You might not have given it much thought, but the browser your website is viewed on can completely change its appearance. Today there are two main types of browsers: Internet Explorer and Firefox. The purpose of this week’s article is not to get you to change over to Firefox, listing about why it has tabbed browsing, blocks popups, and is generally more stable. No, today we will discuss how the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox affect your website.
If you haven’t recognized yet by the tone of this email, Internet Explorer 6 (IE 7 is getting better) is a curse on browsing the internet. Besides being a regular target for hackers and bugs, IE has a difficult time loading webpages the way they should be displayed. If you are designing a standard website with flat images you’re fine for the most part, but as soon as you start trying to work with transparent images, or arrangements of images that make your site look polished, Internet Explorer puts the caibosh on your dreams of layered images by filling in any transparent screen with an ugly gray box.
Also if you ever want to line up your site’s content using tables and you would like to left justify your content, sometimes IE doesn’t recognize this and centers all your content until you go into the code and figure it out. Firefox, on the other hand is great, it shows the page the way it was made to be seen, without silly images glitches and the like.
I know that many of you are saying to yourselves: “but hey! aren’t there are other browsers out there like Netscape or Safari?” Basically they are all falling in line with Firefox’s platform and are far less used than Firefox or IE. The stark facts remain, until Microsoft stops installing IE on applications of windows, we will continue to have cross-browser conflicts. At present, 54% of the visitors to QTweb.ca use Internet Explorer.
So what does that mean for you and your website? Not a heck of a lot, if you are a client of QT Web Designs – since we constantly check your website against defects on all current and past versions of major browsers and try to build your site in a way that is accessible and consistent for all. Contact us today if you would like us to see how your site works across several different browser platforms. If you are designing a site yourself, our best advice is to always preview your site on multiple browsers since you never know how it might translate.
For more information about QT Web Designs or our products visit us online at www.qtweb.ca
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what are the different types of browsers?About Author
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December 8th, 2008 on 8:16 am
Use the Import/Export features.
December 8th, 2008 on 8:22 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?
December 8th, 2008 on 8:27 am
the shit firefox
December 8th, 2008 on 9:14 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
December 8th, 2008 on 9:16 am
firefox hands down!
December 8th, 2008 on 12:27 pm
Firefox took about 200,000 meg of ram from my pc
December 8th, 2008 on 7:53 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.
December 9th, 2008 on 3:37 am
I assume you mean without registry editing
Open IE, Tools, Internet Options, Programs Tab, Click "Make Default"
December 9th, 2008 on 6:45 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!
December 9th, 2008 on 8:10 am
opera
December 9th, 2008 on 12:48 pm
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.
December 9th, 2008 on 4:34 pm
Safari owns
December 10th, 2008 on 1:52 pm
FireFox is the best
December 10th, 2008 on 6:43 pm
December 11th, 2008 on 12:58 am
Google chrome
December 11th, 2008 on 2:33 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.
December 11th, 2008 on 8:16 am
i use lunascape
December 11th, 2008 on 4:16 pm
i use firefox