At present, a vast majority of webmasters are designing for IE (Internet Explorer) 6, which is not as W3C standards compliant as is FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Opera.
In my article – “The importance of sound website design & search spiders to Internet Marketers,” I mentioned the importance of a designer being cognizant of the fact that web browser standards are not yet fully harmonized – a web page that looks great in Internet Explorer (6) might look hideous in a Mozilla based browser like FireFox or Netscape.
I also noted that with the explosion of devices with which to serve Internet applications, compliance with W3C standards has become critical.
When the final release for IE 7 for Windows XP, Server 2003 & Vista is launched, hopefully before the end of 2006, the tables will be turned, so to speak.
Internet Explorer 7 will be more standards compliant and your HTML code will be subject to much more rigorous interpretation than is the case with IE 6, consequently some web pages that look fine in IE 6 might not look the same IE 7.
In IE 7 Microsoft has made a solemn effort to fix the browsers acquiescence to W3C standards and CSS compatibility. CSS interpretation as recommended by W3C has been improved tremendously giving designers and developers more leverage in functionality for cross-browser design.
Microsoft asserts that they are taking W3C compatibility issues seriously.
Concisely what this means is that IE 7 will tend to interpret your web page code more scrupulously than before.
Therefore, if you have been designing your pages and have not bothered to check how they render in W3C Standards Compliant browsers like FireFox, you may be in for a rude shock when IE 7 finally rolls out.
If you have not been incorporating W3C Web standards in your design strategy you may need to re-design for IE 7.
How should you go about it?
Design for “strict” browsers like FireFox first. Not only is FireFox a more standards-compliant browser but it is also the primary competitor to Internet Explorer. A contender backed by Google’s marketing machine—and therefore, is not likely do “a Netscape” on designers.
Prior and up to IE 4.x, Netscape was the leading browser in the market with almost 80% of the market, but in a bid to force the issue culminating with proprietary goofs by AOL to whom Netscape sold out, they screwed up big time with versions 4 up to 6. A bitter war of attrition with Microsoft in the late nineties did not help either.
Microsoft grabbed the opportunity and gobbled the Browser market overnight.
With version 7+ Netscape has been revived. How well it will compete with IE and FireFox remains to be seen.
I will be the first to admit that most the web pages I have built in the last several years are not always standards compliant…and so are ninety five percent of other web pages—as I stated in my previous article, “if strict W3C standards were to be enforced in browsers, most websites would go out of business.”
To design for FireFox a designer needs to combine Valid CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for “look and feel” and W3C compliant HTML for web page structure.
The combination of these two design strategies is powerful in that it elicits tremendous flexibility, ease of maintenance and opens up extensive possibilities in website design. The benefits are rewarding, and every webmaster should attempt to utilize this two pronged scheme in their design routine.
Making changes to and/or styling a site designed with CSS is much easier and more elegant than messing around with a traditional table-based design.
CSS may look intimidating to a first-timer but once you familiarize with the basics you can progressively harness the power of CSS to your full benefit. In addition, most web page design tools such as Dreamweaver of FrontPage have built in modules with which you can automatically generate CSS code, which you can then view in a plain text editor for study purposes.
To aid you in your CSS endeavor you need the following developer tools: Web Developer Extension for FireFox and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Great time-saving tools for creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages.
As a matter of fact, by installing some of the 1,500+ available FireFox extensions you can eliminate the need for quite a chunk of standalone desktop applications.
After designing your Web page remember to us a MarkUp Validation Service to check whether your Web page conforms to W3C recommendations. If there are errors, the validator will notify you of them and suggest corrections.
Also, remember that when designing using W3C standards guidelines a lot of code(tags) that were very valid in the “Pre-Standards” era have completely depreciated and will be ignored completely by browsers. If you ignore these errors during validation, your web pages might not render correctly.
In many instances, you may never be able to achieve 100% HTML or XHTML validation. In such cases you may want put the following DOCTYPE declaration in your document—at the top of your web page before the tag:
Note: remove space after ” ”
A “Document Type Definition” or DTD supplies Web browsers with information about which (X)HTML specification your web page is built upon, which instructs the Browser how to render the page for viewing.
In the example captioned above a standards compliant browsers will interpret your web page as an HTML 4.01 document, and because it is marked as “Transitional,” it will display it in “quirks mode,” meaning that the browser will forgo the strict standards mode, and display your page like it would be displayed in older “non-strict” browsers, while still supporting any tags developed after IE 4, Netscape 4 and others.
On the contrary, the following DOCTYPE declaration tells the standards compliant browsers that your web page should be displayed in strict compliance with the DOCTYPE declaration.
A complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website.
If you leave the DOCTYPE out, the browsers automatically switch to “quirks mode,” therefore, it is important to include the DOCTYPE declaration on every web page that you build in order for it to be rendered correctly.
If your Web pages render well in FireFox at present you probably will not encounter any major problems in IE 7 other than minor adjustments here and there. However, I think a realistic designer should at least make a meaningful attempt to follow W3C guidelines for it is the correct way forward.
Do it now so that you will ready for the future…re-designs and total overhauls are a time consuming and painful process. A process, which becomes much easier if your initial design incorporated structurally clean and modular (X)HTML with CSS compliance.
