So here's the scoop.

I am taking a class at good old strayer university and we are having discussion on why companies would choose to follow standards. Our online courses only support Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers, so out of frustration I posted the thought that our online classroom had chosen function over standard. My thought being that if the class does not support Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, and the large list of other main stream browsers that the online classroom is not following web standards. Although I am not an Opera user, I am pretty sure Opera is known for being standard compliant.

One of the students in class pointed out that Mozilla runs the IE executable and therefore my theory was off base. Is this true? I see where mozilla runs an identical API as that of IE, but does that mean that they have the exact same standard support or that they just make calls to the OS in the same way?

Interested in hearing the communities thoughts.

Thanks
-Shawn

mozilla and firefoz are based off of Netscape, and certainly not IE, i guess someone remembered the wrong name somewhere along the line there... if NS is supported, Moz and FF should be generally assumed supported two. even the newest firefox release will ocassionally pop up a netscape quality feedback box if it crashes....

Thanks for the quick response.

So what would you say is a good reason to not support browsers other than IE and Netscape?

market share. sadly with about 95% of the market share going to IE.. from the business side of it, why bother? it's like clothes shops...95% of women are sizes 8 to 14 (except america of course...) so who cares if you don't make money out of the last 5%? most cost effective to grab the mass market.

As far as I know, Netscape initiated the Mozilla community, and gave to it the parts of Communicator's source code that could be given. That was so badly designed (years of cummulative evolution), that the Mozilla project decided to start anew. So current Mozilla code is NOT based on old Communicator's code. On the other hand, current Netscape (6 or 7) IS based on Mozilla.

So we have four main rendering engines:
- IE (biggest market share)
- Gecko (Mozilla, Netscape6+, Nautilus, Galeon...)
- Opera
- Konqueror

Other rendering engines are less used, or very specific.
(Note: AOL is based on IE, but some prototypes are based on Gecko)

The most standards-compliant engine is Gecko. Next... I don't know, though Opera is often said to be very good.
One thing I know, though:
IE6+ is fairly standards-compliant, but has some strange behaviours. IE5.5 is good enough, though not as good as IE6; but IE5.5 is more "evenly" compliant. IE5.01- are bad versions.

Yves.

from what i hear, IE tends to make its own standards rather then follow what the w3c says (which is pretty much what they can do as they have the monopoly , if they wanted to they could create a new set of html (if they haven't already) and soon you'll see websites with these new m$html tags that makes it impossible for other bowser's to render the site )

I'm not sure, but i thought i hear some time ago that gecko browsers didn't have full dhtml support ....

anyways, you may have 4 main (yea there probably more, if konquere can qualify, so can links, lynx (and all other text based bowser's), dillo, and probably some browsers i never heard of .., and browsers i heard of but am to lazy to list them..) , i think i would classify the rendering engines into 2 categories

1) try hard to be standards complaint (w3c)
2) complaint to standards it makes/modifies/wants to be complaint with

IE is the one that's off not the other browsers. It's all in small things, my site worked in IE but the javascript stopped working in firefox because I used ( instead of [ at some places. Like it's not even more work to make it useable in other browsers.