Who won the browser wars?  Standards did!

It's now possible to write a single set of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and have it work in multiple browsers without doing sniffing

If you want to know who's winning the browsers wars now, you have to evaluate standards support, but this is less of an issue

So the real question is which parts of which standards are supported by multiple browsers

The side question is how far you can push design without having the page fall completely apart in a major browser

("Major" is defined by YOUR visitors, not some "global" statistic!)

It used to be that we assumed the browser was broken, rather than that we were authoring badly, but now that's shifting-- it's worth it to assume that if something doesn't work, it's not the browser's fault

So let's take a look at various standards and where browsers stand

(Note: Gecko is the rendering engine that underlies Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Compuserve 7, Galeon, Chimera, and...?)


HTML 4.01: nearly complete support by everyone
  There are a few edge exceptions, like object/embed and optgroup
  You can't be a Web browser without HTML!

XHTML 1.1: nearly complete support by everyone
  Again, there are some gaps around the edges
  The main failing you see here is tolerance for sloppiness

DOCTYPE switching: the Big Two are doing it now
  The rendering mode you get depends on the DOCTYPE
  Error-handling, layout, and more are affected
  Opera tries to be in standards mode all the time; it's moderately successful

CSS1: nearly complete support by IE6, NS6+, and Opera 4+
  Lynx: no support
  There are still some lingering bugs, but they are unlikely to get you as long as you're in standards mode
  Watch out for IE5.x-- only one mode, and it isn't the greatest
  The big failing is the box model
  'width' isn't handled correctly in quirks
  Error-handling is very lax in quirks
  Standards mode (IE6) fixes this

CSS2: support is limited but fairly robust
  Opera: very good CSS2 support
  Gecko: good CSS2 support
  IE6: limited CSS2 support
  Multiple-media support is quite good
  Paged-media support is limited
  Generated content is very limited
  Positioning is the big problem-- it's fragmented and in some places contradictory; workarounds are often the order of the day

Javascript (EMCAscript): support is excellent
  Being fairly simple, this is an easy language to support
  The problem arises from using proprietary code
  The worst example is proprietary DOMs

DOM: a gradually clarifying mess
  DOM0 support is pretty good across the board
  Doing animations leads to major performance hits in most browsers
  IE is the standout in this category; it is excellent
  DOM2 is the reverse: slow performance in most browsers, and close to zilch in IE, but recent interest in Events from IE engineers
  If you stick to the W3C DOM, you should be fine in the Big Two, and may be all right in Opera

XML: poor support across the board
  Gecko is the standout here
  IE has limited/flawed support (Mac at least gives a tree view)
  XML+CSS works great in Gecko, okay in IE/Win

XSLT: very limited
  Mozilla is the only engine with native XSLT support
  However, using XSLT on the server to transform XML into HTML can be done easily, and is a viable solution (DevEdge)

PNG: widespread support
  Gecko and IE5/Mac support the works, including alpha channels
  IE/Win supports PNG but not alpha channels
  Opera?