A little common sense and a knowledge of web standards and it’s easy to write HTML that will look good and be functional in all browsers.  Still, in my experience, too many developers are choosing a platform and sticking with it—most of the time that is IE.  It’s easier to test one browser, it’s easier to tell a user to use the browser that’s probably already installed on their pc.

Flash and Silverlight are different than HTML—they are runtimes which are allowed to run inside the browser—kind of like how Java applets used to be able to.  They are executables which run compiled functionality on your computer.  They are cross-browser—but not like html is cross-browser.  When I look at a Silverlight or Flash app on my pc, it’s always the same runtime working.  Silverlight is a few years old and really starting to look like Flash—allowing Microsoft developers like me to get more fancy and provide far better functionality for our users.  Silverlight runs on Windows and Mac, but has ignored the Linux landscape (there is an open-source Silverlight runtime called Moonlight being developed for that—but I consider it a snub).

In the world of web development, I think Flash and Silverlight are “cheating” at cross-platform compatibility.  Everyone has accepted Flash (except the iPhone/iPad), but the jury is still out on Silverlight.

Silverlight and Flash are great in that they move a lot of the processing to your computer and free up resources on the server from which they originate.  But they also increase the responsibilities of they client over the server.

Security flaws are found all the time.  We all scramble around and try to fix them when they come up.  As a software developer, I like the idea that I can apply a patch to a server and be done with it.  With client driven app, I need to make sure all of my users apply the patch (and do it in a way that lets them know that the app is safe—and not to panic).  Flash could bounce back from it (“You need it for Youtube, too. You should apply the patch”), but Silverlight is too new.

I’m often seduced by the cool things that Silverlight can do.  I’ve played around with it a lot and have written several small apps (including an animated Overpass ad on my blog), but I’m not ready to jump in head-first yet. 

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Even more interesting, most corporate environments I’ve worked in support only Internet Explorer internally.  You are simply not allowed to install another browser.  I’ve worked on projects where the intranet application we are developing only works with Internet Explorer—usually because of bad coding/testing—but no one will fix this because “we only support Internet Explorer”.

I remember one high-level manager in an investment bank tell me—“Seriously, Eric, I can’t see us ever moving away from Internet Explorer.”

The lack of cross-browser support in the ASP.net developer community has been a big pet-peeve with me for years.  You don’t find this with PHP, Java, or Ruby guys.  But Microsoft developers stick with Microsoft browsers. 

I’ve had the arguments so many times in various contracts—“We should support Firefox too.  It only takes a few minutes to test functionality if we do it early enough, but will be a huge task to implement it later.”  I can remember having this argument a half-dozen times, at least.

It has never been easier to do cross-browser development (you should have tried it in the Netscape 3/IE 3 days—that was painful), but it still gets overlooked.

Even the online banking site for my  business bank account only renders properly in Internet Explorer.  This is a huge pain to go through all the necessary security logins for banking—only to realise you are in the wrong browser and you can’t read the page.  I’ve nearly changed banks because of this frustration.

An ideal web development team would have different developers using different browsers.  In a team of 4 people for example, have one person on each of the 4 major browsers—IE, FIrefox, Chrome and Safari.  Better yet, adhere to proper XHTML or HTML syntax (most of the time, apps only support IE because of some malformed html that Explorer allows). 

But for years I’ve heard the same argument from different people--“We don’t have that kind of time”, “It’s an internal application and the we only support Explorer”, and “We’re not a software house.  But now, when governments are recommending that we switch browsers, these developers haven’t even given their users this option.

This could kill Internet Explorer or at least severely weaken it.  I see a lot of “Make this website work in Firefox” projects coming up.

Related posts:

1. The scary thing about Silverlight . . .
2. The Client-Side Install
3. I’m a Firefox Convert — finally

I found the following video on the fantastic Signal vs Noise blog from 37 Signals.  It’s a one hour introduction to web usability given by Krug in 2008.  If you have a bit of time (I know an hour is a bit long), it really is an interesting talk so have watch.

The url for the video is (on Signal Vs Noise) is http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2092-i-cant-think-of-a-better-intro-to-the-essential

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