With the release of Internet Explorer 5, Microsoft’s browser began to establish dominance and appeared to be on the right track to becoming the de facto standard. Although that version of
Internet Explorer still had a significant number of bugs and unsupported features, subsequent releases have improved on its increasingly solid base of CSS compliance.

Unfortunately, browser development largely halted with the release of Internet Explorer 6, Service Pack 1 in September 2002. Microsoft has said that there will no further updates to the standalone browser, and the next major revision will not be available until the latest operating system (code-named Longhorn) is available. Even more unfortunately, the cracks in Internet Explorer 6’s CSS support are becoming quite apparent.

From the Netscape side of the browser war, a stunning defeat appears to have been turned into a victory for designers. Mozilla 1 and the initial release of Firefox boast a high degree of standards compliance for Geckobased browsers, especially where CSS is concerned. Apple’s Safari, based on the Linux program Konqueror, definitely took advantage of previous advances and released a highly reliable browser with excellent CSS capabilities. Opera has been up and down in the CSS world, but has bounced back with a solid implementation in its latest version; Opera 7 supports almost all of CSS 1 and the majority of CSS 2.

No matter how close the latest round of browsers are to the CSS standard, none is perfect—and a hack or filter may be the only way to achieve your client-driven goals. In this chapter, you’ll find ways to correct problems stemming from the majority of the browsers in use today, starting with the somewhat special case of Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. The Internet Explorer discussion continues with a focus on the recent versions of the browser for Windows: Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, and 6.
In many ways, Internet Explorer was a great example of how not to make a browser. Although these competitive browsers (including Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla and Firefox, as well as Safari and Opera) learned from observing Internet Explorer’s mistakes, they’re not perfect. The balance of the chapter dives into some of their problems and possible hacks.

The pivotal moment in the browser wars came with the release of Internet Explorer 5 when Microsoft’s new free browser was demonstrably more powerful (and more CSS-rich) than Netscape’s current commercial offering. Internet Explorer cemented its position with the next series of releases on various platforms, with widely different capabilities on the Macintosh and Windows.

Tags: Browsers, CSS, from, Hiding