How much do you worry about firefox or netscape?

[SportsOutlaw]

Ok, of the browsers that are rarely used, firefox holds down the lead with under 5% usage on the averate. For my site, it was holding its own with 4.9% of the market, but has gradually dropped to 4.2%.

I just added netscape to this thread because I didnt want to leave them out. They have almost zero existance within my site.

Now, I know these browsers all act differently, so, do you concentrate on making sure your site is 100% compliant with them all, or do you concentrate on Explorer and not worry about the rest?

[ResaleBroker]

I work on getting my sites to display properly in multiple browsers.

[fryman]

I always check my sites with Opera, IE and Firefox

[obenix]

IE is important for now until FF overtakes them. Until then, my concentration is on both IE & FF.

[Jamie]

SportsOutlaw, my personal view is that I find it very difficult to come to terms with people who do not develop with the intention of been 100% compliant.

Unless it is for an internal intranet within a company who has one browser installed and one browser only on their network then I cannot understand people who say "X browser is important and Z browser isn't".

I did a rant named "To Dream, Weave or Read the Front Page?" a while back (forums.iwdn.net/viewtopic.php?t=331) and it touched upon browser compatibility breafly. Here is a quote from the rant...


Take Microsoft FrontPage for example, I am not ‘attacking’ Microsoft here at all (That is my next rant) but because FrontPage and Internet Explorer are both Microsoft products, many of the features that FrontPage harnesses are built in to the system to work specifically and solely, within Internet Explorer and no other browsers.
Based on published figures, Internet Explorer harnesses somewhere in the region of 90% of all web users (As I, and many developers have said before, we would love to challenge this figure, but, as of yet, there is no information to back our views, partly the reason why Microsoft and others can continue to present the 90% figure). So, that is at least 10% of your visitors down the drain, bang, bye bye. Now, lets put this in to perspective, 10% may not seem like a great deal. But, think, lets say a web site receives 10,000 visitors per month (May sound a lot, in fact, quite an achievable number). That is, 1000 visitors the site could miss out on. Now, lets say that the web site is an online store, before hand, the company had done some research and worked out that on average 65% of their visitors to their web site bought a product, that means that the company would have lost out on 650 sales in each month if their web site is accessible via Internet Explorer alone. Now, if you are a positive thinking person and are still not convinced that FrontPage is a bad thing, lets assume the company did some more research. They worked out that on average a product from them costs $15. So, 650 multiplied by 15 is 9750. That means the company will lose out on $9750, on average, each month. In shock yet? Here is the number for your local emergency services… 911.


As you can see that is mainly pointed at Frontpage but I am sure you understand the browser issue.

[mushroom]

I far as I am concerned, it dose not mater what you use to code your pages as long as before you publish, you validate your work.

http://validator.w3.org/

[TwisterMc]

Personally I worry about Firefox first since that's what I use. However it's good to note that if it looks good in Firefox it should look the same in Mozilla, Netscape and Safari. IE is actually the issue since their browser does whatever it wants. I don't hate IE, I hate it's lack of standards. ;)

[Marian]

From what I see in my web logs, IE should be far most important! I use IE and most of the people I know use it too... :rolleyes:

[justtara]

The number of people who use Fire Fox on my sites really keep increasing. My guess is those are the people who know the most about website design and would probably me the most aggrivated it something doesn't work too.

[wendydettmer]

It's really not that hard to make sites that work well on all the browers, and it is good practice to do so. If you only make sure a site works in IE, then you are really telling all Mac users to bugger off :)

[GTech]

I use Fire Fox and definitely check for it. I have about a 7-10% for Fire Fox on many of my stats. I develop for IE as welll, and make sure it looks ok in Safari since I have a Mac Ibook as well.

Most of my sites are built using CSS (excluding my Amazon stores) and I have long since developed an inventory of stylesheets that work well and I reuse.

[Qal]

CSS together with xHTML makes a good combination for great browser compatible, speedy and overall neat Designs.

However, If you're looking to target just one browser of all, that would be the most used browser - IE.

[nullbit]

browsercam.com is good for checking in multiple browsers (and browser versions)

[davedx]

I always check my sites in Firefox and IE. It works out pretty well for me, since I develop with Firefox, then when I'm done I "fix it up" so it works in IE too.

Sometimes IE makes me tear my hair out though!

[riziko]

Around 10%-12% of the users on my site use firefox. I test my pages in FF and IE and Opera (but I don't know why I bother).

