A statement on browsers.
I wrote this page with the intention of being informative. Many people who visit this site are of the geek variaty, led here by various links on UserFriendly and Warpedpotatoes. But I also have non-geek visitors, many of them relatives, co-workers, friends and the occasional "hey the search engine found it what the heck am I doing here?" people. This particular page is to make you ask the question "Am I really using the web the best way I can?".
I started writing this with my webcam page in mind, but I have the feeling I'm going to go way beyond that.
I just found an interesting article on Salon.com about a browser I've been using since before he officially declared it crap, kept using during the time he quit using it, and now that has tried it again and liked it I sing it's praises. Granted, during the time he declared it crap it was so I by no means used it exclusively, but I was really close to using the competitors product. I'm glad that didn't have to happen but it came close. I will say this, since Microsoft has begun it's commitment to being compliant with W3 standards it has vastly improved it's product and it is a very good browser. I can't stand it because I started on the Netscape interface and I can't even stand their renaming of commonly used and adopted words in relation to browsing. It also has some major issues with being compliant to the W3 standards that it committed to, it can't do .png files correctly as you can see in this page I made solely for test purposes. If you're using Mozilla, Netscape6, the StarOffice, Konqueror, or several others it should work. Warning if you click the link, since I made it for testing purposes on my own machine the picture is huge, if you don't have broadband you probably don't want to click it. If you're using any Windows version of IE it shouldn't, Mac and Unix versions are still untested. Coffeeman had trouble in Opera, but I'm not sure what version or OS so I'll leave that up in the air. If your curious about yours working or not, try this link, the one on the right is correct.
One of the biggest problems on the internet right now for webmasters is that people don't upgrade their browsers. One of the biggest problems with webmasters right now is that they write thier code for one browser or OS and don't consider everyone else. They use a bunch of cut and paste Java script to compensate for different browsers rendering things differently, or they use it because they don't know how to code a page properly. There are billions upon billions of pages on the internet, not one browser and OS support them all because of the differing opinions of webmasters. Currently IE on Windows is what the masses tend to use. Different versions of both products but overall IE on Windows. I started into the computer field and got my first dialup account and computer able to utilize that in 1997. Thats late for someone in my field but thats how it had to be. Back then Netscape on Windows was the predominant way to access the web with AOL not to far behind. I was a newbie tech at the time and acted like one of the masses. God forgive me I wanted an AOL account, but I didn't have a credit card so I used the Microsoft internet connection wizard to find another ISP instead. I wound up with Brigadoon, not a bad ISP if you know what you where doing but they sucked if you needed tech support. I was a tech who didn't know I needed support, I got everything working blindly with out their support by sheer dumb luck and thought that was the way it was supposed to be. Anyways, the reason I bring this up is that at the time Netscape ruled the web, IE was arround but it sucked so bad nobody worth mentioning used it. Because of this webdesigners used massive amounts of Netscape propriatary tags such as blink. The elite of the time hated this, they didn't use Netscape or IE so they would put their entire site inside of "blink" tags. Quite annoying. MS spoke out against Netscapes tactics, introduced a browser that was actually worth a shit and crammed it down everyones throats by integrating it into Windows and strong arming competitors that distributed Netscape to switch. Thus a new erra was born, everyone migrating from Netscape propriatary tags to IE propriatary tags. This sucked to. All the old school people didn't want to give up Netscape and refused to, I personally unistalled IE from my computer even when it wasn't supposed to be possible to do so. All the newbies, and their were a lot of them in this era because PC prices finally dropped below a grand, adopted IE because it was on their computers and thats the way their computers made it look like you where suppossed to access the web.
With near forcefull adoption and the way the PC industry was working Netscape began to loose out. An upstart called Opera came along and turned a lot of heads where techs/advanced computer users where involved but it wasn't free. Netscape nearly went bust and was bought by a company that I really and truely hated at the time, AOL. Netscape grew extreamly stagnant and didn't do any worthwhile upgrades for several years. In the computer world a year is an eternity so MS took over domination. But from the ashes of Netscape started Mozilla. Mozilla was always a working title for a development version of Netscape, I think this dates back to the days of Mosaic. Mozilla is open source meaning it's commmunity supported and compleatly free. There is nothing Microsoft hates more than compeating with a free product. Mozilla is what I use, I'm not going to push it on you but I am going to push open standards. Thats why I like Mozilla, is even the W3c likes how compliant it is. Please, if you're an old Netscape fan like I was, give it up, put your Netscape Communicator 4.x away and hit eaither Netscape6, Mozilla or something else entirely, I know, it's hard to give up a good thing but its time has passed.
The reason I wrote all of this was originally for my webcam page. If the whole page refreshes, not just the area with the picture, or if the area with the picture has scroll bars then your browser is not rendering it correctly. If you clicked on my example above and it showed a white hazy picture instead of a translucent one then your browser does not support .PNGs correctly. Please consider updating to something more compliant to W3/modern standards. In my own testing Mozilla has done the best at this, if you want a brand name then use Netscape6. I've found Konqueror to be quite nice, but still suffering from a lot of the same problems IE has. Galeon has a very IEish front end to Mozilla for Gnome users. I used to use NeoPlanet it was a really cool browser to use, they even had a version that would let you switch between the IE and Mozilla rendering engines, but alas they removed the Mozilla part and seem to have all but died. Their website is still there but stagnant. What I liked about Neoplanet was during the time that Netscape 4.x was crap for not having been updated and Mozilla had not yet become useable I could use IE with a Netscape looking front end and all the Netscape short cut keys, I considered it a weening process. Fortunately Mozilla has made that unnessary.
Please please update to something. You don't have to settle for what came out of the box.
