Web browser drama!

Microsoft is still reeling in the web browser market from its own five-year failure to update Internet Explorer before version 7 last year. After being poised to continue their arrogant imperial approach to said market with a new proposal called “version targeting“, I’m thrilled to see they’ve changed course and will now heed the wishes of the greater web development community.

Version targeting is the idea that web sites should explicitly specify which version of the browser they’d like to use, and Microsoft was going to require web sites to “opt-in” to using the latest version of Internet Explorer every time a new version of the browser was released in the future. (If they didn’t, even IE99 would still show the web site exactly like IE7 did!) This proposal is a reaction to the trouble they created by fixing many of their own bugs with the release of Internet Explorer 7, and it would be a sea-change for web development: moving away from the convergence on web standards and the idea of progressive enhancement, back to the use of specific bits of code dictated by browser vendors from the top down for their one particular browser.

The version targeting proposal and explicit opt-in requirement has created a huge upswelling of comment and debate in the web development community, and while 99% of “blue collar” web developers like me seemed opposed to the idea, I was disappointed to see so many rockstar standardistas coming out apologetically in favor. Many thanks to Jeremy Keith, who took a strong stand against the idea in a recent article on A List Apart. Jeremy wrote:

The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of "breaking the web" in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches.

Well, as of yesterday, Microsoft has changed course and said that while their new version targeting scheme will remain intact, web sites will no longer have to explicitly opt-in! IE will continue to adhere to web standards as best it can by default, and the onus to “version target” will be on developers who explicitly want to use an old version of IE. This is great news.

Workers of the web unite! And kudos to Microsoft. It’s excellent to see them listening, and working with the greater community.