(2 votes, average: 1 out of 5)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.
June 4th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Hi Jim. Photos i received. Thanks