Yves:
However, there is another dimension you do not
mention.
We need to access to non-free software to see what is good in them. Would there have been a so good mozilla
if
there had not been msie?
If the "browser arms race" had not happened, hopefully
they would have
concentrated on the spec instead of introducing so many
incompatibilities
and inconsistencies.
Well, if we take msie into account, I fully agree with you. If we only take mozilla, galeon, konqueror, skipstone, lynx and a lot of other ones, the race is about functionnalities and the one that gets closer to the W3C specs. At least I hope. But isn't that a search for compatibility, something we learned from microsoft and msie and the try for having an uncompatible msie? If msie had not been there, would all the free browsers have tried to be as compatible as possible with the w3c recommendations (and all the concerned rfc of course). Well, msie is there, so we'll never know.
Of course, you can speculate whether we'd have an open
mozilla without
Netscape falling behind in the arms race, but enough
other browsers are
being developed to suggest that we would probably have
got there anyway.
Maybe it would have been faster because of not losing
developers to moz, or
maybe it would have been slower because people wouldn't
have seen a need.
That's not a reality which is open to us now, so we
shall never know. We
opened the box and Schrodinger's cat seems to be alive.
Right :-)
What really irritates me is certain people claiming
that non-implementation
of bugs in the major browsers is a bug in the compliant
browser.
I had only heard this as a joke. I'm very disappointed that it's serious.
Are those people concerned in free software? If not, maybe someone could tell them that the key to compatibility is to follow the specs (rfc, w3c recommendations...), not the features&bugs of the other products!
Yves -- homepage http://ymettier.free.fr gmemlogger http://gmemlogger.sourceforge.net gtktalog http://gtktalog.sourceforge.net