Watch the video related to types of browsers
as your default media player. If your Quick time player starts playing your song and you are unable to save it there, so change preferences in Quicktime player. Go to Edit then Preferences then Quicktime preference then Browser tab on top. Click on ‘File Types’ here then make sure you check on ‘select all’ and check it again so that it will unselect some media files associated with quicktime player. These changes will disable your quicktime player as your default media player and then …
Help answer the question about types of browsers
How can i fix this problem where links from web browsers lead to different sites than there supposed to?I recently began having problems when using all web browsers. It occurs using internet explorer and safari, and all others I could try. Basically, when I type in a word and click on the link, it leads to different sites, than its supposed to. I don't know how fix this. Let me know, thanks
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September 28th, 2009 on 7:51 am
google chrome (statisticly the fastest, but no security)
Mozilla Firefox (the best and also very fast)
Internet Explorer ( the worst)
Opera (decent but not great)
Apple Safari ( very fast, not very popular except with MAC users)
There are a few other ones too but are not even worth mentioning
September 28th, 2009 on 7:53 am
opera
September 28th, 2009 on 7:56 am
the shit firefox
September 28th, 2009 on 9:16 am
Use the Import/Export features.
September 28th, 2009 on 9:22 am
firefox hands down!
September 28th, 2009 on 9:25 am
let me just say, i feel your pain, as do millions of other people out there…
coding a site that will look good on all the different browsers is tricky business. as you mentioned, different versions of IE will display things differently from each other, and differently than FF. it really depends on what you're trying to put on the site. IE and FF render styles from CSS differently, unfortunately. however, you can do conditional styles…which ease your pain a little bit.
if you make a style sheet for each browser, one for IE, one for FF, you can by default load the stylesheet that works well with FF, but you can override it with something like this:
<!–[if IE]>
load your style sheet
<![endif]–>
can you post anything specific you're trying to put on the site?
September 28th, 2009 on 5:55 pm
Firefox took about 200,000 meg of ram from my pc
September 29th, 2009 on 8:50 am
Google chrome
September 29th, 2009 on 11:06 am
This is a HUGE subject, far too big to deal with here. The first thing that you should do, if you are serious about making your web site as accessible as possible, is to download the major browsers so that you can check your design in each one. So you want IE (unfortunately, you can't have IE 6 & 7 on the same computer!), Firefox, Netscape and perhaps Opera. If you can get it right in these, you will satisfy the vast majority of people.
The secret to compatibility is to make your pages compliant with the standards laid down by the w3c. The majority of browsers work to those standards. In the past, it was necessary to include a number of "tweaks" on the page to allow for the peculiarities of some browsers (particularly earlier versions of IE) but this is becoming less the case.
As well as checking your pages yourself, there is a validator available for your HTML through the w3 web site – first link below.
The second link takes you to a series of tutorials which I'm sure you will find helpful.
Incidentally, it's not just browsers that you have to satisfy. Users have a wide range of screen resolution and, unless you are careful, you may find that a page which looks perfect on one PC will break up on a smaller screen.
Really, it's a minefield – good luck!
September 29th, 2009 on 1:17 pm
Safari owns
September 29th, 2009 on 6:16 pm
i use lunascape
September 29th, 2009 on 8:24 pm
September 29th, 2009 on 9:44 pm
FireFox is the best
September 30th, 2009 on 4:01 am
browsershots as said above is ok, but has limitations.
Personally, I have the latest issues of IE, FF, Opera, Chrome and Safari. These cover 99.5% of ww users: enough for me…
I test my sites on each of them, at different resolutions.
September 30th, 2009 on 1:52 pm
Unfortunately, no. That is, not without jailbreaking your phone first. The iPhone's "security features" give applications limited freedom to save to the file system and give you limited freedom to access files saved, and therefore Safari doesn't support it.
September 30th, 2009 on 5:10 pm
I assume you mean without registry editing
Open IE, Tools, Internet Options, Programs Tab, Click "Make Default"
September 30th, 2009 on 10:04 pm
i use firefox
October 1st, 2009 on 8:59 am
When you make a request to a Web browser, it responds with a file.
At the very beginning of its response is a header. The header is a few lines of text that tells the Web browser all sorts of things about the file being sent back. Among the things sent back is the content type.
Content-type tells the browser what the Web server thinks the file is. The browser uses the content-type response to determine how it will handle the file: Try to display it, ask another program to open it, prompt you to save it to your disk drive, etc.
What the content-type line sent by a server contains depends on how the server is set up. Most Web servers have a "default" content-type list; what is sent is usually dependent on the file name / extension, but not always. Also, the Web server's admin can change what content-types are sent for specific file types.
You can also forge content-type information from a programming standpoint. It is very common, for example, for Web programmers to "dynamically" create data files (such as comma-delimited files), or even images, on the server, and then feed a person's Web browser a content-type specific to that file, overriding what the Web server would have sent.
A previous answerer stated the server sends a MIME type. That's not correct.
MIME is a methodology for e-mail programs to handle attachments. Both MIME and HTTP 1.1 have Content-type attributes, and they use the same format. They are very closely interrelated, but not the same thing.