text-transform:

If you felt a strange disturbance in the Force yesterday, that’s why.

Over at Wired’s Webmonkey, Scott Gilbertson argues persuasively that we’re falling back into an old trap. Before, it was sites that only worked in one browser — IE6.

But, while IE6 may be a thing of the past, the root problem — websites that work in one and only one web browser — sadly, remains.

This time the culprit is WebKit, the rendering engine that powers the browsers on the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones. But what’s different about this round of monoculture is that, unlike IE 6, the WebKit developers haven’t done anything wrong. It’s web developers that have created the WebKit-only web.

Instead of writing code that will work in any browser, which might mean adding an extra three lines of code to their CSS rules, some of even the largest sites on the web are coding exclusively for WebKit.

The problem is bad enough that on Monday at the CSS Working Group meeting, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera announced that each are planning to add support for some -webkit prefixed CSS properties. In other words, because web developers are using only the -webkit prefix, other browsers must either add support for -webkit or risk being seen as less capable browsers even when they aren’t.

Meanwhile, Chris Heilman is fighting this trend two-fisted, with Pre-fix the web. He and his like-minded compatriots are finding project on Github that are WebKit-only, then forking the code and adding support for other browsers. Hats off to them!

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Today we are sharing our plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC. This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward. We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. Similar to our release of IE9 earlier this year, we will take a measured approach, scaling up over time.

Google Apps already dropped support for IE6 a while back; now they’re taking it a step further, by only supporting the “current and one previous” versions of each browser:

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

IE7′s usage has already dipped below IE6′s in some reports, so this isn’t as huge a deal as it might have been even a year ago. Still, I wish they’d extended this policy out to YouTube as well; that would really drive people to upgrade.

I’ve been working lately on an app that will only be used in-house, so we can simply exclude browsers that we don’t wish to support. Moreover, there is no business- or marketing-driven reason to insist on a fully-polished UI that looks the same across the board. The result? Graceful degradation in IE 7 and 8. IE users get square corners and no drop shadow? Big whoop. IE’s interface looks boxy and lumpy? Oh well.

Man, this is a freaking joy. There’s simple, clean CSS3 all over the place. How I look forward to the day when IE9 has broad support and I can start doing this kind of thing on lots of public sites as well. Sadly, Microsoft has announced that IE9 won’t run on Windows XP, which is currently about half of the Windows installs out there, so IE8 looks to be the “IE6 of the future”.