Which Browser should you be Designing your Website for? Browser Compatibility Issues
November 2006
One of the many thing that must be considered when designing a website is browser compatibility. You don't want to give Internet users yet another reason to leave your site just as soon as they've arrived.
There is such a dizzying array of browsers on the market now, it's difficult to know which to design for. Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera all have different standards. Then there's Safari, SeaMonkey and Flock. Not to mention Camino, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx and Omni . And that's not all of them!
According to Browser News, not only is the browser that your website visitors are using important. The version they are using is also something to seriously consider. One statistics source in November 2006 reported that only 12% of IE5 users were using the latest version of IE 5, only 59% of Netscape 7 users were using the latest version of Netscape 7 and that only 30% of Opera 8 users were using the latest version of Opera 8.
Whichever browsing software Internet users decide to employ, there are certain compatibility issues website designers need to be aware of. Different browsers interpret HTML and CSS tags differently. Some tags they don't recognize at all and some they simply ignore. Websites that look amazing and properly lined up in Firefox and Opera are commonly destroyed by Internet Explorer. And to top it off, newly released browser versions mean constantly changing standards. It can be hard to keep up.
Internet Explorer, much like any Microsoft product, presents some seriously annoying challenges. There are also security issues you should be aware of when using IE, but we won't get into that now. Using CSS and JavaScript hacks is a common practice among web developers to get IE to behave. We've used a few throughout this website in order to allow Internet Explorer and Netscape users the ability to view these pages the way they were meant to be seen. We are not here to debate the use of hacks. Some people think they shouldn't be used, some disagree. In an ideal web-designing world, they wouldn't be needed. We say, whatever gets the job done and makes clients happy, we use. If this page looks kinds funky, and we don't mean that in a good way, make sure you enable JavaScript. It will clean things up, we promise. You'll be amazed by the difference.
Regardless of the browser you're using yourself, make sure to have at least Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera installed on your computer. Safari would also be a good choice to add to that list. If you're planning on designing your own web pages, download them all immediately. Don't forget to hunt down a few of the older software versions as well. You will need them to check how your site displays to users accessing your site. You may not use the Firefox, Opera or Safari browsers but a lot of people do, and they are becoming more and more popular due to the issues with Internet Explorer mentioned above (among others).
So which Internet browsers should you be designing for? Keep it to the top four we've mentioned in this article and you should be fairly safe.
There is such a dizzying array of browsers on the market now, it's difficult to know which to design for. Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera all have different standards. Then there's Safari, SeaMonkey and Flock. Not to mention Camino, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx and Omni . And that's not all of them!
According to Browser News, not only is the browser that your website visitors are using important. The version they are using is also something to seriously consider. One statistics source in November 2006 reported that only 12% of IE5 users were using the latest version of IE 5, only 59% of Netscape 7 users were using the latest version of Netscape 7 and that only 30% of Opera 8 users were using the latest version of Opera 8.
Whichever browsing software Internet users decide to employ, there are certain compatibility issues website designers need to be aware of. Different browsers interpret HTML and CSS tags differently. Some tags they don't recognize at all and some they simply ignore. Websites that look amazing and properly lined up in Firefox and Opera are commonly destroyed by Internet Explorer. And to top it off, newly released browser versions mean constantly changing standards. It can be hard to keep up.
Internet Explorer, much like any Microsoft product, presents some seriously annoying challenges. There are also security issues you should be aware of when using IE, but we won't get into that now. Using CSS and JavaScript hacks is a common practice among web developers to get IE to behave. We've used a few throughout this website in order to allow Internet Explorer and Netscape users the ability to view these pages the way they were meant to be seen. We are not here to debate the use of hacks. Some people think they shouldn't be used, some disagree. In an ideal web-designing world, they wouldn't be needed. We say, whatever gets the job done and makes clients happy, we use. If this page looks kinds funky, and we don't mean that in a good way, make sure you enable JavaScript. It will clean things up, we promise. You'll be amazed by the difference.
Regardless of the browser you're using yourself, make sure to have at least Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera installed on your computer. Safari would also be a good choice to add to that list. If you're planning on designing your own web pages, download them all immediately. Don't forget to hunt down a few of the older software versions as well. You will need them to check how your site displays to users accessing your site. You may not use the Firefox, Opera or Safari browsers but a lot of people do, and they are becoming more and more popular due to the issues with Internet Explorer mentioned above (among others).
So which Internet browsers should you be designing for? Keep it to the top four we've mentioned in this article and you should be fairly safe.
