This article details the problems that users may face as companies stuggle to control the Web browser industry.
No matter who wins the battle of the browsers, the rest of us are likely to lose
It is one of those perfect New England days. Late spring. Sunny but crisp. There is a buzz on the MIT campus. What seems to be the entire student body swarms west, making its way toward the hivelike dome known as Kresge Auditorium. Remarkably, the traffic in the campus thruway known as the Infinite Corridor is going in just one direction, and the usual hallway exchanges about theoretical physics and aerodynamics have given way to gleefully juvenile cries. "He's coming! He's coming!" "Did you see him?" "He's really here!"
A good 15 minutes before show time, empowered-looking students, today acting as bouncers, hold up their arms and turn new arrivals away. The 1,156-seat auditorium is filled to capacity. Press credentials have to be shown several times to gain entry to a small cordoned-off area where more than 100 journalists are scribbling on pads or testing tape recorders.
Beaming, Michael Dertouzos, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, refers in his introductory remarks to the main attraction simply as Bill, and no one is confused. "Gates" has become as superfluous to the chairman of Microsoft as "Sumner" has to Sting. Dertouzos also reminds the packed and highly charged auditorium that the last time a speaker for the Distinguished Lecture Series packed a hall was when Jim Clark, the chairman and cofounder of Netscape Communications Corp., came to campus.
Dertouzos isn't in Kresge a few hours later when a sparse and almost anemically polite audience gathers to hear another lecturer, Tim Berners-Lee. Like Gates and Clark, Berners-Lee is here to talk about the phenomenal growth and seemingly limitless future of the World Wide Web. The diminished audience is ironic. While Gates and Clark head companies that make products for the Web, Berners-Lee invented the Web and now leads an organization that comes closer than any other to officially controlling it.
But the small audience is also a reflection of influence. For proof, visit almost any home page on the Web and notice how often you come across a gleaming capital N, the name Netscape, or the phrase "Best when viewed with Netscape Navigator." Check out a few more sites, and you'll probably hit on a reference to the rapidly up and coming Microsoft Internet Explorer. But unless you know exactly where to search, you're not likely to run across a mention of Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Consortium--or any of its technical achievements--even though the consortium, if successful, would make Web-page browser icons like the shiny N irrelevant.
W3C, as the consortium is often called, exists to design and promote the adoption of standards for the way information is displayed, modified, and interacted with on the Web--and those who are members join with that implicit understanding. But in reality, the consortium does little of substance. Instead, Netscape almost single-handedly sets the Web's evolving standards--though now Microsoft is making a fast-break bid to wrest that control from Netscape. The result? The Web has thrived, but the consumers and businesses that are coming to depend on it face an increasing number of potential roadblocks caused by growing incompatibilities between the various software programs used to create and access Web pages. And the thousands of companies that make up the Web software industry risk being hampered by the dominance of a single company acting--as do most companies--purely out of self-interest.
How difficult is it to deal with Netscape's de facto standard setting? Anyone who's surfed the Web with a non-Netscape browser--or even with an older version of Netscape's Navigator--is familiar with empty or distorted graphics frames, nonfunctioning interactive features, and a host of other defects that manifest themselves from site to site. Now, Netscape Navigator users are starting to encounter similar problems on the relatively small but rapidly growing number of sites that are optimized for Microsoft's Explorer.
Keeping up with the latest Netscape variations mystifies even seasoned Web masters like Andrew King, principal of Athenia Associates, in Ann Arbor, Mich., who runs a Web site (http://www.webreference.com) devoted to following Web technology, including tracking the ever-changing features of various browsers--one of at least a dozen such sites that have sprung up in the recent past. "We do this all day, and we still have trouble keeping up," confesses King. Ditto for Matt Stevens, a network manager for Wired magazine's on-line spin-off, HotWired. Stevens says his job is to "keep track of the latest and greatest" Web features, but with Netscape it isn't always easy. "You have to dig and dig and dig," he says, "because Netscape isn't really good about informing people about the new features in its latest version. And it's always changing." He routinely checks Netscape's Web site to compare release notes of various versions.
The confusion can be particularly harmful and costly to companies trying to put up an attractive Web site that's accessible to all browsers. In July David Siegel, president of Studio Verso, in San Francisco (whose Web site, http://www.highfive.com, serves as a barometer of state-of-the-art Web design), began circulating within the Web industry an open E-mail missive about the dangers of Netscape's strategy of constantly tossing out new self-proclaimed standards. "Already I spend thousands of dollars every month (real money) making sure our sites look good on Netscape Navigator for the various platforms," Siegel's E-mail said. "I could write a book on the differences among versions and platforms for this one product. I [want] my clients [to] be assured that their money goes into design, not into working around cross-platform, cross-version compatibility issues. I'm happy to build extras for one browser or another, but when the basic fabric of a site is torn by differences in the way browsers approach basic elements of typography and layout, I feel the consortium is not serving end users. . . . We all know this isn't a game, but I fear that in trying to shake off Microsoft, Netscape will end up hurting people like me and my clients in a flurry of exciting new features and overlapping releases."
