Vincent Gable’s Blog

June 20, 2008

Modern Browsers

Filed under: MacOSX,Programming,Quotes | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on June 20, 2008

… What struck me watching these (WebKit) demos is that you could build a really slick web app UI using stuff like the canvas tag, SVG, and advanced CSS. Yes, none of this stuff works in IE, and IE still has massive market share — but not among the sort of people who adopt hip new web apps. The combined market share for, say, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 is larger than the overall market share for Mac OS X. Plenty of developers write desktop software that only works on the Mac — why aren’t more people writing apps web apps that only work in truly modern web browsers? The first one to do it is going to be a sensation.

John Grubber

I didn’t have a sense for how far behind IE lags, historically and today, until I saw this compatibility table (via Toby Jungen),

Calculation of support of currently displayed feature lists

Internet Explorer Firefox Safari Chrome Opera
Far Past 6.0: 4% 2.0: 34% 3.1: 43% 0.2: 54% 9.0: 35%
Past 7.0: 12% 2.0: 34% 3.1: 43% 0.2: 54% 9.0: 35%
Present 8.0: 29% 3.0: 48% 3.2: 67% 1.0: 54% 9.6: 58%
Near Future (2009) 8.0: 29% 3.5: 78% 4.0: 88% 2.0: 84% 10.0: 63%
Future (2010 or later) 9.0: 29% 4.0: 86% 4.*: 88% 2.0: 84% 10.*: 72%

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