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There was an interesting article over at TG Daily recently, titled, “Browser wars: When will the madness end?” As you can likely guess from the title, the author assumes that the cage match currently underway between Safari, Google’s Chrome, Firefox, and IE is a bad thing. But aren’t we taught that competition is a good thing? In this case, competition is good—vital, even, if the Internet is to keep growing. Here’s why the browser wars need to continue, rather than lie dormant as they have for years:

Get there faster (anybody know where we’re going?)

The megahertz myth, in a nutshell, was the crazy race in the late 1990’s by Intel to continuously deliver faster and faster chips.  The pinnacle of this effort was the Pentium 4, which sacrificed performance in the name of speed, and suffered massive heat issues (Wikipedia covers the topic nicely).  Intel, as a result, had to step back from these faster chips and introduce the Core chips, which focus on performance and efficiency, at clock speeds lower than the P4s they replaced.  The author of the TG article draws an analogy to the speeds tests of chips during this time to the performance charts that accompany the release of a new browser nowadays.  Apple did make a big show of the speed of Safari’s Nitro rendering engine, replete with flashy bar charts indicating Safari’s lead in rendering JavaScript and HTML.

On this count, the flashy graphics and speed tests may be some grandiose posturing, but they serve as crucial indicators of the progress being made in browser development. The megahertz race was largely a result of Intel’s need to sell more processors, even though a 2GHz processor is just as speedy with your average Word document as a 3GHz. The “browser wars” represent something more important than simple marketing hoopla; the browser is (finally) getting the development attention it deserves. Microsoft throttled the world with IE 6 in 2001, officially ending the first round of browser wars when Netscape Navigator was dethroned.  Given the lack of viable competitors, IE 6 stagnated for almost 5 years (a millenia in Internet time) on Windows, and IE 5.2 was the last update that Mac users ever saw in 2002. Only when Firefox began making serious inroads into Microsoft’s 95% browser market share did anything serious happen: IE 7 dropped. New features like tabbed browsing, updated security enhancements, and better bookmark management are all suddenly available. This is more than a few extra megahertz of processing speed; there are genuinely innovative changes happening here!

Web 2.0 - the Need for Speed

No matter who is doing the comparisons, be it Mozilla, Apple, or third party benchmarkers, it is usually the case that IE sinks to the bottom of the pack in terms of speed.  It is certainly easy to assume that everyday users won’t ever need a blazing-fast JavaScript engine, as most sites load sufficiently quickly to keep people surfing happily.  Unfortunately, trends in the types of sites we use beg to differ.  Even basic text pages, like newspaper or magazine sites, have fancy animated ads or links to video related to the content.  As HD video increases, browsers need to keep pace - it can not be successfully argued that browsers are good enough, and therefore shouldn’t keep improving.  This is exactly what locked us into 5 years of using the same tired IE 6 interface, with all its quirks and poor performance.  Constantly improving the browser experience directly contributes to constant improvements in the sites that are available for browsing.  Web 2.0, and whatever awaits after it rely on innovation and change, and web applications are increasingly competitive with their desktop counterparts.  For that trend to continue, browser development needs to be focused on speed and efficiency, just as Intel rethought the performance of its chips after the Pentium 4.  It’s hardly a coincidence that the rise of Web 2.0 coincides with the relaunch of the browser wars!

Time to Break on Through

Any developer who has had to endure the trauma of testing a site under multiple browsers will be in favor of the benchmarks being released with every new browser, regardless of whether the speed claims are actually true.  The key point to remember here is that all the bar graphs are about the same thing: the speed of each browser at rendering open-standards compliant content.  Why is that important?  Because for too long IE 6’s quirks and half-baked standards support coupled with a 95% market share meant that many web sites/apps were designed to work and look good only in IE 6.  But Microsoft let too much time pass between browser releases, and they don’t have a good mobile browser lined up for the exploding market of handheld mobile devices.  This void is being filled by competitors, who realize that open, interoperable standards are good. (Notice ActiveX available outside of IE?  Go on, look for it, I can wait.) 

Even if this round of the browser wars doesn’t result in a monolithic market share winner, the users will be the real winners.  Open Google Maps in any modern browser and it will look and feel the same.  That is step one.  Step two is finding ways to make these standards-based applications faster, so they can be made richer and more useful, and that has to happen by innovation in the browser, not better coding on a server.  The bar graphs showing blazing fast speed are overhyped marketing drivel, granted, but underneath them is a basic truth: better performance for open standards, like AJAX and HTML5, paves the way for replacement of proprietary standards.  Technologies like ActiveX and Flash will no longer be necessary—the first being totally unavailable outside Windows/IE, and the second being ungainly on Windows, practically unusable on a Mac, and totally unavailable on the iPhone.  Changing browsing habits demand changes to the browser, and with these changes, developers may finally be able to realize the dream of delivering write once, run anywhere code (how long ago did Sun promise us that?).

The second revolution in web usage is the real fuel for these browser wars, not mere marketing push to create new upgrade cycles for microprocessors.  So there is no comparison to the shallow smoke and mirrors that created the megahertz myth, apart from the fact that they both rely on benchmarks which don’t always approximate the real world.  But this time, we, the users, will end up winning, especially because browsers usually tend to be free, while Intel processors are not.