Browser woes

Thursday 5th June 2008

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I was reading an article in PHP Architect the other day about how coding is not as fun as it used to be. The author was highlighting that there are so many considerations and security features that you have to be aware of, writing code for pure functionality is now only a small part of a web or application build.

I have to agree with this, if I am faced with another large website build in the next few weeks I think I will have to go AWOL. I would guess that I only spend about 10% of my time actually writing functional code. The other 90% is spent adding security features, guarding against human input error and trying to get the site to render correctly cross browser. Usually Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox on Mac and PC and Safari are of concern. We can now throw Internet Explorer 8 into the mix as well.

I always code to ensure the site works in Firefox and then break it so that it works in Internet Explorer. To be fair Internet Explorer 7 is an improvement over the previous version but as Microsoft have made the upgrade from 6 to 7 optional the vast majority of people are still using IE6. If Microsoft do the same with the IE8 upgrade we will be left with 3 versions of Internet Explorer all being used by large numbers of people, all rendering HTML differently. It is a real pain as you cannot use CSS properties like “min-height” with any confidence as you know IE6 will ignore them.

Getting rid of Internet Explorer 6 would solve a lot of headaches. I have always wanted to build a site that does a simple check to see what browser you are using and refuses to display if you are running Internet Explorer 6. I might do this when IE6 numbers start to dwindle. If you are using Internet Explorer 6 I beg you to update your browser, not only is it annoying for web developers, it isn’t secure!

Firefox (recommended)
Internet Explorer 7
Safari

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