Doing browsers the right way

According to nearly every Mac user I read, the latest beta of OmniWeb uses the open source WebCore and JavaScriptCore from Apple that Safari uses. That’s doing it the right way.

What we call a browser is really two (or three, depending on how you count) pieces: you are seeing these words in a particular font, in an invisible box of a particular size in a particular place, thanks to a layout engine/renderer. That (and the JavaScript interpreter, which may or may not be part of it, depending on how you feel about such things) is what needs to be standards compliant, and needs to be developed with as much feedback from as many people as possible. Just finding all the little weirdnesses in the intersections of XHTML, CSS, DOM, and friends, is hard enough, much less getting them all fixed up. Around and over the top of the rendered page, there are menus, toolbars, context menus, and all sorts of other widgets and bells and whistles. That stuff is just normal program UI, like any other program.

What makes perfect sense to me is to develop the renderer in the open, as open source, where anyone can report bugs, suggest improvements, or hack them in if they’ve got the chops, so that you end up with a single target renderer for your platform, with as many browsers built around it as there are people who think they can do better context menus and bookmarks. That’s what Apple and The Omni Group are doing in OS X: whether you use Safari or OmniWeb, web pages that were checked against anything running WebCore should work right.

What make no sense at all to me is tying your browser, your file manager, and the HTML renderer control you want people to embed in applications all together as one thing. The other day I was doing my usual three things at once poorly, quoting some dialog from Windows Explorer, my desktop file manager, in an email, while reading RSS feeds in SharpReader and browsing the web in Mozilla Firebird. I was more than a little puzzled to find SharpReader frozen when I finally got back to it. If I had some dialog open in Internet Explorer, I wouldn’t be too surprised to find other IE windows frozen, insisting that I deal with the dialog first, because I’ve gotten used to that (a situation that’s often described to me by novice users as “the mouse stopped working” since the window that opened the dialog is generally buried under a dozen other windows and popus – thanks for that helpful bit of behavior, Microsoft), but for a while I was baffled by having a third party internet application frozen by something I’d been doing in my file manager half an hour before. I can see how that sort of behavior might help Microsoft’s lawyers, or maybe their stockholders, but it sure doesn’t seem to do a damn thing for their users.

1 Comment

Comment by Roger Benningfield #
2003-06-08 02:40:52

In the absence of an ”I’m back” entry… welcome back! There’s been a hole in my aggregator while you were away. [grin]

 
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