Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Buzz Archives: Browsers

Dead How?

At this point news is still sketchy, but the bottom line is that AOL is dismantling Netscape and laying off or “redeploying” the Netscape engineers who were working on Mozilla. Coordination of Mozilla development will continue through the Mozilla Foundation...

By Ben Henick | July 15th, 2003

R.I.P. Netscape

1994 - 2003

By Molly E. Holzschlag | July 15th, 2003

Hitting the Target

The following, published within an advice column in several Gannett papers, was recently brought to our attention: “...90 percent of Web surfers use Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Web developers often optimize their sites to work best with it. Using Netscape may not prevent you from seeing a page, but it ...

By Ben Henick | July 2nd, 2003

Browsers Come and Go, Standards Endure

The demise of the free, standalone versions of Internet Explorer has caused a great deal of anxiety on the Web. It shouldn't have. Microsoft's announcements just underline the importance of developing to standards: browsers come and go, standards endure. As well, Microsoft has promised to release bug fixes for the free ...

By Chris Kaminski | June 27th, 2003

Browser Update

The Web Browser's Unfinished Basement is an article in the E-Commerce Times that should appeal to Buzzblog readers (that's this page, folks). The piece summarizes the recent developments in the browser world, pointing out that 'featuritis' (the nasty condition that has afflicted some browers in the past) is on its ...

By Ian Lloyd | May 20th, 2003

The browser formerly known as Chimera

Camino 0.7 has finally been released. Camino (formerly known as Chimera) is an open source browser for Mac OS X based on the standards-compliant Gecko rendering engine (the same engine used by Mozilla, Netscape 7, Phoenix, and Galeon). This is the first major release of Camino since Apple released the first beta ...

By Mark Pilgrim | March 7th, 2003

Opera Hits Flat Note on MS Phones

The relationship between Opera and Microsoft continues to run chilly as the latest CNET News reports Opera won't offer a version of its mobile browser to work on Microsoft-powered smart phones such as the Orange SPV. Users of Windows-CE based phones will have to stick with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, ...

By Meryl K. Evans | February 24th, 2003

Browser roundup

It's been an excellent week for browsers everywhere. Opera Software quickly released Opera 7.01 for Windows, which fixes several reported security holes in 7.0 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Apple released Safari build 60 for Mac OS X, which improves standards compliance and adds XML support. The Mozilla organization released Mozilla 1.3 beta ...

By Mark Pilgrim | February 12th, 2003

Opera Released… Within Limits

Opera Software on Tuesday shipped version 7.0 for Windows of their Web browser, with a caveat that carries significant implications for CSS standards support. c|net published a story on Monday which quotes Opera's CEO as saying: “ ‘ We have contacted Apple and asked them if they want a third-party browser, and we'll see ...

By Ben Henick | January 30th, 2003

Safari in the news… Again

Today Dave Hyatt announced that Safari is going to "support XML". It's not 100% clear what this means... except to echo others in saying that the browser ecosystem is becoming an interesting place again.

By Tim Bray | January 15th, 2003

Safari: Fast, Incomplete

We held our breath for a day as Web citizens took Apple's new Safari browser for a test drive. Safari is obviously built for speed, with a number of optimizations made to its Konqueror-based rendering engine to boost its performance well beyond that of Mac IE5 and Mozilla variants. However, we ...

By Scott Andrew LePera | January 8th, 2003

Dear Web Developers: Browser Sniffing is Stupid

...especially if you do it poorly, basing decisions on user agent strings and assumed capabilities, rather than on actual capabilities. Two alert readers sent in sad examples of this in action just this week. First, the recently redesigned HotBot, which does make a tremendous effort to support standards and provide ...

By Steven Champeon | December 20th, 2002

Opening Day

Opera Software's "Open the Web" project asks Opera users to contact the owners of sites that fail in their browser or deny them entrance. "Let them know you would like to see the site work with all browsers, including Opera." If you're developing a site and are considering refusing access ...

