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I'd be far more depressed if this had happened in 1995, or if Jeffrey Zeldman and his merry men and women hadn't helped pressure the browser makers into greatly improving their standards support. As it is, things could be a lot worse. Yes, the 900-pound gorilla, Windows IE, still lags behind all the serious competition and has some major layout bugs, so that write-once, read-anywhere isn't quite a reality-- but the situation is so much better than it was just a few years ago that you can get pretty far just by following HTML and CSS standards. Before about 2000, the major players made no effort whatsoever to maintain compliance, and actually attempting to follow the standards was usually asking for trouble. Netscape's rendering engine, also used by several other browsers, is the open-source Gecko. That's not going to die just because Netscape dies. Development might slow, but Gecko is mature enough that that might not even be a bad thing. Safari also uses an open-source rendering engine, KHTML from the KDE suite (the basis for its Konqueror browser), and Apple is actually migrating bug fixes back to the trunk. So it might be possible to get a fair idea of Safari's layout by using Konqueror. I know that one early KHTML problem in my own pages manifested identially in Konqueror and Safari, and it turned out to be my own fault. Gecko has become just common enough that some big sites actually design to it (and are learning how to validate as well). This is very good, because Gecko's layout is standard enough that sites made to render properly in it will likely have pretty clean markup. That in turn encourages the browser manufacturers to follow standards; the awful devolutionary spiral that used to exist in the mid-90s browser war days has reversed. Also, I'm pretty sure that there are sites out there that will render your page in various browsers and show you the results. This isn't a universal solution, of course, because it's not going to simulate complicated interactivity, and I don't know whether they'll be able to keep up with proprietary developments; but it might be useful for uncovering serious problems.

Those are valid points, Matt. But Zeldman offers another perspective: "If AOL is to use IE instead of its own Netscape browser for the next seven years, but IE will not change outside the Longhorn OS, will AOL users be stuck with IE6 until 2010? (IE6 was released in the year 2000.) [...] If AOL abandons Netscape, will Mozilla keep going? If so, will Windows users who do not upgrade to Longhorn switch to Mozilla (or Opera), or will they keep using the current version of IE6 for the foreseeable future? If they do that, will web development methods freeze? What happens to CSS3 and XHTML 2 if the bulk of web users (including AOL users) 'standardize' on a year 2000 browser for the next three to seven years?" We are just to the point that we've been able to move forward past one "frozen browser," Netscape 4. But it took years for that frozen browser's market share to decline, and during that time, many WebHeads pulled out their hair trying to advance the state of the web while still accommodating a 6 year old browser. Now, we may have a new one. And you have to keep in mind, not only does your average Windows user only upgrade IE when they upgrade operating systems (a user habit that MS will now cast in iron), with Windows XP and certainly Longhorn, you're not likely to be able to upgrade your current computer to the new OS. That is a very steep hurdle, one much worse than we faced with Netscape 4.x users, and will cause IE 6's market share to stay high until at least 2007 (remember, IE 6 was released in 2000).

Unfortunately, I fear there's always going to be a huge "browser lag" problem. *Every* time I've gone to a friend's house here and got on the net from their computers, they're using browsers two or three versions behind (one friend still uses Netscape *3* ... ick), probably just what came installed with their computers; I haven't visited a single friend using the latest version of IE, Netscape or anything else. God knows I've tried to talk them into changing, but they refuse to because they've got a hard-won comfort level with what they're already using and they fear screwing that up or having to learn how to use the net all over again (which of course they wouldn't - the net would actually be better for them - but they don't believe me). For them, I think browser upgrades will only happen when computer upgrades do. *sigh*.