Browser Compatibility
A lot of emphasis is being placed on Standards Compliant Browsers. This means if I go to a web site, Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Safari, Netscape etc. should all look the same.
The three browsers that I know are aggressively pursuing the goal of standards are Opera, Firefox and Safari. But wait... what about Internet Explorer? Well, I'll let you judge for yourself.
There is a test that the webstandards.org has set up to show how well the different browsers are doing at achieving the web standards. It's called the Acid 2 Test. <<<(click here to see for yourself)
The Acid2 Test is basically a happy face that shows in your browser with the text "Hello World!" above the face. If your browser passes the Acid 2 Test you should see the happy face with no errors.
I understand Safari is almost 100% compliant. I don't have a Mac to verify this, so I will have to take their word for it.
As you can see, Opera Version 9 Beta, is now compliant. , Firefox is not far behind, and I understand it is compliant in there testing of the next version which has not been released, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is not even close. But a little better then IE6.
So what does this mean? Standards compliant web sites Opera, Safari and Firefox will render the page so they look about the same, but when viewing the page in IE6 or IE7b2, well who knows, but it won't be good.
To make IE6, IE7 look and act the same way as compliant browsers, web developers have had to apply a hack to the code, specifically called an IE hack. Since Microsoft has had a major portion of the market for so long after the Netscape/Microsoft Browser wars, they have had the attitude that they are the standard and everyone should follow them. A lot of so-called web developers tailored their code to work in IE only, which breaks a lot of the other browsers. Because of this most people think Internet Explorer is the better browser, but that's not the case; there is just a lot of bad coding done just for IE. Remember, the W3C standards were made so that all web pages when viewed in any standards compliant browser will look and act the same, and the internet as a whole is useable to every browser. Microsoft has made some strides in IE7 towards meeting the standards, but it is still very far behind. I hope they keep up the work toward this goal!
Just to give an example of some of the things that you wouldn't even notice if you just use IE, let's look at this sample page. First download Opera and/or FireFox and install them. You can install them along with each other and they won't cause any problems with IE or any other programs you have. After you have downloaded and installed one or both of these compliant browsers, go to this sample pape in Intenet Explorer - Click here.
The first thing you should notice is that in Internet Explorer, the page width is wrong and you have a horizontal scrollbar.
In IE you will also see the navigation bar at the top of the page,
but you should see this.
When you hover over a paragraph you should see the paragraph highlighted in red with a yellowish background ,
but instead nothing happens.
It would take a lot of hacks to make this happen in Internet Explorer 6.
Take a look at the Acid 2 Test happy face and you might get a better picture of what's going on.
This is how it should look: |
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In Opera 9 beta it looks like this: |
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In FireFox 1.5 in looks like this: |
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In Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 it looks like this: |
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