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Buzz Archives: Browsers

An End to Aging IE Installs

Do you hear that sound? That’s right Johnny, it’s the sound of millions of web professionals breathing a collective sigh of relief.

By Aaron Gustafson | December 15th, 2011

HTML5? Check. Accessible HTML5? Um…

The Paciello Group and others are examining the accessibility of HTML5 implementations across the current spate of browsers. Their findings are a little disheartening.

By Aaron Gustafson | February 1st, 2011

IE9 looks really promising

The IE9 “developer previews” continue to impress. HTML5, CSS3, & speed improvements FTW!

By Aaron Gustafson | June 28th, 2010

France and Germany call for the end of IE6

Google’s disclosure of a December cyber attack, originating in China, prompts two major governments to push for the aging browser’s demise.

By Aaron Gustafson | January 20th, 2010

Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification.

You've heard it's coming in 2012. Or maybe 2022. It's certainly not ready yet, but some parts are already in browsers now so for the standards-savvy developers, the future is worth investigating today. Ian "Hixie" Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, hopes that the spec will go to ...

By Bruce Lawson | May 13th, 2009

IE8 Has Arrived

With a greater focus on standards-compliance, it seems possible that Microsoft’s latest browser may redeem itself in the eyes of standards-savvy designers and developers.

By Aaron Gustafson | March 20th, 2009

WAI ARIA Last Call, and Safari 4

The W3C’s WAI ARIA moves to Last Call Working Draft; appropriately, the Safari 4 Beta is out, featuring improved ARIA support.

By Derek Featherstone | February 24th, 2009

UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails

You might remember that I published a post called UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance last September, calling out a draft document outlining some UK government browser testing guidelines. These suggested that for government web sites, webmasters need not test in less popular browsers (those with ...

By Bruce Lawson | January 19th, 2009

WCAG 2 and mobileOK Basic Tests specs are proposed recommendations

WCAG 2 and the mobileOK Basic Tests specifications have been moved to "proposed recommendation status" by the W3C, which means that the technical material is complete and it has been implemented in real sites. WCAG 2 Shawn Henry writes of WCAG 2, Over the last few months, the Web Content ...

By Bruce Lawson | November 4th, 2008

Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?

Acid3 progress and what it really means.

By Lars Gunther | October 2nd, 2008

UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance

This blog post is superseded by UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails. Last friday, the UK government's Central Office of Information (COI) published a public consultation on browser standards for public sector websites: This guidance has been developed to assist those delivering public sector websites to determine which web browsers to ...

By Bruce Lawson | September 8th, 2008

Acid 2 Test Back to Normal

The Acid 2 test hosted here on the WaSP site was broken but is now fixed.

By Derek Featherstone | July 24th, 2008

Opera 9.5 released

Just a short buzz: the final version of Opera 9.5 was released today, with a boatload of exciting features. Of particular interest: excellent support for current standards — (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1 partial implementations of new emerging standards — CSS 3, HTML 5, and ARIA More details about the browser's ...

By Patrick Lauke | June 12th, 2008

Mozilla Download Day [German Translation]

Mozilla hat sich vorgenommen, ins Guinness Buch der Rekorde zu kommen mit den meisten Software-Downloads in 24 Stunden! Darum wird der 17. Juni 2008 ein besonderer Tag sein: der Download Day. Was wird an diesem Tag so Besonderes sein? Mozilla möchte den Weltrekord aufstellen für die meisten Software-Downloads an einem einzigen ...

By Glenda Sims | June 1st, 2008

Mozilla Download Day

Mozilla is on a mission to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours!

By Kimberly Blessing | May 29th, 2008

Acid3 Passed in 23 Days!

On March 3, the Web Standards Project launched the Acid3 Browser Test. On March 26, two browser teams reported that their builds passed.

By Kimberly Blessing | April 7th, 2008

Microsoft releases the first IE8 Beta

In other news, the ACID2 test page has become overwhelmed.

By Aaron Gustafson | March 5th, 2008

Microsoft rethinks IE8′s default behavior

Perhaps it was our complaining or perhaps it was a reconsideration of its own interoperability principles, but Microsoft has decided to change its course on IE8 and will opt-in to its new standards mode by default.

By Aaron Gustafson | March 3rd, 2008

WaSP Round Table: IE8′s Default Version Targeting Behavior

One week ago, several WaSP members took the time to have a virtual sit-down with Chris Wilson of Microsoft to talk about IE8′s proposed default behavior of having to opt-in for the browser’s new standards mode.

