When Written: April 2007
When I talk of a future browser for web applications, I would like to make a plea to the various browser developers. How about having a basic browser engine, that is open source and free to use that is fully standards compliant?
Here I am talking just about the rendering engine, the bit between the multitude of tool bars that everyone seems to want you to install until a point arrives that you end up reading web pages through a virtual letterbox, and the status bar at the bottom that few of us look at. This engine could be used inside a browser wrapper user interface, where different companies could add their own enhancements to the user experience. Like tabbed browsing, quick searches, toolbars, popup blockers etc, but nothing that would affect the rendering of web pages would be allowed.
This browser engine could then also be used as the rendering engine in the various development tools out there so developers would at long last have a dev tool that previews a web page exactly as a browser would. Utopia? Perhaps! But not impossible to achieve. We are nearly there with the Mozilla project but it just needs a realisation that consistency in the browser rendering is what is needed, not differing interpretations of the standards. The only browser differences we should have should be in the extra functionality for the user, and not in the rendering of web pages, the running of JavaScript nor in the document object model. In the past certain browsers had extra technology in them to enable support for certain intranet technologies.
Hopefully web technology has matured to such a point that things could be consolidated and all involved can see the benefit of a browser that will work with ALL web sites, as well as having development tools that render designs correctly?
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton