Web Devout tidings

Many recent news articles claim that a Mozilla Firefox 2.0 alpha version (the development stage before beta) has been released. This is not the case. The confusion is derived from a recent version number change in the nightly development builds, which are publicly available but are only intended to be used by developers and pre-beta testers. The nightly build version numbers have changed in preparation for an upcoming alpha release, but Mozilla has not yet officially released it and there are still additional changes that are expected to be made beforehand.

Asa Dotzler, the leader of Mozilla’s Quality Assurance program, has responded to these false reports.

Update: It appears that the alpha development is currently frozen, meaning it will not receive any more changes until the official alpha release unless the quality assurance group deems it necessary. The alpha release will be called “Bon Echo” (previously planned as “Bon Ocho”) rather than “Firefox” in order to discourage the general public from using it. Bon Echo, like other Firefox developer releases, is named after a landmark, specifically Bon Echo Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.

Update: Bon Echo alpha 1 has now been officially released. Again, this should only be of interest to Firefox developers and people who wish to actively take part in the beta testing and bug report process. This version should not be used for general web browsing, as there may be serious bugs that result in loss of data or crashes.

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) website has undergone a major redesign. This reflects the new energy that has been pumped into the project since web browser development began to accelerate in the last year or so. The WaSP group has been working closely with the Internet Explorer development team to push for improved standards support in Internet Explorer 7 and future versions, with notable success. The new website also features a comment system and trackback support.

There have been some more improvements to the Web browser security summary page. In order to present more perspective, all sections have now been split up into subsections that deal with advisories, vulnerabilities, and relative danger levels separately. There is also a new section of the Vulnerabilities table that shows the highest amount of open advisories, vulnerabilities, and relative danger that each web browser has had at one time.

Occasionally during public discussions about web standards, particularly standards compliance in web browsers, someone comes out of the crowd and asks these two questions: “What good is a web standard if no browser has perfect support for it?” and “Why is a W3C standard any better than a Microsoft standard?”

The second question has an easy answer: even Microsoft is dumping their “standards”. Internet Explorer Group Program Manager Chris Wilson stated in an official blog post, “I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it’s been Recommended).”. The web development community generally agrees that the models endorsed by the W3C are easier to work with, more flexible, more intuitive, and simply make more sense than Internet Explorer’s implementations. Other browsers have been aiming at W3C standards compliance for quite some time now, and the Internet Explorer development team has made it clear that they aim to follow standards more rigorously in future versions, even when it means breaking websites that rely on Internet Explorer quirks, as we have seen in the big commotion regarding the widely-used * html hack.

It’s true that Microsoft has made some positive contributions to web technology. Some contributions have made it into W3C standards, some have not. When it comes to a battle between an Internet Explorer implementation and a W3C-endorsed web standard, the rest of the browsers and web development community typically flock to the W3C standard. Why? Because we are aware of the great mess that came from the browser wars between Netscape and Internet Explorer, when standards were all but thrown aside and each browser went its own way. It became a tremendous struggle for web developers to get something working across all major browsers. Standards ensure that there is common ground for future development. Considering that all browser developers now aim to follow this one source of rules — rules that are largely the product of discussion and agreement among these browser developers — we as web developers know that these are the rules we can expect will hold up in the future.

This leads to the answer to the first question. Standards are important even if a particular standard isn’t yet well-supported. When no major browsers support a standard, it usually equates to lack of interest. But when interest does spark up, web developers and browser developers can know exactly where to go, since the tracks are already laid out. Standards are more about the future than anything else, and as time goes on they will help to keep our technology models clean, organized, and progressively easier to utilize in a widely compatible way.

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