Funny Way to Run a Railway
Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 08:31PM Got into a conversation with a web design company today. They had asked permission to use one of my pictures on Flickr (which was nice of them) and mentioned the site they were building.
I had a quick look and the site was really swish. Well designed and with nice content. But I noticed that one of the pages did not render quite correctly with IE8, my current browser of choice. I’ve been quite happy with IE8, although it has to be said that sites don’t always look right with it. Perhaps this is due to it being more standard than they are, but I’m not sure. Anyhoo, I tried the page with Safari and it seemed to look OK so I pinged the company my findings.
They came back to me and said “Oh, that’s interesting. We don’t usually test our sites with IE8 or Safari.” I found this very surprising. I’m not sure if a shop would do very well if it has window display that was only visible to blondes, or put everything on a high shelf where only tall people could see it (although I’d be OK on both counts of course).
If I was running a web design company I’d make it my business to ensure that the site worked correctly with everything. Of course one day, in a distant utopian future, we might have some web standards that would mean browser compatibility was no longer an issue, but for now it is – and I would have thought that would be standard practice to worry about this kind of thing.
development
Reader Comments (8)
http://browsershots.org/ et al
We do have web standards - created by the W3C. It's the job of web developers to create sites that comply with them and the job of the web browser devs to get the software to render compliant sites properly.
In the past, Internet Explorer was widely known as being non-compliant with the CSS stadards. Surely it's bad PR when one of the biggest companies in the world cannot produce standards-compliant programs.
I've seen videos about the development of IE7 and it's RSS support where the devs wish to 'extend' standards instead of simply complying with them. Extending (in that case) means changing the rules to suit them.
So, in short, we do have standards, but the devs have to be willing to follow them and maintain what they produce.
Since Microsoft wrote the fix into windows 3.1 to cover a programming bug with Sim City things haven't changed, the objective of IE was to display web pages, and if it has low tolerance for bad design then it fails at doing it.
Google.com has 43 errors according to the w3c validation checker. Obviously setting a goal of standards compliance is a foolish one.
Internet explorer 8 on windows 7 is the fastest browser I have ever seen, easily surpassing the quite nippy Chrome. However, facebook doesn't work in it. So perhaps there is a flaw in Rob's logic?
Luckily IE 8 has a compatability button. Two clicks and your site will (probably) render fine (just as facebook does).
@ Simon: Do you have any numbers for IE8 'easily surpassing the quite nippy Chrome'? Literally every benchmark I can find puts Webkit based browsers lightyears ahead with javascript execution and rendering times.
Also neither yahoo mail nor hotmail work in Chrome.
That said, it is a webdesigners job to ensure that the website works in every single mainstream browser (Including IE6 which still 15-20% of people use.. scary).
IE is one of the worse things which could happen to the web, it made up its own rules... making 10x more work for a webdesigner (meaning we can charge more.. but takes more time). IE8 is on the right path, but I think its too little too late.
Oh, and if you want speed, Opera and Chrome easily surpass every browser out there, many tests have proven this. (The only reason I don't use Opera or Chrome is lack of plugins.. Firebug, Firescope, Webdeveloper toolbar etc )