There’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…
