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April 26, 2004

Let's Talk Browsers

I've designed this site to work best with Windows. Not out of any nefarious plan, but because I have a Windows machine on my desktop, and that's the machine I used to design it. When I get a Mac this summer, I expect that the design will morph into something that works with the Mac, too. Until then, live with it.

Given that fact, let's look at some browser statistics from my weblogs.

About 80 percent of my hits come from Internet Explorer of one flavour or another; the vast majority are IE 6. You might think that that means that the remaining 20 percent are other browsers, but in fact 8 percent of my hits come from spiders. About 10 percent of my hits are Mozilla users, and 0.23 percent of my hits come from Opera. I haven't compiled results for the other minority browsers; I might get around to modifying the log munger one of these days, but you get the idea.

Why is IE so ubiquitous? I use it myself, and the reason I use it is that everybody designs sites to work best for it, so why bother getting only half the function and none of the design on inferior sites? I'm not surfing the web to prove a point, and I'm definitely not interested in sticking Microsoft one in the belly by choosing some other browser that fails to be standards-compliant in its own unique way. And since everybody designs for IE, more people use IE; they also don't care to fight the noble fight against a corporation just to prove a point they don't believe in much, anyway.

How do you fix this?

First, you need a browser that can figure out what browser that can switch modes to fit with IE's non-compliant code, Mozilla's non-compliant code, or whoever's non-compliant code, and do so fast. Maybe with tabs at the top of the page, so you can change screens and have it just work. Even better would be if it would read the code and figure out which browser to emulate on the fly. Even better would be if it would fix awful web coding on the fly and present you with only perfectly marked-up pages that don't use crappy, pixelated fonts or 1990s web design mores. I can dream, too, you know.

Second, you need to kill everybody who thinks that Word or FrontPage or any other graphical interface can produce workable HTML. Or send them to re-education camps, though that's something I allow only on my most generous days.

Third, nobody is allowed to have "under construction" on a web page. Ever. It's not under construction. You're just pretending to have more content than you really can come up with. I know that has nothing to do with browsers and is just a pet peeve of mine about the web, but it really does have to end now.

Fourth, we all just decide to run our monitors at true colour settings so all this web-safe palette bullshit can come to an end. The fine art of finding non-dithering colours on multiple platforms is not something we should be spending our time worrying about. Instead, I want to see some work on wiping out really bad site designs.

Posted by ayse on 04/26/04 at 10:12 PM