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What browser do you design for?

Posted on Apr 14, 2005

I was reading an article on Yahoo! News (available here) about the rapid growth of Firefox, particularly the story focused on traffic to the Mozilla site. A quote in the article from Nielsen analyst Ken Cassar went as follows:

"It was looking as though Microsoft Explorer was in the process of establishing itself as the standard browser, which was great news for site developers," Cassar said. "With Firefox on the rise, they have to grudgingly accept that they don't live in a one-browser world."

This struck me as odd, since most every developer I know is designing for Firefox and then making it compatible with IE (and grudgingly so). Is my perception mistaken?There was a day when I would design for IE and with a great sense of dread, try to work that out on Netscape. Now it is IE that I approach with dread - particularly when a page makes heavy use of stylesheets or if I need to do things like use PNGs (which on a side note - I read a blog from someone who seemed to be on the IE team at MS or something who was emphasizing that IE does support PNGs just not the transparency, which he said was an optional part of the spec...my question is, what good is PNG support without transparency...I mean I am not a designer but the only time I want to use a PNG is when there is a trnasparency issue since the size of a PNG doesn't make it worthwhile otherwise...but, back to the topic at hand).

Don't get me wrong, I know that a large majority of my site traffic is going to be in IE, but are there really developers who are "grudgingly accept[ing] that they don't live in a one-browser world." Personally I think this analyst is clueless...but, you tell me?

Comments

It's SO nice to develop something on Firefox on PC, then go to the Mac, open Firefox and GASP - it looks the same. Safari usually behaves well too.

Then I have to open up IE and 'fix' everything. Life would be SO easy if Microsoft would just adapt. Maybe IE7 and the new WaSP test will help all browsers conform.

Posted By Jim / Posted on 04/14/2005 at 10:02 AM

Im with you, I design for firefox, all of my intranet work is firefox only. I am not in the business of hacking things together. As far as the comment from IE on the blog, all browsers (firefox included) need to conform with the spec, the WHOLE spec and nothing but the spec. These aren't suggestions, these aren't things you can do if you have time, if you want to build a browser, go to the specs, see what the developers are going to look at, and make your stuff follow the rules. And don't half-ass it, get it all. The real trouble is, firefox is awesome compared to ie, but even it has problems. I've never built a browser so I don't really know what they go through, but it just seems to me, if they have the entire thing layed out in black and white, they should be able to build something that works, always.

Posted By Ryan Guill / Posted on 04/14/2005 at 10:11 AM

Where possile, I try to design (first) for Firefox and then for IE6. As long as I keep things in xhtml, they both render pages pretty much the same. Even the box model seems to adapt.

The issue I run into the most with IE deals with form controls. Especially select boxes that insist on punching a hole through anything positioned on top of them. (Grrr...)

Most of the developers I know working in controled corporate environments are designing primarily for IE. One is even forcing IE 5.5 on us.

Posted By Mike Rankin / Posted on 04/14/2005 at 5:50 PM

Very interested theme, with attention I will read following registration fees.

Posted By Aparaty cyfrowe / Posted on 12/11/2005 at 5:24 PM