Yea there was Gopher and it was good.
Lo and behold, Mosaic!
And it was slow.
Veronica, Gopher, and I were the hare to the Mosaic tortoise.
But Mosaic was pretty.
And Netscape Navigator became standard.
Microsoft saw Mosaic was good and, like Netscape, based Internet Explorer upon Mosaic’s code.
But Microsoft was evil and the world loved Netscape.
Programmers knew code must work in Netscape and then maybe in Internet Explorer.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3 for W3C standards were good, and CSS was good, as long as Microsoft could have some of their own proprietary "standards."
Still Netscape dominated.
Enter Internet Explorer 4 and Browser War I was lost.
Now we tested for first for IE3, IE4, and then Netscape Navigator.
Internet Explorer 5 – meh.
Quirks mode – blah.
WML? No one will ever browse with their phone. WAP!
Internet Explorer 6 – WTH!
Opera.
Mosaic beget Navigator beget Mozilla.
And geeks professed the end of Microsoft while normal people replied, "Firewhat?"
Internet Explorer 7 -FTW.
Now we tested for Internet Explorer at least version 7 and 6, Mozilla/Firefox, and maybe Navigator.
Oh, don’t forget to test with JavaScript enabled and disabled, delete your cookies, clear your cache but be ready to explain this to your end users, and don’t forget the magic reboot.
Internet Explorer 8 – is great?
Be sure to include conditional code for a special IE6 cascading style sheet.
What is Flock?
What is compatibility mode?
All hail Google’s Chrome!
What do you mean? Regular people use Macintosh computers!
Apple has a browser? Safari!
Browser War II.
The website looks different on your phone than your computer?
When you say your Internet enabled toaster prints the New York Times fine but my blog burns your toast, is all the bread blackened or just the crust?
And my website does not control the spooling on your Internet enabled toilet paper dispenser.
And if the ink is smearing on your butt, that just means you are wiping before reading the paper.
What is browser compatibility? Testing against this list.
Today I have a website that looks good in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8. I have not been able to test it in Internet Explorer 7 but will be fixing that today. However, if I put Internet Explorer 8 into "compatibility view," my horizontal list based css driven navigation menu breaks. IE8 Compatibility Mode and IE7 are NOT the same thing! There are many differences between IE8 compatibility view and IE7. So today I’m playing with Internet Explorer’s Virtual Compatibility images.
Interesting, this browser history appeared in my feed today after I posted this.
