I keep biting my tongue on this subject. Let me state first... I have no particular love of IE. It's what the vast majority of my audience uses and therefore it's my default browser. If Mozilla or something else takes the market share, I'll change my default (as I did when Netscape 4.x lost dominance).
Whether you like or dislike Win IE it IS the dominant browser. The time spent massaging code for browsers should be spent proportionally with the use of the browser, especially when the browser is anything less than version 1.x. In an ideal world where there were no rendering bugs or different behaviours (and IE is of course the worst offender) this wouldn't be an issue. Also remember that only developers frequently use different browsers. If there are slight differences in the layout between browsers, don't worry about it (as long as it doesn't break). 99.9% of the audience will never compare your cross-browser pixel-perfectness. Yes, it's great to check on all possible but anyone spending any amount time on "other browsers" like firefox and camino simply amazes me. They're pre-release (developer) browsers or "Technology Previews" in their own words. The public aren't using them (or if they are they have already been told not to expect them to work flawlessly). If they were finished (and bug-free) they would be at version 1.x and would be promoted as the next commercial release browser. At that point I would add them to my "Must Work in production" category. Mozilla 1.6 is the current public release. "Konqueror is an Open Source web browser with HTML4.0 compliance..." 'nuff said on that one (unless you are actually using HTML 4.0 of course, and I doubt that anyone here still is). Having said all that (and this is where my argument completely crumbles), Opera IS a commercial release but "apparently" has a very small market share. They are their own worst enemy on this front as (and I haven't checked a release for a while) the last version I installed defaulted to a Win IE user_agent string. How are we ever to know how many people are actually using Opera. Obviously your own server log files can give you the best picture of your users but a trend can be obtained from the following: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/browser.php http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html For a site with no particular "web development" bias (meaning that the browser stats for a site like webstandardsgroup.org will never be a good global benchmark as the audience is likely to use a wider range of browsers), take a look at the browser/OS stats for the Australian Museum. http://www.amonline.net.au/website/reports/amonline/0401/index_08_b.htm Unfortunately this is a pretty old WebTrends that doesn't know about a lot of newer browsers so they come under "others". Please send flames off-list, and remember that this is only my personal view, and even Russ probably disagrees with me to some extent. P > I'm curious - does anyone really think that getting things spot > on for Opera is important? Hasn't this browser got a miniscule > user base? And Opera seems to give me almost as many problems > as IE anyway. ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
