Correct this Web Designer

[PhilC]

Originally Posted by advensa

Show me a web designer who designs websites for every browser there is? If everybody would design websites for every browser, they would be out of business.

According to statistics 82% use Internet Explorer 4% use or used to use Netscape and 12% use other browsers such as unix and others.

alex

Anybody want to help enlighten this fellow web designer ... ?

[chaka42]

he's not a web designer is he? since when are we in business because of browser-compatibility (or in this case, lack of)?

[DaveyBoy]

which designer is it?

his stats are probably about right though, i still design for IE and have the philosophy of, if it works in IE thats good enough for me.

[LazyJim]

Yeah Davey but you sold you soul to Gate$, guess u were weak! :p

[Fusion]

I checked some big companies sites in Opera; looked odd.

[DaveyBoy]

Originally Posted by LazyJim

Yeah Davey but you sold you soul to Gate$, guess u were weak! :p

Nah i'm just lazy

[LazyJim]

hehe good boy!

[FGTH]

Follow w3c standards when coding your site and the pages will be displayed consistently across most browsers.

IE and Netscape 7+ are very forgiving, whereas Opera, Netscape 4.7 and earlier revs of NS4.7 are not.

One thing that's annoying with w3c HTML is that you can't use topmargin, leftmargin, marginwidth, marginheight within the body tag. This is due to earlier revs of Netscape that didn't support the tags. To get around it, you have to use cascading style sheets and div tags for the page layout.

Keep in mind that IE is available on the majority of different platforms (MacOS, Solaris/Unix, Windows). Some older versions of Mac/Unix/Solaris come bundled with earlier versions of Netscape as the default browser.

[LazyJim]

Originally Posted by FGTH

Follow w3c standards when coding your site and the pages will be displayed consistently across most browsers.

lol

Follow w3c standards when coding your site:
- you page will work on all browsers.
- your page work and appear nearly the same on most common browsers.

CSS is the best, W3C do provide the best solutions.

[88sahara]

If you told a business that is opening its doors down the road...we're going to make the front door big enough to fit 90% of your visitors, they would tell you that you are crazy!

Somehow people let that kind of thinking slide on the Internet, oh well, 90% of people can view it fine, so screw the other 10%...that 10% just may be your margin, with linux becoming more pervasive cross-browser compatibility is huge!

[LazyJim]

I like that analogy!

[PhilC]

Exactly ... ! And, when most people quote statistics at me saying that '85% of my visitors use IE, so why bother about the other browsers', I feel like going and banging his/her head somewhere to knock some sense.

At a rough estimate there are more than 750 million net users ( http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ). Calculate 85% of that and 15% of that and figure out yourself how many potential clients you shut off by not designing a cross browser site.

Personally, if any 'web designer' doesn't design a cross browser website, you can trust yourself that he/she doesn't have the technical skills.

A tip : Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 makes it a breeze to create cross browser websites with its 'check browser support' feature.

<edited error on estimated net users>

[Fusion]

lol 5 billion net users and 6 billion people on the planet? More like 500million web users.

[kwvarga]

If anyone uses internet explorer on *nix I will hunt them down and kill them with my bare hands.

[imaginemn]

Here are some numbers I found online from a company that tracks this type of information:

Reference Link: http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox11.html

The most popular browsers on the web are:

1. Microsoft IE 6.0 52.3%
2. Microsoft IE 5.5 20.9%
3. Microsoft IE 5.0 19.7%
4. Netscape Navigator 4.0 1.2%
5. Microsoft IE 4.0 1.0%
6. Opera 6.0 0.8%
7. Mozilla 1 0.8%

Companies with the largest total global usage shares on the web are:

1. Microsoft IE 94.9%
2. Netscape Navigator 3.0%
3. Opera 0.9%

Part of the problem with these types of stats is that not all servers translate the correct browser in the web logs. I personally have noticed that some Netscape browsers show up as IE and some versions of IE showed up as Netscape. I think it has to do with how IIS is setup and what type of software you are using to track your user browsers.

I used browserhawk for a while but it was always updating their browser list because of bugs or browser updates. I remember when Safari came out it kept shutting down servers who were using browserhawk and did not have the Safari update within browserhawk. It was a mess. Little off topic but explains the discrepancy of browser statistics.

Very interesting stuff.

imaginemn

[DaveyBoy]

Originally Posted by 88sahara

If you told a business that is opening its doors down the road...we're going to make the front door big enough to fit 90% of your visitors, they would tell you that you are crazy!

Somehow people let that kind of thinking slide on the Internet, oh well, 90% of people can view it fine, so screw the other 10%...that 10% just may be your margin, with linux becoming more pervasive cross-browser compatibility is huge!

But in a typical small store, 10% of people WON'T be able to fit through the door, you simply can't cater for everyone, same as online, no matter what you do there's always some people who can't view your site as it's intended.

By the way, indian bloke, feel free to come bang my head somewhere - the fact of the matter is, almost everyone still uses IE, it works fine, displays stuff as most designers intended etc., so get over your anti-M$ stance and actually start to see sense, that making things for IE before making it work on mozilla etc, is of course going to make more sense.

[Fusion]

The one i find the biggest crux is Nutscrape. It seems to like showing images misaligned Fricking browser wars grrr. Just agree on a std and stick to it. Then they all render the same, then people can choose based on features if they think its faster at displaying pages etc. Not because its cool not to have MS products.

[Avatar]

just optimize for one browser only since if your using eg. javascript you will probaly loose 10% of surfers anyway