Programming

What’s the Collective Noun for Web Browsers?

    Craig Buckler
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    a collection of web browsersThere’s an aarmory of aardvarks. We have a superfluity of nuns. Then there’s a number of statisticians, the highly improbable blessing of unicorns, and a collective of nouns. But how do we refer to a collection of web browsers? As far as I’m aware, no one has defined a term and it’s becoming increasingly awkward to refer to them.

    Perhaps it’s because it’s a relatively new concept to discuss more than one web browser? A mere five years ago we had a single mainstream application. Today, however, we have a healthy and competitive market with an <insert noun here> of web browsers to build for and test against. We could use generic nouns such as ‘set’ or ‘group’ but that’s a little boring.

    So, because it’s the weekend, I think we should use SitePoint to discuss and decide the definitive name for a collection of web browsers. Here are my initial suggestions:

    • a wave of web browsers
    • a surf of web browsers
    • a render of web browsers

    Or, for those of us still testing IE6…

    • a worry of web browsers
    • a wince of web browsers
    • an exasperation of web browsers, or
    • a murder of web browsers (although the crows might object to that one)

    While we’re at it, there’s no collective noun for developers and programmers. ‘Team’ is tedious, and there’s a “cruft” of hackers — why should they have all the grammatical fun? My vote would be for a disagreement of developers or a quarrel of programmers. I’m sure the comments below will substantiate my suggestions…