Can we speed up Browser Evolution by Mike Davidson

Just going thru the blog of Mike Davidson. An old post of why the state of browsers are looking pathetic. He argues at length about auto updates & strict, compulsory implementation of standards (not the XML purists though) in upgrading browsers. Seems lot more sense to think that way. He compares the browser upgrade with Flash upgrade.

Full article is a worth read for any web developer. Btw, subscribe to his RSS Feed (2.0), it's a fascinating read about one of the powerful designers of our time. Some of the highlights of the article i like are:

"The message is, “Let’s speed the adoption rate of W3C standards and let’s also speed the rate at which we apply them on our own sites.” If that causes a few more people to upgrade browsers before they’d like to, so be it."

"If the recent success of Safari and Firefox has shown us anything, it’s that “open” wins in the long run, and if you aren’t producing what the community wants, the community will eventually not want you."

"The fact is that part of the reason Internet Explorer has a 95% market share right now is that Microsoft has successfully reduced the concept of the internet down to a postage-stamp sized icon on your desktop."

"Create the Rapid Browser Improvement Delta Force (or R.B.I.D.F.) I mentioned earlier in the article. I’m serious when I say that I’d rather have a handful of representatives determine actionable browser improvements and then immediate act on them than wait for initiatives work their way through years of committees only to result in hopeful recommendations. Please know that this is not a knock on the incredible amount of thought and effort coming from these committees… it is just a realization that sometimes the more people who are involved in a decision and the more perfect these people try to make that decision, the slower things tend to move. Sometimes you don’t need perfect decisions… you just need helpful, swift ones. If anyone has suggestions for such a panel of people, please post them in the comments. 10 or less people sounds about right to me."

"I realize that some of my thoughts on browser development are a bit naive (seeing as I have never developed one myself), but I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that the inability for us to use newer coding standards shortly after they are released is largely self-imposed. We settle for browsers which don’t upgrade their rendering engines transparently, we settle for specifications which take too long to pass through large committees, and we settle for coddling to the 1% of the population who doesn’t see fit to upgrade with the rest of us.

We need to quit settling."