Question

In the early stages of the Web, a browser called Mosaic dominated the market. After a few years, the balance had shifted to Netscape, which was then, in turn, largely supplanted by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. At any point where a single browser was dominant, that browser’s vendor would feel entitled to unilaterally invent new features for the Web. Since most users used the same browser, websites would simply start using those features—never mind the other browsers.

This was the dark age of compatibility, often called the browser wars. Web developers were left with not one unified Web but two or three incompatible platforms. To make things worse, the browsers in use around 2003 were all full of bugs, and of course the bugs were different for each browser. Life was hard for people writing web pages.

Mozilla Firefox, a not-for-profit offshoot of Netscape, challenged Internet Explorer’s hegemony in the late 2000s. Because Microsoft was not particularly interested in staying competitive at the time, Firefox took quite a chunk of market share away from it. Around the same time, Google introduced its Chrome browser, and Apple’s Safari browser gained popularity, leading to a situation where there were four major players, rather than one.

The new players had a more serious attitude toward standards and better engineering practices, leading to less incompatibility and fewer bugs. Microsoft, seeing its market share crumble, came around and adopted these attitudes. If you are starting to learn web development today, consider yourself lucky. The latest versions of the major browsers behave quite uniformly and have relatively few bugs.

That is not to say that the situation is perfect just yet. Some of the people using the Web are, for reasons of inertia or corporate policy, stuck with very old browsers. Until those browsers die out entirely, writing websites that work for them will require a lot of arcane knowledge about their shortcomings and quirks. This book is not about those quirks. Rather, it aims to present the modern, sane style of web programming.

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.