If you thought the battle of the browsers was old news, think again. Next monday, IE9 is released. Firefox 4 has been signed off for release candidate due out leter today or tomorrow. Google Chrome version 10 has just been released. On the mac, Safari 5 is making strong progress, while the mobile market is gaining significant 'casual browsing' share.

What does this mean for web developers? Well, with nearly all recent browser releases supporting large parts of the HTML5 and CSS3 specifications, there should in theory be less differences between the browsers. The reality however is quite a different story. There are a depressingly large number of websites that do not look right using IE9 RC1 (hopefully, this should be resolved in the official release next week, but there are no guarentees) - one of the problems with legacy sites is that often they use browser detection and css hacks to make a website appear as identical as possible for different browsers. When a whole new generation of browsers are released, there is a whole new set of browser user agents, so the browser detection that used to work may require updating, and the CSS hacks that fix a site for the previous generation of browsers may no longer work for IE9.

I had to do a little bit of work for some sites to get them IE9 ready - things like updating to the latest version of CK editor, but nothing major because nearly everything I build uses safe CSS techniques with graceful degredation. In rare circumstances, where a CSS hack is required, this is only for older browser to circumvent known bugs - generally this is to do with differences in font spacing in Safari 3, or problems with layer margins in IE6.