By Porter Glendinning | December 17th, 2002

Take Two

Mozilla 1.2.1 was released yesterday. This version addresses a bug introduced in the 1.2 release that, among other things, was causing problems for sites using document.write() calls to generate page content.

By Porter Glendinning | December 3rd, 2002

Not So Fast

Apparently the toothpick didn't quite come out clean, so they've stuck Mozilla 1.2 back into the oven and will pull it out again when it's 1.2.1.

By Porter Glendinning | November 30th, 2002

The Latest from the Lizard’s Lair

The hard-working developers at Mozilla.org released Mozilla 1.2 yesterday. This is the first stable release to include Type Ahead Find. For some time Internet Explorer's Macintosh users have been able to focus on text links by keying in their first few characters, an important accessibility feature that allows links to ...

By Porter Glendinning | November 27th, 2002

Opera Rocks

The good people at Opera Software have been re-engineering the Opera web browser to play faster, look more fashionable, and to groove with DOM standards more effectively. They've been refining their licks for a while now, and this week are getting on stage to provide us with a sneak preview ...

By Molly E. Holzschlag | November 13th, 2002

IE Only? Not necessarily.

KPMG Canada recently earned the wrath of Mozilla and Opera users for blocking the latter and presenting the former with incomprehensibly unusable visual garbage in place of a layout. Though the site’s markup is poor, that’s not the problem; the problem is outdated, brain-dead browser detection and related scripting. Eric ...

By Jeffrey Zeldman | September 23rd, 2002

Extinct: IE for Unix

Cam Barrett reports that Internet Explorer has been discontinued for Unix. Pity. If you can't bear to part with the *nix, perhaps now is a good time to take Mozilla 1.1 out for a test drive.

By Scott Andrew LePera | September 19th, 2002

Browser Upgrades, Netscape Style

Visit Netscape’s homepage using Netscape 4, and you may be asked to download Netscape 7 before proceeding.

By Jeffrey Zeldman | September 5th, 2002

Building A Better Lizard

Mozilla 1.1 has been officially released, and now stalks the countryside spreading improved support for CSS, HTML and DOM. In addition to a number of DHTML-targeted performance enhancements, Mozilla sports a suite of cool developer tools (like the ever-improving Venkman JavaScript debugger and DOM Inspector) and welcome user interface ...

By Scott Andrew LePera | August 29th, 2002

Opera 7 all new engine? “Better” DOM support?

That's what Paul Festa reports in his August 20th article, Opera casts off legacy code for speed. Many of us have hoped that Opera would listen to the numerous complaints about lack of DOM support for their otherwise very good browser. Many developers out there may feel that Paul's article ...

By Shirley Kaiser | August 20th, 2002

Hotmail Versus Mozilla

Justin Skolnick points out that Hotmail, or more properly, Passport, is rejecting Mozilla (gif) as not being a "current Web browser". Funny, you'd think that after four and a half years, Microsoft would have heard of Mozilla by now. Or maybe they're just upset about the whole AOL/Mac thing...

By Steven Champeon | August 15th, 2002

AOL now with Gecko!

AOL released a new version of their software that is based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, for the Macintosh. A good sign for those who want to build a single site that works in AOL and in standards-compliant browsers.

By Steven Champeon | August 15th, 2002

Bank Idiocy

At home in Canada I bank with a perfectly respectable institution called CIBC, been a customer for a while, even use their online stockbroker. Until now. I've switched to a Macintosh and none of the browsers on OS X (IE, Mozilla, you name it) can get into the online trading ...

By Tim Bray | August 7th, 2002

Mozilla and CSS1, bound at the hip

Don’t you wish everyone did this? The Mozilla Project has published a copy of the CSS1 Recommendation cross-referenced to the remaining bugs in their implementation of same.

By Steven Champeon | June 4th, 2002

AOL testing replacement browser

America Online is in the process of testing a Mozilla-based replacement to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which if successful may level the playing field for new competition in the browser market. (via News.com)

By Scott Andrew LePera | March 26th, 2002

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)

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