Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari —
Which browser is for me?
If you spend any time on the Internet, you've probably run into discussions about web browsers. There are a lot of IE-bashers (people who dislike Internet Explorer), often for good reason. Web standards1 were written years ago to help make web sites display consistently on all web browsers, and Microsoft flouts those rules in many ways. Because of this, developers spend many hours on each project, just fixing rendering problems between browsers; and 90% of the problems we have to fix are because of Internet Explorer. In fact, there is an entire genre of HTML and CSS known as "IE hacks" — code we have to write to make some web designs work in IE. Even though it might not show up as a line item in a proposal, developers build into their budgets a cost for making each web site "work" in Internet Explorer2.
You might wonder why developers dislike Internet Explorer. It's a logical utilitarian reason. It's easier to develop in Firefox because it's just plain easier to use:
- Firefox renders standards-compliant HTML properly.
- Because of its open source roots, Firefox has a robust list of add-ons and plug-ins. The extensions range from development and debugging to search engine optimization.
- Firefox has frequent updates.
- Developers may install multiple versions of Firefox on the same computer for testing. (You can't do that with Internet Explorer.)
- If you upgrade Firefox, it doesn't render other installed software unusable, whereas if, for example, you upgrade from IE6 to IE7, you might have to pay for a new version of Quickbooks.
We find that most qualified web site developers now develop on a browser which is web standards compliant, and then fix any rendering issues that arise in the various versions of Internet Explorer. The reasoning is that it's easier to develop for the many browsers which render close to what you expect, and then alter the code slightly for one or two browsers, than it is to start off with a browser which isn't standards compliant, and then make changes to make it render correctly on all the other browsers.
From our standpoint, we need to ensure that our web sites render correctly on IE6+, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Those are the browsers with the largest market share.
So, what exactly does all this mean? Should you use Internet Explorer? Well, that is completely up to you. We recommend Firefox as the browser with the best of all the important features: ease of use, standards compliance, security, and stability. Because of the huge support for Firefox among developers, its features tend to be more robust. (Firefox had tabbed browsing — enabling you to view multiple pages within the same window via tabs — years before IE7 was released.) Is Firefox the be-all, end-all of browsers? Certainly not, but most people find using it to be a much more pleasant experience than its competition.
Notes
1 Web Standards is a movement whose aim is making web content accessible to all in a consistent manner. Its parent is the W3C, and one of its main champions (apart from conscientious web site developers) is the Web Standards Project. Developers who adhere to web standards create sites which are better optimized for search engine indexing, easier for disabled people to view, load more quickly, and render more consistently between (most) browsers. If you'd like to read more on this topic, check out MaxDesign's Web Standards Checklist and The Four Essentials of Modern Web Design by Jason Foss. << return
2 The problem with Internet Explorer is that when Microsoft developed IE6, they wanted to create a browser which would render poorly-written code — code which was written improperly so that it would render in IE5. Now, Microsoft's solution going forward with IE8 is to require that developers put a special "meta tag" in every web page they create, telling IE8 that it should render in standards-compliant mode. In other words, we have to tell IE8 to render standards-based code correctly. (Note: After immense criticism to this decicion regarding IE8, Microsoft has reversed its decision. We'll have to wait and see.) << return