![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Web development nightmares...
Jun. 4th, 2009 08:13 amMy life is split between web development at the University, mostly on our Intranet, and the work I do both commercially and voluntarily outside of work.
Standards inside the University are controlled (or maybe I should say, constrained) by other factors in our infrastructure. We do not (officially) support IE7 yet; and we certainly don't support IE8. We do support IE6, because one of our major vendors has yet to certify IE7 with their product. (The vendor in question is SCT. This company has a virtual monopoly in University ERP solutions, and therefore doesn't care about compatibility or fixing bugs in it's own code). We also support Firefox for non-SCT users; in fact we recommend this browser. So at my day job, I have to worry about IE6 and Firefox, though I do check things on IE7 and IE8, especially where students have access to the pages.
For my commercial outside work, I have to worry more about the most popular browsers 'in the wild'. According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com current usage breaks down like this across the Internet:
This is complicated by the fact that the IE number breaks down like this by version:
Most of the public think web pages just happen. You design and publish, and that's it. But in reality, every browser type and version may display your nicely formatted pages in a slightly different way. Often they are horribly different, requiring a lot of detailed work to 'fix' the differences. There are standards for web design, but for the last decade all browser developers have adopted only parts of those standards, adding their own 'special' features in order to garner market share. Only now are these companies finally beginning to take standards seriously, which in the future may make life easier for web developers.
The question for developers then is - which browsers do I check when publishing a page? For my outside work, these days I'm drawing a line at IE6 for 'old' IE versions. I check only the current versions of Firefox and Safari; and I don't worry about the other browsers still out there. Much as I would like my pages to display correctly on every browser ever created, the fixes and checking just occupy too much time, especially for the sites I maintain as a volunteer; so for volunteer sites I'm not even bothering with IE6, even though it has 17% of market share. Microsoft no longer supports IE6; it encourages users to upgrade to at least IE7, as do I !! (Usually this doesn't mean the pages won't display on IE6; but things might be mis-aligned and have incorrect fonts, colors or other elements when displayed in that browser).
A word on upgrading: IE6 is horribly insecure, even with all the security fixes that Microsoft has published. No-one should really be sticking with it (unless you are locked in to it by a monopoly company like SCT). Some people are reluctant to change from IE6 because they are running very old machines, and they are worried that IE8 would take too much power to run; and they might be right. In that case, Firefox or Chrome would be a good choice.
(Side note 1: There is a standards test for web browsers. The ACID2 test should render a little smiley face if the browser is following all web standards correctly. IE6 did an AWFUL job on this. IE7 had some elements of the face correct. I'm impressed to find that IE8 renders the test correctly. Opera was the first browser to actually pass this test; but it still has so little market share I don't test for it. Firefox also passes this test now. Try it on your current browser version at http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html
Side note 2: And before someone flames me about IE being sucky and insecure, if you compare Firefox 3 and IE8 you'll see there are insecurities in both browsers; IE8 is a reasonably safe browser, just like Firefox. There are NO safe browsers).
Standards inside the University are controlled (or maybe I should say, constrained) by other factors in our infrastructure. We do not (officially) support IE7 yet; and we certainly don't support IE8. We do support IE6, because one of our major vendors has yet to certify IE7 with their product. (The vendor in question is SCT. This company has a virtual monopoly in University ERP solutions, and therefore doesn't care about compatibility or fixing bugs in it's own code). We also support Firefox for non-SCT users; in fact we recommend this browser. So at my day job, I have to worry about IE6 and Firefox, though I do check things on IE7 and IE8, especially where students have access to the pages.
For my commercial outside work, I have to worry more about the most popular browsers 'in the wild'. According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com current usage breaks down like this across the Internet:
| IE: | 66% |
| Firefox: | 23% |
| Safari: | 8% |
| The Rest | 3% |
This is complicated by the fact that the IE number breaks down like this by version:
| IE 8: | 7% |
| IE 7: | 41% |
| IE 6: | 17% |
Most of the public think web pages just happen. You design and publish, and that's it. But in reality, every browser type and version may display your nicely formatted pages in a slightly different way. Often they are horribly different, requiring a lot of detailed work to 'fix' the differences. There are standards for web design, but for the last decade all browser developers have adopted only parts of those standards, adding their own 'special' features in order to garner market share. Only now are these companies finally beginning to take standards seriously, which in the future may make life easier for web developers.
The question for developers then is - which browsers do I check when publishing a page? For my outside work, these days I'm drawing a line at IE6 for 'old' IE versions. I check only the current versions of Firefox and Safari; and I don't worry about the other browsers still out there. Much as I would like my pages to display correctly on every browser ever created, the fixes and checking just occupy too much time, especially for the sites I maintain as a volunteer; so for volunteer sites I'm not even bothering with IE6, even though it has 17% of market share. Microsoft no longer supports IE6; it encourages users to upgrade to at least IE7, as do I !! (Usually this doesn't mean the pages won't display on IE6; but things might be mis-aligned and have incorrect fonts, colors or other elements when displayed in that browser).
A word on upgrading: IE6 is horribly insecure, even with all the security fixes that Microsoft has published. No-one should really be sticking with it (unless you are locked in to it by a monopoly company like SCT). Some people are reluctant to change from IE6 because they are running very old machines, and they are worried that IE8 would take too much power to run; and they might be right. In that case, Firefox or Chrome would be a good choice.
(Side note 1: There is a standards test for web browsers. The ACID2 test should render a little smiley face if the browser is following all web standards correctly. IE6 did an AWFUL job on this. IE7 had some elements of the face correct. I'm impressed to find that IE8 renders the test correctly. Opera was the first browser to actually pass this test; but it still has so little market share I don't test for it. Firefox also passes this test now. Try it on your current browser version at http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html
Side note 2: And before someone flames me about IE being sucky and insecure, if you compare Firefox 3 and IE8 you'll see there are insecurities in both browsers; IE8 is a reasonably safe browser, just like Firefox. There are NO safe browsers).
