You know how the original song goes… “99 bottle of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, take one down pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall…”.

That’s the feeling I get now when I’m trying to decide which browser to use. But Just image how fun it is for a webmaster who needs to cater his sites to everyone. It’s a complete nightmare all over again.

Do you remember back in the day when Netscape was big? You almost had to write two versions of your site, one for IE and one for Netscape. Well guess what? It’s even worse now.

With IE8 now in public beta that makes three versions of IE that need to be accounted for, never mind Firefox 1, 2 and 3 (in beta now as well), Apple’s Safari (also in beta), Opera, the iPhone browser, the gazillions of other mobile phone browsers, and lord know what else. It’s got to be a horrible experience.

So what is a webmaster to do? I guess that is really a matter of preference, audience and business requirements. For me the business requirements and null because I’m not the webmaster at my place of work so I could care less but it’s a reality for some. I have a tendency to stick with the current versions of Firefox (Firefox Secrets) and IE for testing compatibility. These two will get you the bulk of your users and, honestly, the rest make up so little most of the time it’s not worth even worrying about. If you are a stickler for web standards you will have to be prepared for more headaches because Firefox doesn’t even follow them all the time.

~TheNerd

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Sofware, The Interwebs. 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.