The Browser War Saga Continues
Posted by administrator on Saturday, May 8th, 2010
Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... the war of the web browsers began, and still continues today! Simply put, a web browser is the program that you use to surf the web. It interprets web page code and loads the information on your screen. Popular web browser programs include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Konqueror, Opera, and Google Chrome. There are literally hundreds of web browsers out there.
Each web browser displays websites slightly differently, because it's up to each program to interpret the web page code to display it on the screen. Although modern browsers agree on many of the important web page code interpretations, once in a while a website will look different on your computer. From a web developer's point of view, the web browser software that has the biggest problems is Internet Explorer version 6. It displays and interprets web pages very differently from the others. My personal favorite web browser is Mozilla Firefox.
One neat online program that helps you see the differences of web browsers is called BrowserLab by Adobe (http://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html). After creating a free account, you can view any website in a few browsers. You can even see them side by side.
Understanding how your website looks on the web in different browsers is your web designer's job. But understanding that websites look differently helps you understand your customers better. For instance, if you get a call from someone saying they have a big gray spot at the top of your site, but you don't see it, it could be related to a different browser interpreting things differently. You can recommend they try a different browser until your web developer fixes the problem.
Below is a table of browsers popularity as of April 2010. This information comes from w3cschools.com. IE means Microsoft Internet Explorer.
| 2010 | IE8 | IE7 | IE6 | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| April | 16.2% | 9.3% | 7.9% | 46.4% | 13.6% | 3.7% | 2.2% |
Comments
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Yeah! Go Firefox!by Cody on 13 May 2010 at 7:39 p.m.