Crappy websites

[DaveB]

a serious question

we are about to go into some web development and the issue of which browsers to support is coming up.

firstly what are the most common broswers

secondly why don't people who create new browsers make sure they work with existing websites?

I am not overly techy so a few general ideas would be useful

Ta!

IE
Firefox
Opera
Safari

These would be a good start. If it works right with all these chances are it will work with anything.

The problem is really that MS tend do their own thing when it comes to implementing web standards.

Everyone else more or less sticks to the letter of the standards and any web page built to the standards will work with those browsers as well as IE. MS often decide that they dont agree with the standards or that their way of doing things is better, so sites built using their tools or web server software often have these MS "standards" as their default configuration which is never changed by the devs using them, hence only working with IE.

[Platypus]

a serious question

we are about to go into some web development and the issue of which browsers to support is coming up.

firstly what are the most common broswers

secondly why don't people who create new browsers make sure they work with existing websites?

I am not overly techy so a few general ideas would be useful

Ta!

Here's the recent stats from a website I babysit (and which gets lots of hits):

Perc. Browser Name Version
46.00% MSIE 8.0
37.00% MSIE 7.0
11.00% MSIE 6.0
4.00% Safari 4.0.3
2.00% Firefox 3.5.3

In previous looks at the same data, there's been more FF and less Safari.

EDIT: over 90% for Microsoft - depressing, eh?

[original PM]

cheers Faqqer n DaveB

are there still compatibilty issues with MAC web browsers or not or does it depend again on the browser type?

[original PM]

and cheers to Platypus also!

[DaveB]

cheers Faqqer n DaveB

are there still compatibilty issues with MAC web browsers or not or does it depend again on the browser type?

A site built to the accepted Web Standards will work happily with any browsers regardless of the platform they run on. ( Safari is the native Mac one, you can run Mac versions of Opera and Firefox as well ). Sites built to the Microsoft "Standard" will generally only work right with IE.

Think of it like this.

If you buy a car you expect to be able to drive on any roads you want provided it is roadworthy. It doesnt matter what car you drive, as long as it is deemed roadworthy you can go where you want.

However some roads are owned by a particular car manufacturer, they have their own rules about what is roadworthy and what is not, and only their cars can drive on those roads. Anyone else trying to use them finds their car stopped because it doesnt meet the special rules for roadworthyness imposed by the manufacturer.

[d000hg]

The problem is really that MS tend do their own thing when it comes to implementing web standards.

Everyone else more or less sticks to the letter of the standards and any web page built to the standards will work with those browsers as well as IE.

Not quite. Chrome and Firefox are not the same on many sites.

over 90% for Microsoft - depressing, eh?

No, not really.

[bogeyman]

A site built to the accepted Web Standards will work happily with any browsers regardless of the platform they run on. ( Safari is the native Mac one, you can run Mac versions of Opera and Firefox as well ). Sites built to the Microsoft "Standard" will generally only work right with IE.

Think of it like this.

If you buy a car you expect to be able to drive on any roads you want provided it is roadworthy. It doesnt matter what car you drive, as long as it is deemed roadworthy you can go where you want.

However some roads are owned by a particular car manufacturer, they have their own rules about what is roadworthy and what is not, and only their cars can drive on those roads. Anyone else trying to use them finds their car stopped because it doesnt meet the special rules for roadworthyness imposed by the manufacturer.

WHS

IE6 is still a big fat fly in the ointment. It doesn't even nod to web standards and is still around in a lot of corporate environments (because using anything else will break their in-house intranet apps).

IE7 and 8, while not great, are generally not too problematical.

MS's pushing of IE8 with Windows Update was a good move!

[TheFaQQer]

WHS

IE6 is still a big fat fly in the ointment. It doesn't even nod to web standards and is still around in a lot of corporate environments (because using anything else will break their in-house intranet apps).

IE7 and 8, while not great, are generally not too problematical.

MS's pushing of IE8 with Windows Update was a good move!

IE6 is great - sign the petition to save it!

[DaveB]

IE6 is great - sign the petition to save it!

Heheh, Bob and CT have been busy again

[NickFitz]

If you code to standards and ensure strict rendering mode then you can expect a bare minimum (probably none) of cross-browser issues with Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome. As far as HTML and CSS are concerned, IE8 will also be OK, as long as you ensure that it isn't falling into IE7 compatibility mode. There will be a few minor hacks to get IE7 working, and a few more for IE 6.

JavaScript can be a bit trickier because of MS's refusal (so far) to implement a working event model, as well as a large number of seriously idiotic bugs in their DOM implementation (a lot of which have been fixed in IE 8, to be fair). For the most part, it's easier to use a library like jQuery to take care of this for you, unless you want to pay somebody who knows JS, the DOM and IE inside out (I'm not available until the New Year, BTW).

To be honest, the whole cross-browser thing is exaggerated. The problems really come if you build to IE first: you'll never get things working properly anywhere else, as IE is so non-standard. Get things working elsewhere, and the number of hacks needed to kick IE into line will actually be quite minimal.

For example, my own ie-win-fixup.css file, in its entirety, is:

#page {
    zoom: 1;
}

#header {
    zoom: 1;
}

#primary {
    zoom: 1;
}


#content {
    zoom: 1;
}

#footer {
    zoom: 1;
}

code {
    word-wrap: break-word;
}

.flickr {
    margin-top: 1em;
}

and that could be reduced to three lines if I cared to do so.

An alternative approach, and increasingly popular, is to simply use the vastly greater capabilities of modern browsers in such a way that IE 6 (and maybe 7) only gets a minimally-styled page, and is deprived of fancy JS effects: that way the content remains available to those miserable wretches who are still stuck using that misbegotten piece of garbage, while the rest of the world gets something more suited to the 21st century. This shouldn't be done using idiocy like sniffing the User Agent on the server though: there are much more reliable techniques using things like conditional comments (the one truly useful non-standard MS technology) and advanced selectors that IE just doesn't get.

(I came across a good example today, making extensive use of SVG within HTML: it still works on IE in the sense of displaying the content, it just looks really boring because MS won't implement SVG: http://emacsformacosx.com/)