Browsers, the longest war on the Internet.
A browser is a program you use to read this post now.(Just in case you do not know, no offence yo!)
Is there only one?
Now the question, how many browser do you use? If you are one of the dominating Windows XP users, I bet there’s only one you use. Internet Explorer. And why is that? It is only because Internet Explorer 6 is preinstalled with new copy of Windows XP. You get it free. Do you like it? Do you enjoy using it? I doubt that not much of you can really answer this, because there’s no comparison.
Bad experience..
I have Opera, Mozzilla and firefox installed on my debian box. No Microsoft, no Windows, no Internet Explorer, I’m done with those. Let’s not talk about flavor of operating system. I wonder if any of you, always turns on the Automatic Live Update in Windows like I used to do? Now this is the biggest drawback of MS that annoyed me to the maximum, day by day, my windows received updates, and mostly start with “Internet Explorer Security Update/Patch/Fix” and so on. The system disk (Drive C: or whatever your windows installed on) got bloated very fast. I used to install programs/games on a seperate harddisk, so my drive C: was only for windows. Only windows itself took 9GB+ of the harddisk space.Maybe you think that’s nothing, but to me, that’s way too much for an O/S.
You hear it everywhere!
So, if resource is not a problem, what else? If you, by any chance, get into any website development project, and if that website implements CSS techniques, you should know what am I going to whine about. Internet Explorer 6 has a pathetic set of its own definitions when rendering CSS box model(Layers). Seriously, while all other browsers getting the effect you want, IE is always the biggest obstacle you have to overcome. By any luck, you get some gurus posted hacks to the problems, and sometimes, you have to compromise. With the project deadline scheduled on the calendar, you can’t actually sit all days and nights just to fix one layout issue, so you give in, by ABANDON the minority. Sorry to tell this, but this is in fact the collateral damage done by monopoly of major software distributor. Every industry must have its own standard for the community to comply, to achive or to learn about. It is so wrong to eliminate competitions in such direct and harmful way, Not only the competitions, but also the end users, the community and the industry will suffer from this to verious levels.
Don’t give in!
A very sincere advice to all the web developers/masters/designers out there, do not ever try to give up the minority. As in, don’t make any website that is “MS-Friendly” only. Especially websites deal with business-to-business activity, you do not know who are you going to lose whenever your distorted page displayed in someone’s alternative web browser. Same goes to any services that deal with end users, a very big example, jobsdb.com. They actually support MS IE only with their web services, can you imagine that?A very bad first impression always drives your user away. Bear in mind to test your web pages, applications with more than one browser, at least three is adequate. Don’t risk to piss off one single visitor that maybe can bring you millions.
The nature, the basic
What do you value the most in web page? Its design? Its layout? Or shiny logos on top and bottom of the page? Wrong! It is the content. The content is the most basic element in a web page. The quality of content, the value of information a web page carries, decides its popularity and ensures the traffic. Instead of cracking your head for hacks that will make your beautiful layout page cross browser compatible, try to prepare quality content that makes people come to you. Try to publish your information in simple and neat layout, use more time for the content. Let’s hope that one day, the browser compatiblity issue can be solved once and for all. But at the mean time, do your part of the job!
Some readings I did
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/22/410963.aspx IE7 development team blog, must read! see all the hatred lol!
And most of all…
Get this fast !!
browser, internet, mozilla, web, www
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