What was that about "Don't be evil"?

    I'm sure most readers of this blog will be familiar with the famous Google motto "Don't be evil". Having had the chance to look at Google culture from a viewpoint slightly closer than the average Joe it comes across as something taken pretty seriously within Google. When they say that, they really mean it.
    "Being evil" is generally taken as a reference to some of the shady practices found elsewhere in the tech industry. Really good examples of "Being evil" can be found in the history of Opera Software, as the underdog in the browser race they faced over a decade of unfair practices from the developer of the dominant browser.
    But things are different now, aren't they? MSIE is no longer the top dog, and there's a new kid in town. Chrome, from Google, and they have that "Don't be evil" motto, don't they?

    I use all the main browsers, I'm a web developer. I use Opera quite a lot, it's a damn good browser, just like Chrome or Firefox. I'm also a Google user, you might say I've drunk the Google Kool-Aid. So seeing screens like these three from flagship Google services running in the latest version of Opera (12.00) distresses me.

 I develop interactive web sites that work with all major browsers. Chrome, MSIE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. It's standard web developer stuff, not difficult at all. The web is full of HOWTOs, compatibility libraries and guides for the novice developer, so I'd expect the kind of experienced developers Google hires to have no problems writing code that works cross-browser. It's hardly as though Opera makes it difficult anyway, it's one of the most standards-compliant browsers on the market.
    So what I'm seeing is a major browser developer not making the effort to support a smaller competitor's product in their web servicess when I know that supporting that product is straightforward for a competent web developer. And then using the lack of support to display a message pushing users of the smaller competitor product to their own offering.


    "Don't be evil" is Google's motto. It pains me slightly to say this, but as an Opera user I don't think they're living by it here. Come on Google, step up to the plate!

MSIE overtaken

    Back in April I wrote a piece about the rise of Google Chrome and the pending loss to MSIE of the number one browser slot. Based on StatCounter GlobalStats data I predicted that this would happen in June.

    I was wrong. It happened in May. Finally we're in an era in which supporting outdated, insecure, and non-standards-compliant browsers is no longer considered a priority.

    It would be tempting to slam MSIE. Hell, the product deserves it! But I hope losing the top spot reveals Microsoft at their best. When they're top dog they don't behave well, but when they're the underdog, they innovate. It would be great to see a future version of MSIE that really gave Chrome and Firefox a run for their money, a super-fast, secure, up-to-date, non-proprietary, and standards-compliant browser.

    Well, I can hope, can't I.

Preparing for MSIE Overtaking Day

    It's been a trope of the web developer's existence for the last decade: Microsoft Internet Explorer won the browser wars in the 1990s, all other browsers are irrelevant. The customer has this firmly lodged in their heads from the days when MSIE had over 90% of the market and demands support for IE in all its forms over support for any other browser. We may just about have won the war over abandoning IE6 support, but we are still demanded to code in all the workarounds demanded by its just-as-creaky younger siblings.
    It might have been true in the mid-2000s to manipulate the famous phrase about IBM to "nobody ever got fired for supporting MSIE". But as a quick look at StatCounter's Global Stats will tell you, over the last couple of years Google Chrome has come from nowhere and is rapidly converging on MSIE's market share. Extrapolate the graph forward a few months, and it becomes obvious that sometime this summer, probably in June, Chrome will overtake MSIE as the world's most popular browser.

    That's right, June 2012 will see MSIE Overtaking Day.

    You might think it would be unwise to break out the champagne though. After all, the top spot is just passing from one big company to another, won't it just be a case of "Here's the new boss, same as the old boss"? In that we're fortunate: unlike MSIE with its proprietary approach to rendering HTML, Chrome is a Webkit browser, underpinned by open source and web standards. So if we code to those standards we can expect it to work without too many tweaks on all browsers that support them.

    No more browser-specific stylesheets, no more special Javascript hacks, no more compatibility libraries.

    But the title of this piece is "Preparing for MSIE Overtaking Day". We're already there, as developers we're used to coding web standards, all our sites already work in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. It is the non-technical people who need preparing, all those marketing people at the customer, the legal people and the developer project managers who are stuck in that 2000-era trope. I was shocked not too long ago to encounter a site whose contract specified individual browser versions. Not even "version X and above", so when a legitimate bug was reported in a recent browser the response came back that it wasn't supported because the browser wasn't several years old. That kind of thinking is simply not acceptable.
    So we have to think away from the browser in the post-MSIE world of frequently released standards-compliant browsers. We have to sell web standards such as HTM5 rather than support for particular browsers to the non-technical people we encounter as web developers, and we have to hammer home that message using the clearly visible statistics.
    Otherwise we'll still be coding for MSIE7 in 2017 just like some of us had to support MSIE6 in 2010 And that just ain't funny, not at all.

Yet another set of browser stats

    It's worth posting these graphs of browser market share over the second half of 2010 generated from real-world Urchin traffic figures. The first one shows the percentage traffic for each of the five main browsers, and the second one breaks the MS Internet Explorer figure down into separate versions since version 6. April and May are best ignored due to the site launch distorting the figures, but June onwards can be considered to be an accurate representation of Internet users.

Web traffic by browser

    As MSIE has slipped gently below a 50% share, Firefox has remained essentially steady, leaving Chrome to pick up IE's defectors. The slight surprise in this graph is at the bottom, Safari has been overtaken by Opera in the later months of 2010.

MSIE individual versions share of MSIE total

    As might be expected, MSIE8 has taken over from MSIE7, which is slowly levelling off. Whether MSIE7 will follow MSIE6 in refusing to die remains to be seen, but the continued use of these two browsers does indicate that a substantial core of Windows users are refusing to upgrade either manually or by Windows Update. MSIE6 shows a slight increase in the summer months, this is probably due to students using home PCs while away from their schools. MSIE9 has a very small showing, as you might expect from its pre-release status.