I recently thought about the older browsers I used when I didn’t know any better, and it immediately dawned on me; I used to use IE6 and I liked it kind of… The thing is that I didn’t know any better.
Back in 2004
I was surfing 3D forums at my workplace on a dial up modem back in late 2004 and one of my forums was taking longer than usual to load (we’re talking minutes here). One of our neighbors in the building was a small web company
and one of the guys from that company noticed my frustration while hanging out in our office on unrelated business. He said, “hey if you want a faster browser, try Firefox.” I thought to myself, “Could a faster browser really make a difference?” (I knew nothing about the web back then. I was just an end user, nothing more.) After trying Firefox, I noticed (at dial up speeds) that it rendered the page progressively and that made it seem faster. This was huge… Browser loyalty began all over again. IE had crushed Netscape but a few years later, the Phoenix had risen!
Today
If we move focus to the present, the landscape is so much richer now. There’s Safari, Firefox, Iceweasel, IE, Chrome, Maxthon, Chromium, Konqueror, Iron (Chrome without the Google tracking) and many more. Some Android phones now support WebGL! HTML5 sites are popping up more often and things are crazy!
Right now, for the web, crazy is good.