At work I’ve been developing a inital draft for the new company website. Based on some browser statistics, Firefox holds 41% of the browser market, with IE6 and 7 close at 26.5% and 27%, respectively. However, I’m willing to bet a good 30% of the people using Firefox (a statistic pulled out of my ass, of course) are geeks and/or in the IT profession (including web designers). The company I work for is a manufacturing company, who sells machines that make gel capsules. So I have to assume the a larger percentage of the audience will be using IE7 and 6 (IE6 is still out there - there’s a lot of companies still using Win2000).
That about puts them all on the same plate, which means I have to develop for three different browsers, all with their own little perkiness. Of course, I could just use tables - hell, tables work anywhere. Or I could make a navigation bar with images only. But as a geek and supporter of standards, I of course have to use CSS only. And the navigation menu isn’t in a line of text. No, it’s an actual list element. And it’s floated and horizontal, with no bullets.
And the best part - it’s a rollover, drop-down menu. Without Javascript. Of course, that was the point, except in order for IE to accept rollovers properly, I had to use some Suckerfish javascript. Well - at least it was tidy, and worked. Sprinkled throughout the code are little hacks and tricks to make everything fit in place, like !important flags and .margin-top: -2px tricks. In my quest to achieve standards compliance and full accessibility, I have broken my core religious believes and broken my balls over gettings everyone to play nicely. Isn’t it just easier to say eff that browser I don’t care about you? Well, certainly. But then I’d be a rational, productive person.
By the way, you can see an almost-up-to-date (last wednesday) version at http://aaziz.org/tes/. The products has some working links.
Thats a good guess on the number of users to your site being mainly IE 6 and 7. My personal site sees almost 90% FF users, but my companies site sees over 50% IE6 and 7 users. It just depends on your audience.
While FF is coming on strong, the majority of non techy people still use IE6&7, which is a shame.
I wish you could just screw a certain browser but as long as your customers use it, you’ll have to support it.
This blog and the parent site (http://aaziz.org) haven’t even been tested on IE by me at all. But advertising myself as a web developer I have to make sure my products are working for the majority audience, and at least still functional and decent for everything. I’m afraid to test this site on Opera, as I think the menu’s are going to be in horrible positions.
One of the worsts things is that Firefox adds an extra 2-pixel margin to the top border, so I’ve had to reduce that. But on my home computer, it doesn’t do that, and there is no margin at all. The only difference is my own laptop runs Vista rather than XP Pro that everyone here is using.