JavaScript® Programmer's Reference

Chapter 22. Unique Browser Features

Something that's come up a lot over the course of this book is that each browser has its own set of quirks and edge-cases that make it unique. Historically, the world's most popular browser, Internet Explorer, would often blaze its own path for a feature while the rest of the browser world would wait, form a standard, and adopt that instead, making IE look like the odd man out. The same can be said for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, who have done their share of innovation as well. There are quite a few JavaScript features now that belong to one browser in particular. In Chapter 18 I introduce a few of these, like DOM Storage, Internet Explorer's UserData, and HTML5 databases, which are supported exclusively by WebKit at the moment.

There are quite a few little features like those that belong almost exclusively to one browser or another that are worth knowing about. You might wonder why you would spend time reading about a feature only supported by one or two browsers. Sometimes those features have comparable alternatives in other browsers. (For example Vector Markup Language (VML) is in a way similar to Mozilla and WebKit's Canvas feature. Providing a graphing tool for all three browsers would be a matter of writing an interface library to those two.) Another reason you might want to know about proprietary features is to provide extra functionality to users in a particular browser. For example, Internet Explorer's Web Slice feature is an opportunity ...