Comments on: Web Browser News

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:41:45 +0000

I bought my microsoft shares 5 years ago and it wasn’t that good, today I would buy apple shares.

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:28:49 +0000

Hi Ryan, most web developers use Firefox purely because of it’s extensions (Firebug was a bit of a game changer when that got added) and it’s always the best way to code when you build for a standards based browser and then try and fix errors that IE is causing rather than create bad code that IE understands and then try and fix it. (Whether you use Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera is probably irrelevant though as long as you code using web standards )

Completely agree with your IE6 comments, in a lot of cases it could probably be dropped but there are always occasions when IE6 might make up a bigger portion than you might expect.

I’ve also got an article on IE6 bugs and fixes so it’s not always as hard to cater for IE6 as you might think:
http://www.dave-woods.co.uk/index.php/ie6-css-bugs-and-fixes-explained/

By: Ryan Barlow

Ryan Barlow — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:19:49 +0000

Good article as always Dave!

I’ve personally switched to Chrome 4 at both home and work, and like nearly everything about it (with the exception of the loss of Visual Studio 2008 Javascript debugging that you get with IE). I’d always been one of the few developers to actually use IE8 before (never been a huge Firefox or Opera fan).

On the IE6 issue, I think like you say, it strongly depends on your demographic. Unfortuantely one of our customers at work (a big, big American company) use IE6 internally and use it when demo-ing to other teams etc… so unfortuantely we have to support it. Works a lot better in the new browsers though!

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:09:13 +0000

@Brody: I think we’re at the stage now where your second assumption is mainly true and it’s companies that have so far refused to update their employees systems that is mainly the majority of IE6 users.

For my personal work I have stopped supporting IE6 to a certain extent but developers should take a longer look at things than simply dropping support for it because total market share has dropped. Whilst web design is an art, I also believe that some decisions should be backed up by statistics so discovering how many IE6 users are currently visiting a site is fundamental in determining whether it should be supported or not.

By: Brody

Brody — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:41:28 +0000

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say IE6 users either a) aren’t too web savvy or b) are forced to use it. It really is a sad thing for the former demographic that the web is changing for them, and they really have no idea. I recently decided to stop going out of my way in my personal web work to cater to IE, a rising trend it seems. I really don’t know what to say to IE users. They’ve been eating worms out of designers and developers beaks for so long and now they’re getting kicked out of the nest. Hopefully they land on Safari, FF or Chrome and not just IE8. But the more bitter I’ve-been-catering-for-IE-far-too-long-and-now-I’m-through! side of me is just thinking: I hope the door hits you in the ass on the way out!

By: Dave Woods

Dave Woods — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:51:46 +0000

I agree Peter, although this step might be what’s needed to force businesses to update, especially if they rely on Google Apps in any capacity.

And I definitely agree about your Google Chrome point. The browser itself isn’t that much different to when they first released the beta so I’d also say it was more of a version 1.4 although maybe they’re looking to bring it in line with Safari 4 seeing as they’re both based on the same version of the Webkit engine.

By: Peter Gasston

Peter Gasston — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:46:28 +0000

I’d venture a guess that almost all of the people who could update IE6, already have. What we’ll wait for now is for systems to get updated. On the positive side, I’m seeing IE6 usage of less than 10% – in some cases, much less – on most websites we publish, so it is definitely a minority browser and should be treated as such.

And a little niggle about Chrome; it’s not really version 4 in the way that Safari or Firefox would be; I would say at the most we should consider it 1.4.