Ross

[adsets]

I would say this is a matter of business, is it worth it to you to send away 5-10% of your traffic? I would say that since IE hasnt changed in the last 40 years and due to security issues the % of users is going to be decreasing.

[fryman]

Around 10%-12% of the users on my site use firefox. I test my pages in FF and IE and Opera (but I don't know why I bother).


Don't know why you bother? If I go to a site that looks like crap with my browser, I just hit the back button. Sure way to loose a customer.

[da22in]

I design and test for Firefox, and then rarely adjust for IE - if necessary. Netscrape is inconsequential and doesn't matter anymore...and the new version is a bloated form of Firefox anyway.

[adsets]

da22in - I agree the best approach is to design and test in another browser, then adjust IE as necessary. The real kicker here is that soon we will have to design for small footprint screens like blackberries etc...

[davedx]

Small footprint = less space to fill & less graphics to make!!!

The glass is half full........

[dirvish]

If things look different in IE than they do in Firefox chances are that it is because there is something in your site that is against web standards. Check your site with the validators at w3.org, they'll show you what non-standard code you are using. Clear up the most glaring standard-deviations and you might find that your site looks more similar across multiple browsers.

[nfzgrld]

If things look different in IE than they do in Firefox chances are that it is because there is something in your site that is against web standards.

Never use "web standards" and "IE" in the same sentance. The two have nothing to do with each other. I use FF and validate all my html to XHTML 1.0 Strict. Once I have that I go to IE. Without fail the page will look completely WRONG In IE. Sometimes I have to choose between having the page look right in IE and validating correctly. I'm not real thrilled about all the extra hours of work it takes to make the page look right in IE AND still validate, if that's even possible. This is especially true with CSS and style commands. Microsoft Internet Explorer is NOT compliant, please stop telling people that if they validate their code everything will be ok.

IE needs for things to be just exactly so in order to work properly, at least from a CSS perspective, and it may, or may not, comply with the w3 standards. IE is garbage. We should all stop using it, and stop checking our sites in it. When half the web looks like crap to them, people will get the message. Either MS will make a compliant browser, or people will just stop using it. And while we're at it, someone might want to point out to all those windows hosting companies that there is a version of Apache for windows and it works great. Might also want to point out that things like PHP, MySQL, Perl, and many other things that normal people use on the internet are also available to them. They don't have to use the crap that microsoft gives them with their server. At least not to the exclusion of standard things that all web servers should have. In fact, I ask you, if a server doesn't have Perl and/or PHP on it, is it really a web server? I don't think so.

[dirvish]

Never use "web standards" and "IE" in the same sentance. The two have nothing to do with each other. I use FF and validate all my html to XHTML 1.0 Strict. Once I have that I go to IE. Without fail the page will look completely WRONG In IE. Sometimes I have to choose between having the page look right in IE and validating correctly. I'm not real thrilled about all the extra hours of work it takes to make the page look right in IE AND still validate, if that's even possible. This is especially true with CSS and style commands. Microsoft Internet Explorer is NOT compliant, please stop telling people that if they validate their code everything will be ok.

IE needs for things to be just exactly so in order to work properly, at least from a CSS perspective, and it may, or may not, comply with the w3 standards. IE is garbage. We should all stop using it, and stop checking our sites in it. When half the web looks like crap to them, people will get the message. Either MS will make a compliant browser, or people will just stop using it. And while we're at it, someone might want to point out to all those windows hosting companies that there is a version of Apache for windows and it works great. Might also want to point out that things like PHP, MySQL, Perl, and many other things that normal people use on the internet are also available to them. They don't have to use the crap that microsoft gives them with their server. At least not to the exclusion of standard things that all web servers should have. In fact, I ask you, if a server doesn't have Perl and/or PHP on it, is it really a web server? I don't think so.


I agree with almost all of what you say. I still maintain that standards compliance is the best place to start from (not that it will make all of your troubles go away). If you then have to tweak things out to make IE happy then so be it; it still has ~90% usage so even though we hate it we are kinda stuck with it.

[JoeO]

On my website I have about 25% more Firefox visitors then IE visitors. So Firefox is very important for me. And the amount of firefox visitors seems to keep growing larger.

[Arnie]

PIMP MY FIREFOX
Netscape 8 beta donload here. Works well here.
browser.netscape.com/nsb/