Internet Exploder soon to have WebKit heart?
The world is changing indeed. I have been now working on our website for over a year and at one point I ditched support for Internet Explorer in favor of coding standard compliant XHTML. I wanted a website for the future and not for the past. I am only testing in Firefox but foremost in Safaris Webkit (the developer nightly builds of Safari) because by all that I can see it is just the most standard compliant browser out there - so if stuff looks good in there and validates you have good code. Now I am still looking at browser statistics and pander if ditching IE was such a good decision because its still at 75% browser market. Then along comes a blog entry and the world just get a different face. After Google incorporating WebKit in their Google Browser Microsoft thinks about following along with a future generation browser of their own that uses WebKit. I donīt know if you can understand what that means. But that would put Safaris WebKit in the number one browser spot quite instantly surpassing Firefox. That also means the world is left with only two competiting browsers but both of those try to be standard compliant as hell. (Hey I am not counting Opera - who as the total underdog browser still does not seem it necessary to have a standards compliant rendering engine). Heck Firefox and Safari both push CCS3 out the door and SVG is at least in Webkit working very well to the point where you can start animating in it. That means standard compliant moving vector interfaces with custom fonts - together with the audio and video tags that are coming as well this means not only bye bye Internet Exploder but also bye bye Flash... Oh happy days.... Of course the whole thing is taken with a grain of salt as there is nothing official about it - but one can dream right?
"Open source is interesting," he said. "Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."