This Website is Best Viewed with…

Flikr image by MoonSoleil

How many times have you been to a website that has something along the lines of “This site is best viewed with IE7, Resolution 1024×768, blah blah blah…”? This is usual discreetly tucked away in the footer, but just today I found myself on a site that upon entering opened a little warning screen telling me that I was using Firefox and not IE to view it and that I might not be seeing their beautiful work just as they meant it to be seen. Hmmm…

Ok, I might be getting a little bit carried away so I’ll step off my soapbox for a minute and just explain, calmly, why this is such a problem.

IE (Internet Explorer) used to be the super dominant web browser that people use to do their surfing but that has changed in the past few years. With the rise of Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome, IE now (according to our stats from about 10,000 visitors to one of our sites) is sitting at only about 63% ownership of the market.

Now the big problem is with the styling rules that developers have to follow in order to get the websites they create to display in a consistent manner. There is one set of rules Microsoft apply with IE, and then another that everyone else has agreed upon.

The long and the short of it is that if you make your website look good in IE only it could end up looking terrible in other browser (that 37% of your visitors are using). The buzz word is “cross browser checking” (which sounds a bit like something you do in secret and don’t tell your parents about) and everyone should be doing it.