I remember; it's because platform vendors compete on their differentiation.
Thats it and I can't ever see it changing. Whilst a browser might be a commodity it isn't by any means complete in its function and there is active competition not least between MS and those who hate MS and want to do something better than MS has done. What would happen if IE 7 came out with 100% standards support (!) - then where does that leave everyone else (on the Windows platform) - they can either catch up to IE (gawd that would be a dull programming job, just repeat what someone else has achieved) or try and move the game on and do something new and 'better'.
