On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 19:21, Wade Preston Shearer wrote: > i have a very simple question about browsers and standards. and, i am > not just whining here... this is a serious question. > > why is it that browsers and so far behind the browsers? why is it that > CSS3 is exists and there are browsers that are still missing support > for parts of CSS1? > > obviously there are hundred of browsers and some teenagers writing one > out of his basement might not have everything in there, but i am really > having a hard time understanding why the major browsers have such big > pieces missing and/or are so far behind. > > do they just not care? it can't be like the example of QuarkXPress, > where they just dominated the marketed and had not competition and > therefore had not reason to update their code and add features, because > browsers are free... the writers don't make money selling them. > > so... are they working as hard as they can and just can't keep up with > the features that are invented? do they need more man-power? do they > just not care? (this is seems to be true for IE to some extent) > > i don't have any experience with writing software, but it just seems > strange to me that you would let your product be lacking... especially > with all of the competition. it seem like as soon as a new feature is > developed or conceived, you would want to include that in your next > update/patch. > > anyone?
I'll give it a shot. My guess is that in general they are working hard at keeping up with the features the majority of the customers want, or think they want, or what they think their customers want. This is always a tricky thing to figure out for both vendors and customers. With web broswers you probably have two kinds of customers too, web-surfers and web developers. What do each of them want and how soon do they want it? It could be too, that some of these features are just difficult and time consuming to implement and they are working as hard as they can at it. Mozilla seems to have come a long way in a short amount of time, and overall they seem to have IE beat in all sorts of ways (feature wise). Maybe to get things like CSS3 Mozilla needs some sort of competition in that area to get them moving that way :) Also, I'm guessing that as more people realize how cool Mozilla is, more will start switching, and then MS will have to finally update IE (which hasn't changed much in the past few years, if you haven't noticed). Bryan ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
