It even had support for
nonstandard technologies such as its own native version of the XMLHttpRequest object (a key
ingredient in enabling Ajax, which is covered in Chapter 5). Firefox quickly soared in popularity,
especially among the developer crowd. The W3Schools web site, for example, shows recent
Firefox usage at almost 34 percent (see http://w3schools.com,May, 2007).
nNote Take browser statistics with a grain of salt. As the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Every site is different and attracts a certain demographic, so you can expect your stats to differ from
everybody else??™s. For example, 60 percent of those who visit my site, with its heavy skew toward developers,
use Firefox. This speaks heavily to the need to build sites that work on all browsers because you never know
what your users will have or how the market might shift.
Apple released Safari for the Mac, which filled the gap when Microsoft decided to discontinue
developing a browser for the Mac platform. Safari, along with Firefox and Camino
(based on the Gecko engine that Firefox uses), had solid support for HTML and CSS standards.
Early versions of Safari had limited DOM support, but recent versions are much easier
to work with and also include support for XMLHttpRequest.Most importantly, they all support
the same set of standards.
The differences between the current versions of the browsers on the market became
minimal, so you have that ubiquity you??™ve been looking for.
Pages:
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38