One very important part of working on a website is designing it so that the website is cross-browser compatible. By this, what I mean is the web designer wants the website to show up in a Netscape web browser just like it does in the Firefox web browser or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE).
Why Cross-Browser Compatibility?
With all of the various operating systems used today – Windows (PC) and OSX (Mac) to different distributions of Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Synbian,Unix, and even WebTV or Cell Phones – people who browse the internet may have different web browsers – and even different versions of the browsers installed.
Looking at the logs of Aleeya dotNet, I can see that these web browsers have been used:
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* PDA/Phone browser
So, my goal of a web designer for this site becomes one of making sure that everyone can see this website – as it was meant to be seen – no matter what web browser is being used.
So, I tried viewing Aleeya dotNet in 16 different web browsers for the Windows Operating System.
| IE 6 | medium | large |
| Netscape 8.1 | medium | large |
| Firefox 1.5 | medium | large |
| Amaya 9.52 | medium | large |
| Avant 11.0 | medium | large |
| Easy Bee 3.1.4 | medium | large |
| The Family Browser 2.3.3 | medium | large |
| Flock 0.7.6 | medium | large |
| Green Browser 3.6 | medium | large |
| K-Melon 1.02 | medium | large |
| Maxon 1.5.8 | medium | large |
| Opera 9.2 | medium | large |
| Neoplanet 5.1 | medium | large |
| Off By One | medium | large |
| Power Web Office 1.4.5 | medium | large |
| Simplicity 1.0.1 | medium | large |
Outside of Of By One – which did have photos, but still rendered it more along the lines of text – the only browser that I showed anything real different in was Netscape.
Netscape 8.1 allows you to view the pages in 2 different ways. The first way – rendering pages using the IE engine – will show pages through how IE will view them. The second choice is viewing them as Firefox will see them.
Firefox 1.5 will show Aleeya dotNet perfectly fine – as it was meant to be seen. Everything looks correct and the tabs are spaced correctly at the top.
But, if you use Netscape 8.1 (rendered in Firefox) it shows the tabs being positioned differently. The tabs overlap the background incorrectly.
But, if you use Netscape 8.1 (rendered in IE) it will show Aleeya dotNet perfectly fine – as it was meant to be seen. Everything looks correct and the tabs are spaced correctly at the top.
This was quite surprising to me. Firefox and Netscape both use the Mozilla engine. The key here is that Netscape can render a page correctly looking like IE, but for some reason, the cannot use the Mozilla engine correctly when rendering the page as Firefox.
Hello, I found your blog in a new directory of blogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, Your blog looks good. Have a nice day.
Interesting article. Stumbled across your blog and I really learnt a lot regarding browsers. Thank you very much.
Cross browser compatibility is a really important aspect that bloggers, web developers and web designers need to look into when maintaining blogs and sites. but this fact is at times neglected and not looked into which in turn pushes away the user. since the user assumes its the problem with the site and not the browser they use.
great topic. I think it need for professional website designer to make website showing correctly in any browser that clients use. so they have to check up in all browser. For me, I concern only Firefox and IE. Its very hard to make website showing correctly in all browser. thanks this very interesting.
That’s totally cool. Well we certainly didn’t know that 16 browsers are there. Anyway, thanks for the information. Certainly was really helpful. Thanks again. Cheers
Neat. At first I never knew so many browsers existed. I don’t develop web pages so I’m not much concerned about browsers. But I think I’ll try few of these out
Appreciate the information. Cheers
Brilliantly put together, never knew all these issues were all because of compatibility. This article will make a huge difference in my day to day work. Thanks loads.
I also design websites and creating code for all the browsers can be a major pain. I mainly focus on having compatible code for IE and Firefox. Padding and Margin spacing is major issues between these two browsers. Also your doc type plays a major role on how the code is read.
Wow, extremely informative and interesting. First of all I never knew so many browser’s existed. Apart from the big names. Secondly thanks for making me think about the compatibility issues. I never paid great attention towards it but it’s high time i did so. Thank you
A wonderful article you posted. That is so informatory and creative. Please keep these excellent posts coming. You helped me so much.
Thanks for sharing!
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Hi Jim. Photos i received. Thanks