Web is so quickly advancing - are you so quickly falling behind?

I have been using computers for several decades. I am used to change. I am used to the stillness that precedes the death of a technology, a product line, and a company.

And I take huge strides in the advancement of things in computing as a given.

I just do not expect them to be coming from the same organization all the time.

Organizations hit a ceiling, get locked in a groove, stuck in a rut - you know all the clichés. Well, clichés come from real life.

Linux has been around for a decade and a half - it is not stagnating. Richard Stallman has been creating text editors, C compilers, and a lot of the vital organs Linux developers all rely on for decades - he is not stagnating. Apple Computer has created the first super popular personal computer with color graphics, then the first popular personal computer with windows, icons, mouse, pointer, then breathed life into the digital music industry - they are not stagnating.

Another thing that is not stagnating is Mozilla.

Back in the early half of the 1990s, NCSA at the UIUC created a series of useful tools including: Internet connectivity and a TELNET application for the Mac ...and NCSA Mosaic.

After that, the team of students who created NCSA Mosaic got hired as the founding employees of a west coast company called Netscape. Then Netscape created Mozilla, a start-from-scratch, open source, free web browser.

Mozilla embraced a lot of W3 recommendations created just as it was being created in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It did so about as quickly as the W3C technical recommendations were approved. Then, new recommendations came out. Mozilla implemented them too.

A couple years ago, Firefox came out. A year later, they released version 1.5 - adding support for even more modern web things.

This blog is not going to attempt to work with web browsers that were designed/written in the 1990s at all. If your browser came out in 2001, you are going to find that lots of posts here will not display properly in your browser. They will be missing content, the content will display wrong, or there will be an admonition somewhere in the content that tells you to get a more up-to-date browser.

If you want to read this blog without your old, beleaguered browser hobbling your efforts to browse - I suggest you get a better one. For instance, get Firefox.

The W3C has done some great work. They hammered out standard ways of doing things that all browsers makers could use. Firefox seems to have adopted more of them than any other browser at the moment. Apple is catching up - as are Opera, KDE Konqueror (for Linux), and even some little hand-held devices that are using Apple's open source WebKit.

There are other players in the race to the future. Some have dropped far behind. Others will probably join those in the lead now - one of these years. Maybe one day, all the browser makers will catch up with where these guys are today.

Anyone can use Firefox to look at this blog. All that is required is that you have a computer running Mac OS X or Windows 98 (or later). So I do not feel I am being exclusionary or elitist by using modern types of content in this blog.

I want to showcase what I can do and what anyone can see. That is as long as they do not mind spending 20 minutes updating their browser in order to catch up with half a decade of progress.

Personally, I would do that any day.