Browser Wars 2

As of now I am 17 I have been doing web sites now for a while now. I have had the same trouble with the Netscape and IE both mangling my html and perfect JavaScript as if they were trying to mess with my head. I continued to do web sites only keeping that confusing Netscape back of my head. I know another person that also does web sites and he is an older fellow. He looked at my site in dreaded Netscape 4.7. I cringed as the browser opened and the page loaded. It amazed me that it worked perfect is this catastrophe of a program. Then he looked at another one of my sites and the frames were thrown left and right. I explained to him I haven’t fixed it to work in Netscape do to the lack of interest. I then took a big step and ask this guy, why he used Netscape. Now this guy is no beginner in the web site mania, he creates multi-thousand dollar sites when he has time or wants to. He begins to explain how he hates that Microsoft has the idea of forcing the IE browser on him. I suggested he open that site in IE and it worked as though it new what is was doing. The tables were perfect the graphics were there. And most of all when filling in forms you can hit ‘enter’ instead of clicking the submit button with your mouse. I never realized the browser IE is forced on us so much. But I figure it is better so who cares. As I came home and eventually put Netscape 6 on my computer. I pointed my browser to the site I did for the company I work for. (www.arcticwebs.com) As it loaded everything was every where I couldn’t believe that with the newer version it made it worse. But what about that guy opening it in 4.7? Why did it work then? I pounded my head in frustration and continued to think about this. How can I continue my efforts doing sites, when such awful things happen with the different browsers? I fear it is only going to get worse. I hope one thing that Microsoft will buy out Netscape and take out the loading screen and make it work such as IE works. I am scared to find out what AOL will do with this program; since they bought it back when IE 5 was out it doesn’t look like much. I am not saying IE is great. It does have its nice crashes and then it closes each window you have open. That in itself is over come able with its nice language translation of html pages and JavaScript. On the other hand you have Netscape crashing and its crappy display of html and JavaScript. What can you do, its and endless battle that could cause every web site developer in his right mind go insane with in a few days of looking at IE, then looking at Netscape. I recently discovered a poll asking which browser would prevail. The results show in May 2, 1997 - December 31, 1997 26% think Microsoft’s IE and 70% think Netscape and 4% for neither browser. I was surprised to know that in January of 2000 it was at 31% for IE and 61% for Netscape and 6% for neither. Although these are old results it still is amazing that IE isn’t winning the battle at all. I believe though that there are more people out there that enjoy IE and haven’t realized it is a better browser then its farthest competitor. For the welfare of all web designers out there I pray there will be a unified browser one day. That our masterpiece will look good to any client, surfer or otherwise, and not mangled, tangled and thrashed by that one browser.