Web Browsers and Consistency

Last week, Google made the news due to the revealing of their latest web-focused product -- another Web browser. For most concerned, this announcement was not all that exciting. Chrome, as they are calling it, does not introduce any new concepts in the way the web is browsed. The focus from the Google developers is on speed and stability. The most exciting thing in my mind is the fact that it borrows its rendering engine from the open source WebKit framework.

The converging of technology is why I like the idea behind Chrome. Rather than suffering from not invented here syndrome, Google chose to incorporate an existing product into their own. WebKit is already being used in Apple's Safari browser as well as in a number or other products. The fact that another big company is adopting an existing rendering engine for its highly visible product will hopefully lead into a sigh of relief from many web designers.

Every web designer knows the pain and frustration of making their web application look and feel the same between all web browsers. The market share of globally used web browsers has never had a true monopoly so the burden has been on the web designers themselves to know or to find all of the nuances and quirks that are introduced by the differences in the competing web browsers. There are a handful of major web browsers in play at them moment - each with a different core architecture for interpreting and displaying the HTML markup used in laying out web pages. From the subtle differences in their JavaScript interpretation to quirky standards implementations,it rapidly becomes a headache for the web designer to constantly reference their design in many different environments.

While it is extremely doubtful that the two main players in the browser market, Internet Explorer and Firefox, as well as the many other existing and future web browsers will adopt the same rendering engine, it is hopeful that the push towards web standards compliance will continue to be a driving force in the improvement in web browsers. Standards aren't necessarily perfect but they are an essential step to having consistent output from competing platforms.

The Acid tests are a resource that browser developers have to test how well their rendering engines respond to a common set of instructions meant to exercise different portions of their products. The latest release of their test, the Acid3 test, promoted a race between some rendering engine camps to fully pass the test. In just 23 days, WebKit and Opera had working versions of their browsers which passed the test.

Whether it be motivated by the cries of web designers or the pressure from competing browsers, getting more consistent output in the way HTML and JavaScript are rendered between browsers will be nothing but beneficial to everyone.