Browser Usability
First let me define what I am calling browser usability. Browser usability is when a browser can go to a determined site and view all of it's content with no problems, this includes FLASH, QUICKTIME movies, WMV, WMA etc.
As a webmaster when I go to a site and it doesn't work right in a specific browser I check the site for valid coding and then after verifying that the web master has not made some glairing error. I start analyzing why the browser can't interpret the code properly and file a but report with the respective company.
But as a User, like most of you reading this article, I don't care why the web site is not viewing properly I just want it to work and blame somebody usually the browser manufacture.
So lets look at who is responsible for the problems on the web. First there has to be some kind of standard that tells web developers and browser manufacturers what is ok and not ok. This would be the W3C, they were established 1994 their mission is "To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web."
So now it is up to the browser manufacturers to follow the W3C guidelines of how to properly interpret a standardized web site.
Second it is up to the web developers to build web page that follow the W3C standards so that the pages built by them will view properly in all browsers.
Third browser manufacturers have to build in to the browser a way to interpret bad coding of web sites. that is to say if someone who doesn't know what their doing, builds a web site that looks good in IE6 but doesn't follow the standards, that will be the only browser in will look good in. The same goes for a person who build a web site for Opera 9 and doesn't follow the standards, that site will look good in Opera 9 but not in the other browsers. This is what happen in the beginnings of the internet, with Internet explorer being the dominant browser many so called web developers developed only for Internet explorer and followed no standards, as a result, all the web sites will look messed up in all the other browsers unless the browser manufactures code for the errors of these so-called web developers. This becomes tedious and increases the complexity and size of the browser.
This leads to the question. How much extra code should manufactures put in to their browsers to compensate for the so-called web developers that programmed there sites for Internet explorer only? We'll that's up to the manufacturer, do they cater to the bad programmers or try to force the bad programmers to correct there sites. Personally I would like to see the bad programmers go away. But that is not a good marketing position so most manufactures try to compensate for the programming errors. Oviously Internet explorer has to do very little because the majority of these bad programmers use Internet explorer as the testing browser which leaves the burden on the other browser manufacturers.
Do you want to find out if the site you went to is valid W3C code, go here: http://validator.w3.org/check and type in the address of the site you want to check.