Browser Wars…the battle continues
Saturday, September 27, 2008 8:41:49 AM
If you’re a web designer like myself, then you feel my pain. After 15 some years of the internet, we are still waging the WAR against dealing with multiple web browsers. I would have NEVER predicted that 15 some years in, we would be having this discussion. So here we are, designing websites for several browsers. IE 6 will NOT go away. Despite many efforts by web developers to alienate them, this browser is not going away any time soon. We still need to develop for this small population. Now we have IE 7 & coming soon to a theater near you…IE 8, isn’t that great! SIKE…not really. And just a few weeks ago Google launched it’s beta version of Google Chrome, will caused quite a ruckus in the blog-o-sphere. And then there’s FF (Firefox), everyone’s best friend. Except it will never be widely adopted by the general population. It’s numbers have flattened…as predicted.

There are just way too many people browsing the internet these days that will only ever use the browser that came with their PC. So the browser war continues. And we the web developers suffer! It’s funny that clients wonder why websites cost so much…well we have to code for so many different browsers it just takes more time. The bottom line is we need to develop for the audience of that particular website. We all have web trends/logs or analytics to review and learn from. However, most often than not your analytics will tell you to develop for IE, 6 & 7, soon to be & 8, FF, Safari and soon to Google Chrome. Hey, at least one browser fell off the map…bye Netscape!
Oh well…job security I guess!
Here’s a great site to keep up on all the latest trends with browsers, OS’s, and so on.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com
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