Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage
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Web Browsers*

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Browser Compatibility I have tested this site on Linux, Mac, and Windows with the following browsers: AOL 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (no longer in development) Brave (all flavors) Camino (all) Chrome (all flavors) Epiphany 1.x and 2.x Firefox 0.9 to current K-Meleon 0.9 and 1.x Lynx 1 and 2.x Mozilla 0.9, 1.0, 1.4, 1.7.x, and 1.8b (the end of the Mozilla line, replaced by SeaMonkey) MS Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 Edge (all flavors) Netscape 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (no longer in development) Opera 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and newer Pale Moon (all flavors) Safari (all flavors) SeaMonkey (all flavors) (go SeaMonkey! my favorite) Vivaldi (all flavors) Older browsers (AOL 2 and 3, Netscape 2, and MSIE 3) will work too, though some of the site's features will not work with ancient browsers, since many web technologies didn't even exist when those early browsers were developed. I maintain backwards compatibility whenever possible. Phones, tablets, and other mobile devices: Some of these devices will work; many will not. Therefore, I do not support these devices. Instead, you will need a real computer with a relatively modern web browser.

Dear

Electronic publishing is still a relatively new and rapidly evolving enterprise. Consequently you and I both must live with the vagarities of software developers and hardware limitations. For example, the same web page can look and act very differently in different browser programs. That is a result of the fact that software development is a very competitive and rapidly evolving business combined with the fact that HTML is a very limited system for displaying and manipulating text. (If you are interested in more on this subject, I have recently published a review of Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age (HardWired, 1996) in the Newsletter of the American Dialect Society, in which I discuss these and other limitations of hypertext. However, I do recognize the communicative and informational value of electronic publishing. That is why I also wrote "On Hypertext.")

So despite the fact that I have been using electronic communications to help prepare different publications for years — I am on the Advisory Board of the linguistics journal Functions of Language for example — I found that I had to make some difficult decisions related to software when preparing this HyperTextBook for you.

On the one hand, I wanted to create a site the was both visually appealing and used images and artwork to marry older forms of text with this — the newest form of text. On the other hand, I wanted a site that was not too cumbersome to those of us who have older, but perfectly good, hardware (slower modems and the like). I hope this HyperTextBook is a happy compromise. (I do take the artwork and formatting in the book seriously too: after all, I truly think of this as an online course, and I want you to enjoy reading the book on the computer as much as possible.)

However, I use javascript and other client-side technologies to improve the site's functionality. Therefore, my students must use a javascript capable and enabled browser.

I recommend using the Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, or Mozilla's SeaMonkey browsers. They are technologically advanced, standards-compliant, state-of-the-art applications.

I honestly can not recommend Microsoft's Internet Explorer any further: Wired News reports that Mozilla downloads surged after the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said to avoid Internet Explorer for security reasons. Second, US-CERT's recommendation came after a note about another IE vulnerability. Even Slate Magazine recommended Mozilla Firefox over IE back when the magazine was still owned by MSN! What's worse, Microsoft announced that its improved browser (IE7) will not be available for people who use Windows 2000 even though Microsoft claims it will support Windows 2000 until 2010, and nearly half of all desktops still run Windows 2000!

Furthermore, Jimmy Grewal, a key member of Microsoft's Mac Internet Explorer team, confirms that IE5/Mac is dead. Microsoft will no longer provide a browser for the Macintosh. At all. It seems that Microsoft is ending its policy of providing internet software (and upgrades to that software) for free — independent of the user's OS¹. (Microsoft once produced a version of MSIE for Linux even, years ago.)

Unquestionably, for the next few years, 85% of the web using population will have buggy support for CSS float, no support at all for adjacent sibling selectors, and no hope of PNG transparency unless developers are willing to write proprietary, IE-only code or deploy sophisticated JavaScript workarounds to make IE/Win do what other modern browsers do natively. Not to mention IE/Win’s known caching problems with background images and its insistence on displaying the a:active state even when a link is no longer active.

Considering these announcements by Microsoft, I concur with Jeffrey Zeldman's summary of Microsoft's recent decisions:

Dave Winer puts the death of IE5/Mac into context, concluding “It took [Bill Gates] ten years to erase the web as a threat. It’s done now. He owns it, it’s in the trunk (I know you don’t like to hear this), it’s locked, and they’re driving it off a cliff into the ocean.”

