The Core

Anyone else getting really hacked off with browser diversification at the moment? 

Here are the MAJOR releases so far this year:

Feb Chrome 9
Mar Chrome 10 + Firefox 4 + IE 9
Apr Chrome 11
Jun Chrome 12 + Firefox 5
Aug Chrome 13 + Firefox 6

Yup - nine full version releases in 7 months and still we're not at a point in time when you can markup a page in confidence that it will render as intended across even the most recent releases.  As a result we're back to lots of cross browser testing.

I've got a site that I consider to be a good test bed for what is "normal".  It has a broad enough range of users that it tends to mimic UK wide trends at least quite well.  We work to a general guideline of trying to test under any browser version that counts for 0.5% of the traffic for that site as a general standard. (this does change for less general sites).

In Jul 2008 that 0.5% counted for 5 Major browser releases (IEx2, FFx2, Safari x1) across 3 operating systems.
by Jul 2011 that has risen to 16 Major browser releases (IEx4, FFx5, Chromex2, safarix4 and Androidx1) across 6 operating systems and a helluva lot more coming close to that 0.5% mark.  I expect those numbers to increase further next month.

To make this worse the new fast release cycles of some of the browsers seem to equal rolling out shoddiness.

I might make one of those old skool "best viewed in..." buttons.  Mine will read "best viewed in a browser that actually bloody existed when we put the site together, wasn't released by a pissed up dev team after a friday session down the pub and at least actually nods towards standards compliance". 
</rant>

There's been a flurry of press releases on browsers - rc's above; also a linkbait claiming IE users were stupid; one this week about IE better against social media malware. MEthinks there's a lot of fluff being put about as browsers posture for position.

IMO the irony is that browsers have become increasingly user-unfriendly.

Browser sniffing on websites has come back too and I'm blaming Web 2.0 cr*p.  Apple .me service always sniffed browsers (because it's Apple and they know best what everyone should be using) but they would at least let you proceed past a warning page to use the site at your own risk. (Usually that failed because they couldn't be bothered to code for all major browsers.)

Then later Yahoo rolled out it's current new-and-improved (could have fooled me) email and it lets you use IE, FF, Chrome and Safari only. If you are not using one of those they won't even let you login. So if you use Opera or an open source Linux browser you are locked out.

Silly! Purple! Gits!

I think we are slowly moving to a Tower of Babel on page rendering.

I assume that a lot of it is being driven by the same mentality as the decision not to call Xbox 360 "Xbox 2": ie the presumption that the public must think that playstation3 comes after xbox2 and firefox6 is obviously way behind IE9.

Screw it, can't we brand up a webkit instance and called it "Core browser 100" ?