August 2008
The Browser Wars
Posted by: Andrew on 29 Aug 2008 @ 12:08 pm Category: Web Design
Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Other. Which browser do you use?
Everyone has a favourite. Have you ever stopped to think about why? Everyone has their own opinion, I hope it's more than just "Cause it's not Microsoft".
Because of inconsistencies in the different browser implementations every site renders the HTML differently. So for the exact same HTML Firefox might look different to Internet Explorer. I don't envy the job of our "Pixel Pushers" (www.eatyourowndogfood.com.au), they spend a great deal of effort to ensure the website looks the same for 6 different web browsers. I definitely don't have the patience and very quickly would end up with notices like "This site can only be viewed via raw tcp sockets".
The question is - When you're designing a site do you spend the effort to make it work for everyone, or take the lazy way out and slap a "Best viewed in ____" notice on it.
I recently came across a website that loaded a "We think Firefox is better, you cannot view this website until you 'upgrade' to Firefox" page instead of normal. I promptly changed to access the site with lynx, a linux based text-only browser, just to "show it who's boss".
I've seen other websites that popup warnings saying the site is designed for Firefox (eg awstats.sourceforge.net), but I thought it quite ridiculous that someone could be such a Firefox fanboy to go and try prevent non-Firefox users from accessing their website at all! The error page was pretty well done, It was obvious that it was more than a lazy 10 second whip up. So I thought I'd do a bit of a look around for some browser statistics.
After a quick wander around our office I noticed that we're 85% Firefox. Not a surprising statistic when addons like Firebug are so useful for people in the web design industry.
But what about other users and the internet in general?
Heaps of Google results confirm that IE is much more popular than Firefox, but I wanted to see some real and recent numbers.
Turns out having root access to 20 Web Servers makes it pretty easy to do a check. The Websites we host are for users mostly in Australia but cover a pretty full range of internet users. So I ran a check over every hit to every site for July 2008. As the hundreds of millions of hits rolled by it made me wish I had wrote a better method to determine the browser, but eventually it spat the numbers out:
80% Internet Explorer, 15% Firefox, and 5% Other. Quite a massive lead IE has there!
So it turns out that the website I found had blocked access to 80% of their visitors. What a waste of effort for a such a negative result!
If only I could give you the url to the site so you could see for yourself. The site was pretty useless anyway, so I didn't think to save its address.
Ireckon that in the end if you want a good website for everyone to use you're going to have to spend the effort, otherwise what is the point of having a website at all?
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