Vladimir Sedach

Have Emacs - Will Hack

February 9, 2009

Web browser engine survey

Topic: Web programming

The diagram below summarizes my recent cursory survey of web browsers. I think the one important conclusion that can be drawn is this: Webkit will be critical in the future. I know at least one person who does not have a computer, but uses Facebook from her mobile phone. There will be more and more people like that. Another important factoid: IE6 is not dead. IE Mobile 6 will use the JavaScript implementation of IE8, but the layout engine is based off of IE6. That will probably induce nausea in most web developers, but it makes me glad I still take care to develop my web apps to run in IE6.

Graph showing relationships between different web browsers
  and the rendering engines and JavaScript implementations that the
  browsers use.

Other notable things:

The repository version of Parenscript will probably break your code.

I have released a new version of uri-template, which fixes a bug in how URI encoding was being performed.