Rocky posted a couple days ago about Browser wars redux? Why bother… In this post he mentions that it doesn't matter which browser you use and that it certainly doesn’t warrant a war.

I agree about the ‘war’ part and people getting crazy about which browser is better. The reality is that browser standards are a nightmare. And Microsoft for one thing isn’t helping by not doing jack about fixing the bugs in IE other than security which is obviously a PR nightmare for Microsoft.

I personally agree with his point that it doesn't matter much which browser you use. Any public Web application requires that it handle at least IE and Mozilla well, but if you browse around today on many public sites you will find that many don’t work well with one or the other, or look like shit in one or the other. But if you want to use one or the other with a few tweaks and locking down security to the max in IE you can get things working well enough in most cases.

The main issue in my view is that there are serious issues with IE. I recently got hacked (my own fault I suppose), but this is no isolated incident and much worse for consumers who can't really tell they've been hacked. Say what you will about the powerful features that IE has over Mozilla in terms of plug-in capabilities and how relatively easy it is to create this stuff – it’s a major security problem. For many people this is the only thing they need to know and it’s off to another browser.

I actually like FireFox as a browser, but I use a number of sites daily that don't work well with FireFox. Some things are minor UI differences, others are major enough that the site becomes unusable.  Most of these BTW are developer sites, which should know better. IE's benefits - the ability to have a rich hosting environment like being able to edit HTML, ability to easily internally send XML back and forth are also its weak points since those things require COM objects to run...

In a perfect world the browser vendors would fix their browsers to be compliant. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't gotten of their lazy fat ass in years with IE. With MS it’s always putting changes off to the ‘next version’ .Well in the case of Windows the next version is two years off at least and if you go back to the last real OS release that would be 5 years. Pathetic. IE is riddled with bugs, security holes and lacks standards compliance in many ways.

I have to say that I’ve been duped by this as well. It's sad and exactly what the naysayers of the day predicted once MS took over the browser 'lead'. I was one of the people thinking this would NOT be the case, that MS would take initiative to improve functionality - only shows my faith was somewhat misguided as well. This isn't about things like tabbed browsing or popup blockers but the behavior of the base browser, the object model etc. Most importantly standards compliance.

In order for things to improve competition is the only way to do it. And if it takes another browser that works better then so be it...

Rocky’s main point though is that rich applications don't belong in the browser - rich client is the way to go for this. I agree but it’s an extremely hard sell today. Sure this might work for corporate and internal applications, but what about the vast majority of sites that actually deal with the public? Currently there aren’t many good choices out there that make rich client convenient to use for clients. Installing software on the local machine is no safer than it is to run some add-in inside of the browser after all. Not with .NET today! Not if you want the app to actualy be able to do anything useful. This is a trust issue. Today it’s made even worse by the fact that nobody wants to install anything from the Internet unless they have to or they trust the vendor.

Further, selling a Windows solution for rich client for a public market is a non-contender as well. Try to sell that to IT in many big corporations today. For any broad application this will not happen for a long time and when the time comes it may not be Windows due to Microsoft's inability to get their plans inline and make a decision to stick to a schedule and feature set they can actually keep...