The timing of recent events bears out Dave’s thesis, at least as far as Microsoft’s intentions are concerned. The U.S. government found Microsoft guilty of having criminally abused its monopoly power to crush competing Internet-based businesses. Yet the government did nothing about it. The AOL lawsuit posed a problem for Microsoft; so Microsoft bought off AOL. Only after AOL took the money did Microsoft quietly let slip the news that it intends to kill its Mac and Windows browsers. (And in fact, we now learn, some eighteen months ago a few Microsoft marketers told a designer friend that the company intended to kill its own browsers once all the legal hubbub died down.)

By its recent actions, Microsoft seems to believe that if consumers want the Internet, they will use the next version of Windows to access Microsoft-based web services and MSN content, and to download XBox patches. And some consumers will do just that. But consumers have a choice.

By its recent actions, Microsoft has also made dupes of its employees who contributed to web standards. In light of recent news, it appears the company tolerated these employees’ activities because they pacified the developer community.

In sum, the ample numbers of IE vulnerabilities seem to encourage hackers and evil script kiddies to write and spread worms and viruses (as well as all the spam emails that carry them). This is just not tolerable anymore. It's time to do something positive to make the internet a better environment: install Mozilla. However, I will continue to make these courses accessible to as many browsers as possible.

Regretfully, I may not be able to do this for much longer, however. From the very beginning of this site's origins, in the middle and late 1980s, long before the College of DuPage had its own web server or even an email system for its faculty, I was using the network to share files with students and colleagues locally and globally. When graphical browsers were developed in the early 1990s, and throughout the original browser wars of the middle 1990s, I worked hard to ensure that these sites were equally usable in all versions of all browsers. My philosophy is "Any browser, any word processor, any platform, any time." Yet Microsoft's recent decisions may change all this. Now that it controls the browser market and the OS market, Microsoft may revert to its earlier policies of writing proprietary code so that only its software works on only Microsoft developed (or Microsoft approved/compliant) sites. This will force those of us who provide content on the web to code different versions of each web page for different software (a lot of work) or to code only for one product. All jokes about being assimilated into the Borg aside, I can only conclude that we should install Mozilla².

Sincerely,

Notes

*This article is translated to the Serbo-Croatian language by Jovana Milutinovich from Webhostinggeeks.com.

¹According to a CNET News.com article, the standalone version of IE may, in fact, continue to be updated. "If you're using IE now, for Mac or Windows, you will have access to any appropriate updates," the report quotes a Microsoft representative as saying. "There will be continued innovation and improvement... It's not going anywhere as a product. What happens in the Longhorn timeframe — it's too early to discuss." (4 June 2003)

²This is not a recommendation I make lightly. If any of you know me at all, you know that I have religiously avoided making any recommendations about software in the past. To make a recommendation seemed incongruous with my any browser, any word processor, any platform, any time philosophy. Never before have I made a statement for or against any software (even back in the days of AOL 1.0 and 2.0, when AOL's browser was the most useless browser ever developed, causing me to work day and night (literally) for a month of Sundays in order to get these sites to function correctly within it — a burden I felt I had to carry because the majority of my students and visitors used AOL. And a sizeable number still do.)

Furthermore, those of you who know me know also that I am a strong advocate of open access. I have fought hard within the College of DuPage and with colleagues at other institutions around the world to keep educational materials publicly, freely accessible —

• to ensure that most of the technological burden is on the content developer, not the audience,
• to ensure that the public has access to educational content,
• not to require special software to view/use the materials,
• not to hide educational materials behind passwords.

I worry about open access a lot. This medium itself is already extremely limiting. As a reading and writing teacher, I want as many people as possible to have open access to any materials that can help them build literacy. The fact that computers are expensive, as is software, as is a network connection, means that already many, many people are denied access to the whole medium. (Yet as a reading and writing teacher, I also sincerely believe that our very notion of literacy must undergo redefinition. For the next generations, to be literate will entail encoding and decoding symbols on the screen — not just the page. And so I persisted with this part of my work.)

This too has prevented me from advocating for or against particular software.

Nonetheless, I worry about the long term implications of recent decisions mentioned above. I worry that unless we do something now, we will no longer have an accessible web, where independent content can flourish. Instead we will have a web owned by corporations and pornographers. The web will become "just more TV."

And Microsoft already owns WebTV.

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