Firefox 2, Safari 2

Back in 2008, these two major browsers were stuck on their second edition. The latest versions right now are FireFox 17 and Safari 10. Time flies! But apart from the version numbers, has there really happened that much in the past 4 years?

Firefox 2 also introduced better support for feeds, inline spell-checking, support for SVG text (I'm curious about SVG btw, will post a blog about it later), resuming browser sessions, phishing protection and new windows opening in new tabs, by default! All of this is so common now it's hard to imagine what it was like earlier.

Safari 2 introduced integrated RSS, Atom and PDF viewing, as well as private browsing and parental controls. In a time before Chrome, those two latter features were way ahead of its time! Facebook overtook Myspace in 2008 though, so they were indeed needed features. Since then, only speed and functionality have been tweaked with each release, no remarkable new features.

It was a special year! It was also the year that Internet Explorer 6 came out, a popular browser at the time. It is also a browser which has lived much longer than it should, considering all the issues designers have had to face over the years while trying to optimize their sites to work properly on IE6. The other major browsers have never posed such major problems, and it took a while before IE finally caught up to the competition. Or has it? Maybe IE 10 will be just as much of an issue in another four years...