Any web dev knows the biggest pain in the ass is getting your site cross platform / cross browser complient. As I’m currently working on rolling out 4 websites I once again find myself using a ridiculous amount of time getting the site to look perfect in IE6. So. I’m faced with troubleshooting for 3 browsers!!

A lot of us will begin a site on a Mac. It’s a great dev platform for many reason, none I’m going to launch into here. I generally will get the site looking perfect in Firefox first. Mainly because Firefox, on both Mac and PC, will have almost identical results. So, tick 1st box.

The next stage is to see what IE6 is displaying.

99% of the time it’s all over the place. So, you begin hacking and bashing the css to get some sort of continuity including transparent PNG hacks (iepngfix.htc my current favorite), margin/padding hacks… the list goes on. So, you eventually get it right and you think all’s dandy? Nope. Ya still have IE7 to content with!

You may think that IE7 will display pretty much what Firefox sees, unfortunately this isn’t the case. While not as bad as IE6 (it supports transparent PNGs at least) it’s still work.

Well, I’ve just trolled as many browser-stat pages as i could to try and get a decent picture of what browsers are being used ‘today’ in Ireland. Turns out that IE is used by about 72% of users and this is split between 65% IE7 and 35% IE6 (i’m leaving out the 1% of twits on IE4/5) . Firefox is at about 21% and Safari at about 4%.

So, what should I do?

I think I’m going to forget about development for IE6 unless someone specifically asks for it, and charge accordingly. Too much time is spent, per proportionate users, retro-fitting the html/css code.

I’ll try this approach with current projects and see what the response is. I’d dearly LOVE to have a huge IE only pop-up with “update your damn browser” in flashing neon….but alas, I’ll leave that to the dreaming

Cheers

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 2:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.