So many browsers…
With so many browsers and so many versions of browsers available, it’s hard as a designer to get a website to view the same, with the same functionality, on every PC, Mac and mobile device that may view it. With technology advancing and more powerful computers and devices becoming readily available you have to find the balance of embracing the new possibilities such as CSS3, and enabling a compatible and comparable experience for those using older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) which dont support many of the now standard functions.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops the guidelines and specifications to which browsers should adhere to. This is to ensure that there is a comparable user experience regardless of which browser and device the visitor uses. However, it is well documented that while the majority of browsers adhere to these guidelines and offer regular updates to their software without the need to download an entirely new browser, Internet Explorer adheres to its own guidelines and each version of Internet Explorer reads html and css differently. This means that designers and developers need to write the html and css in non standard ways, alongside the compliant code to ensure that the various versions of Internet Explorer display it correctly.
Internet Explorer is one of Microsofts most recognised web based products and with every version you are required to download and upgrade. IE6 is now 10 years old with many incarnations of it being released, the most recent of which is Internet Explorer 9 in beta. Because of this it has been announced over the past 12 months that many websites and companies will no longer be supporting IE6 in favour of new versions, the most recognised of these including YouTube and now Google. However, there are still large institutions such as the NHS, which will be holding onto IE6 as long as possible for various reasons, not least because of the pure scale of the job to upgrade every machine on the network. But it is inevitable that with the most well known search engine in the world retracting its support, that people will be forced over time to upgrade to a newer version or another browser all together.
Firefox, Opera, Safari and Googles own search engine Chrome, are all compliant with the W3C guidelines and run updates automatically on the machine its installed in, rather than the user needing to download the new application to their machine. This means that patches and bugs are always being fixed and rectified without the end user realising. As a designer it is far easier to make a website view correctly in these compliant browsers rather than the old versions of Internet Explorer. If you ask any designer which browser causes them the largest problem I can almost garauntee that they will say IE6!
So what does the future hold for browsers…
The latest version of Internet Explorer is the most compliant version for along time and is being welcomed by designers and developers the world over. IE9 (currently in beta) along with Firefox and Chrome are already drip-feeding the ability to use CSS3 styling. This is only going to get better and make the possibilities for functionality without using JavaScript or Flash much more interesting. (Currently most functionality is dependent on the end user enabling Javascript, Flash or some other script. Flash is not overly desirable for mobile devices, particularly as Apple have stated that they are not and arent going to support it on their Iphones and Ipad.) The other browsers are bound to follow suit and embrace the new era of HTML5 and CSS3, which is only a good thing for the industry and for the users.
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