Articles posted in Browsers

How not to launch a browser

Mozilla's launch of Firefox 3 was a poorly conceived marketing exercise and has let down an excellent product. Read more

IE6 not going anywhere soon

I've been monitoring browser statistics on clients over the last few months in order to understand the effects of the IE7 forced update by Microsoft. Among corporate clients it doesn't seem to have had much effect and IE6 looks set to be around for a while. Read more

Microsoft and IE8 default behaviour

Microsoft has changed its mind about the proposal to use a meta tag to trigger IE8 to use the standards rendering mode. Read more

Educating clients about browsers

Recently I have had some success in changing browser usage within a client network. Here's a short summary of what I have learnt. Read more

IE8 - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The news that IE8 is considering using meta tags to determine rendering modes is a bad idea from everyone's perspective and Microsoft should reconsider. Read more

Opera’s Antitrust Action With Microsoft

Opera have filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission stating that Microsoft is abusing its market position by selling the Windows operating system together with its Internet Explorer browser. Read more

Embracing progressive enhancement

Striving to make sites the same cross-browser at the presentation and behaviour layers is a bad philosophy for the web and for the browser market. Instead designers and developers should embrace Progressive Enhancement and accept a lesser experience for less capable browsers. Read more

IE7 one year on

Today is the launch of Leopard, Apple's latest version of the OSX operating system. With it comes Safari 3, a product that almost a year on from the launch of Vista highlights the stagnant performance of Internet Explorer 7. Read more

WebKit to support font-face

The news that the open source browser engine WebKit is to follow Opera and support font-face is great news for web typography. But more work needs to be done by the web community, browser manufacturers and font foundries. Read more

Why use Web Safe Colours?

I've always designed using the web safe colour palette. Recently I realised I didn't actually know why. After a bit of research it would seem it is less relevant than I thought. Read more

Preparing for IE7 - Limiting CSS Hacks

Internet Explorer 7 is just around the corner and there have been warnings from Microsoft that existing hacks will break layouts in IE7. By limiting the use of hacks your CSS can be both backwards and forwards compliant. Read more

Goodbye Internet Explorer Hacks (well maybe)

I had to do a template today and I took the opportunity to code using no hacks. With the impending launch of Internet Explorer 7 there are going to be many sites that won't render properly because of existing Internet Explorer hacks. Read more

Flock - One browser too far?

After my browser love-in yesterday I was reminded of Flock. It was launched as preview in late 2005. Built on Mozilla's open source code the business model was to gain market share by offering users an excellent experience. What was that excellent experience? Well not much - RSS, easy blogging and maybe instant messaging. Errr.... what's different from most of the other major browsers? Read more

Mac Browser Love-in

Although I love Firefox for Mac I can't deny that it is very slow compared to other browsers. After reading of the adventures of the Mac browser pimp Jon Hicks I decided to experiment a bit more in my browser usage. Where did I end up? Well in a multitude of places with multiple browsers open! Read more

Better coding with Fangs

Until today I wasn't aware of the Fangs plugin for Firefox. Whilst reading an article on evaluating accessibility over at 456 Berea Street I came across the plugin. Roger at 456 Berea Street recommends that developers use this plugin to assess accessibility and I fully concur with him. Read more

Internet Explorer 7

I've been testing out the new Internet Explorer 7 Beta for a while now and I must say that most if not all of it is very good. For a start the security is much better but as a designer I can't get over the quality of the rendering. It is near Mac like in quality. Read more