By Aaron Gustafson | February 24th, 2008

Hug your bike, drink a beer and discuss a browser

March is coming up and for most people in the web standards community, that means at least one thing: SXSW! The Web Standards Project will be present again this year, with our annual meeting (held on Monday the 10th, exact details to follow soon). Because there's so much going on in ...

By Faruk Ateş | February 5th, 2008

Acid3 nearing completion

If you’re a fan of the Acid browser tests, you already know that Acid3 is in the works. It’s now in a “final review” state, so please check it out and submit your feedback.

By Kimberly Blessing | February 5th, 2008

Opting-in to standards support

In this week’s issue of A List Apart, I was (finally) able to reveal Microsoft’s new strategy for forward-compatibility, a strategy that was developed hand-in-hand with several of us here at WaSP.

By Aaron Gustafson | January 22nd, 2008

What’s the best test for Acid3?

Now that all the major browsers (and many minor ones) have pledged support for Acid2, Ian Hickson has moved on to preparing Acid3 — and you can help!

By Kimberly Blessing | January 16th, 2008

Farewell Netscape

So, the web browser we know as Netscape is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-browser. But how do we all feel about this really? Will the browser ‘be sorely missed’? Did it pass away peacefully in the night, a lot later than many of us thought it would? Or are some people out there in denial that it has actually happened, grieving for this once great web icon?

By Ian Lloyd | December 28th, 2007

IE8 passes Acid2 test

Blimey. Cor luvvaduck and no mistake. Just after the announcement that Opera are complaining to the European Union about Internet Explorer's dodgy standards support, Chris Wilson reports that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. This doesn't necessarily mean that IE8 has fixed all its float oddities, ...

By Bruce Lawson | December 19th, 2007

Opera complains to Europe over IE lock-in

Opera Chief Technology Officer and co-inventor of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie has written an open letter to the Web community explaining the reasons that Opera has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in Internet Explorer and to unbundle Internet ...

By Bruce Lawson | December 13th, 2007

Mobile Safari without the iPhone

Apple has brought Mobile Safari to the iPod.

By Aaron Gustafson | September 10th, 2007

The good, the bad, and the ugly – iPhone edition

The iPhone has had a tremendous impact on the web, eliciting impassioned testimony from supporters and detractors alike. What does it mean for the web standards? What about the rest of the mobile web? And (how) should we design for it?

By Aaron Gustafson | August 22nd, 2007

Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac and Windows

As the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off today, Steve Jobs announced the availability of the Safari 3 Public Beta — for both Mac and Windows. Caution: bug reports abound.

By Kimberly Blessing | June 12th, 2007

Current browsers and the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

In web accessibility, you’ll often hear emphasis being placed on the duty of web authors to create accessible content. However, this is only one part of the web accessibility equation.One that has been particularly close to me, or rather one that has provided me with a lot of opportunity to ...

By Patrick Lauke | May 20th, 2007

Browser, Standards and Interop Summit in Paris

The XTech 2007 conference is taking place at the Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel in Paris next week from the 15th to the 18th of May. On the first day of the conference, Molly and Edd have organised the first annual Browser, Standards and Interop Summit to run all day in parallel ...

By Jeremy Keith | May 11th, 2007

Recent Buzz

Our Work Here is Done

By Aaron Gustafson | March 1st, 2013

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.

When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.

Realizing that this fragmentation would inevitably drive up the cost of building websites and ran the risk of denying users access to content and services they needed, Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded WaSP and rallied an amazing group of web designers and developers to help them push back. The WaSP’s primary goal was getting browser makers to support the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:

• A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.
• HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.
• W3C Community Groups – If you have a passion for a specific web technology, you can help make it better by participating in one (or more) community groups. In particular, you might be interested in one of these: Core Mobile Web Platform, Responsive Images, Web Education, and Web Media Text Tracks.
• WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.
• Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.
• Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.

Nota bene: In the near future, we will be making a permanent, static archive of webstandards.org and some of our other resources like WaSP Interact to preserve them as a resource and to provide a record of our 15-year mission to improve the web.
Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth contributed to this post.

Filed in WaSP Announcement | Comments (89)

More Buzz articles

Title	Author
Call for action on Vendor Prefixes	Rachel Andrew
An End to Aging IE Installs	Aaron Gustafson
Beyond the Blue Beanie?	Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis
The Sherpas are Here	Aaron Gustafson