Slashdot Mirror
Designing Websites - What Browser to Code For?
flyingember asks: "I code up PHP/CSS webpages and recently wondered about who to code for. We know that each browser supports CSS a little bit differently than the others, likening back to the Netscape/Internet Explorer HTML wars. Opera or Mozilla hacks are seen constantly across the net. Looking through two years worth of saved webalizer statistics, 95% of my visits came from IE and the rest from Mozilla, these are the teeming masses of the internet. Even the traffic to my site two years ago resulting from this article sent 50% IE users on Windows XP, and the total was 95% from IE. The numbers have only grown more IE 6-dominant since then. Given the overwhelming Internet Explorer user base, unless your webpage is specifically targeting The *nix or Mac crowd why code for anything except IE 6?" While each browser does support CSS, and even some HTML a bit differently, what functionality seem to be universal across all of the major modern players? Can you design a sharp looking website with such features, without resorting to browser-specific code? If so, how?
Anybrowser.org is another good one if you need convincing.
Nothing irritates me more than having a webpage not display properly in opera when I have chosen to let opera identify itself as opera, but renders correctly when I tell opera to identify itself as IE6.
This Quote probably sums it up best
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996wang33
PAGERANK++ Robsell.com
I do not belive I have seen any of these "Mozilla hacks." Most of the "hacks" I have seen are for things that every browser except IE works properly with, such as the so-called "IE Box Model Hack" that I hear talked about a lot. Can you provide an example of one of these nessicary Mozilla hacks please?
I have found that as long as you code to standards, and test your page a bit in different browsers, you should be able to code up a page that looks the same, or at least acceptable in all browsers. I suggest coding for Mozilla, as it is more standards compliant, then testing for IE, and applying the (very few) IE hacks that are nessicary to get it to look right. You would be suprised at how similarly they work, unless you are doing some very complex CSS.
/usr/games/fortune
As late as what, 1998? a web developer might have asked the same question about Netscape. It had such a large percentage of the market share that it was a pointless crusade to code for anything else.
Look where it got them.
There's also somethign about the question that's slightly reminiscent of the Y2K problem--I've said this myself on occasion, and know plenty of others who've echoed the sentiment: "Oh, i'll get around to updating that page long before another browser takes over." Yeah, right.
Bottom-line: code to the standards. IE 6 is fairly decent about most of them, though not as good as the Lizard, so you're probably safe for the future as well that way.
PHP is a server side technology; it doesn't matter WHICH browser you code to, because the PHP doesn't care. CSS, ok, CSS is different: but here's the problem with coding to IE6's CSS model: you don't know how it's going to change in the future. You have no idea how Microsoft is going to change its support of the CSS features whose behavior is peculiar in IE6. With W3C standards, at least you have a target that stays (relatively) still - the other browsers at least are all going to keep backward compatibility to the W3C recs.
Unless you're doing a lot of weird CSS hacking, making a standards-based page look good in IE6 is a lot easier than making an IE6 page work in Safari or Mozilla.
Now, if you said JAVASCRIPT, well, that would make more sense; the object models are significantly different between IE6 and Mozilla and Safari and Opera. There the smart thing is to write separate pages for both browsers and use those PHP programmer skills to serve up the right page for each.
Okay, here's what you should do, IMO. Design for HTML 4.01 transitional. Or XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Use tables for layouts, and CSS for font specifications and a _few_ other things that are all commonly supported, _exactly the same_, on all major browsers. This is called "lowest common denominator." Don't use _anything_ that's not standard, mind you, but use that which is _correctly implemented_ from within the standards, and you'll be alright. When XHTML came out, browsers didn't stop supporting the older standards - they still work, and honestly, they work more reliably across the modern browsers than ANY of the newer standards. That's just the way it is until MS decides to actually FIX their LAME-ASS browser.
:)
Is it your job to push people into installing a decent browser? No.
Would it work, even if you tried? Hell no!
Is developing _ONLY_ for the latest standards going to magically make everyone who comes to your site, or even a reasonable percentage, _want_ to upgrade? Another hell no.
You need to get real - the MS IE browser dominance is going to stick around a while (another few years, most likely), and by that time, hopefully Longhorn will be here, and will bring with it a browser that supports standards. One can only hope.
So there ya go!
Oh, another option: develop the whole site in Flash - pixel perfect on every browser that supports Flash!
Code to standards but make sure that your code is happily displayed without any quirks in a range of browsers and on a range of platforms.
Browsers you should be worried about (in no particular order, so don't start flaming me about ranking): MSIE, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Safari.
Platforms you should be worried about: Windows, Linux, Mac.
Of course, if you're intending your content to be viewed on the move, make sure you've got WAP/portable browser friendly pages too. Oh, and remember resolution: you might have a 1600 by 1200 desktop but the average web user doesn't. 800 by 600 is as high as you should design unless you want to alienate the majority of surfers.
If the various combination of browsers and platforms scares you, don't worry. There are various apps out there (and websites) that will show you what your pages will look like in several browser/platform configurations. Someone more immediately familiar with them them than I am will surely (hint, hint) provide you with some useful URLs.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
You're not any type of fanboy. You're just dumb.
His point was that he used to code for Mozilla, because Moz is very standards-compliant. Now he uses Safari to preview things in, since Safari/KHTML pretty much renders things just like Mozilla does (namely, according to standards)--that's why they made Safari User Agent string:That's because it's so freaking much like Gecko (Mozilla) when it comes to rendering pages according to standards.
He's not trying to cater to one browser--he's using standards-compliant browsers like the excellent Mozilla and Safari to make sure all browsers can render his pages. Just because MSIE has the best market share doesn't mean catering toward it would be a good idea.
Audience that can view a site designed specifically for MSIE 6.0, assuming general public viewership: 95%
Audience that can view a site designed specifically to follow standards: 100%
See the benefit now?
Show me a website that renders properly in Safari that doesn't render useably in MSIE, and I'll consider removing your dunce cap.
ActiveX, VBScript...random BHO's and hijacking exploits. Oh, yeah. Let's use that browser as the gold standard.