I have been using HTML, CSS, JS and jQuery in my web development and it is my first time. I have been testing my design on Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge, and it works perfectly.
But when it comes to Internet Explorer, things just don't work well. Squeezed images, animation not working, margin/padding issues, flickering image when scrolling etc...
So my question is, are there any merits in getting any websites to work flawlessly with IE? IE is like the least popular browser now that Microsoft Edge is here (from what I read sometime ago). Just wondering if I should invest my time in getting my website to work with Internet Explorer.
#zaraku27
I think you should make a website which is compatible on every browser although Internet Explorer is not commonly used by everyone because of some other modern browsers but some of the application are optimized only for IE and some websites can only be used on IE whereas it is faster with windows computer because it is integrated. It is also simpler to use then other modern browser like Chrome, FireFox, Opera and etc and it is highly compatible with almost all the Operating System.
The versions 9 and above of Internet Explorer use HTML5 which enhances browsing experience, This lets the user to stream videos and audios excluding any type requirements of installing additional plugins IE being one of the oldest and conventional web browsers support many of the applications which some modern web browsers may not support .
I have decided not to support older browsers (IE6 & Before) and alternatively providing a page that forces the user to upgrade their browser. The demographic I am targeting are generally technologically savvy and very few users will encounter this page. What I am hoping to do is not support any browsers older than 5 - 6 years. What would be the best way about to achieve this? Would it be better to ONLY eliminate IE6 and below? What about early versions of Firefox, etc.?
You can read the browser version from the User-Agent string passed by the browser. You want to do a RegEx match on it. Depending on how harsh you want to be you could put a big banner at the top of the page with what you have detected their browser to be and a link for them to upgrade.
You should be able to find libraries in your chosen server-side language to do the parsing for you, save the hard work. An ultra-quick Google returned: https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser
I am in the process of updating my business website and I've decided to use HTML5/CSS3 (with some PHP) for the whole thing and it works fantastic in every new browser (IE9, FF6, O11, S5, C13) with or without JS.
Now I am not sure what I should do about every other browser version. I imagine I have a small amount of leeway with most of the browsers (atleast the previous version) except IE8 (I have the IE shiv, but it doesn't cover non-js browsers.). Most of the features degrade nicely, but there will always be issues with older browsers.
I know nonJS browsers are probably a minority, but it would be nice
to cover them as well
This list is ordered in the order of current preference to cover the
largest number of browsers(nonJS/JS) but time to implement hasn't been
considered.
Only considering web-browsers, plan is for a mobile site for mobile browsers
Here is the list:
Build a really dodge version of the site using tables^, etc. and redirect the users there if they have an old version of the browser (server-side) and have a warning on there about upgrading.
Use Javascript to fix up the bits they don't work (like the shiv). This doesn't really cover the nonJS browsers which as stated are probably a minority.
Build a static old browser page to redirect the old browser users to a page with links to upgrade download links. This is a real copout solutions, but is quick to implement
Assume the only users that have old browsers are IE users, and use conditional comments to implement one of the previous options. Assumptions are always bad
Pretend users have the most upto date browsers and make no attempt to fix the site at all. Not really a practical option
Rebuild the website for HTML4 and use it accross the site. Bit of a waste of current work. As well as it looks a bit dissappointing if a webdeveloper has a site using old technologies, which was the driving force for the upgrade
What are your thoughts/solutions to the HTML4/5 limbo? Is there anything you've done in current projects to combat this?
Cheers,
Steve.
P.S. Being a member of the 'I hate IE6 and don't care for it's existance' club, I'm pretending that IE6 (or less) never existed.
Update (to clarify)
^ - by tables, I mean are really slapped together version of the current website, using either a table/non-table based layout. But something that may not look pretty when the source is viewed, it's really just there to fill the compatibility void.
It's perfectly acceptable to have features in some browsers and no features for an older browser. See Here.
However, it should be noted that whenever a fix is doable, you should have it. Unless a website is a JavaScript based app, it should be working without JavaScript, note that working != working perfectly.
if you have a hover state with a cool transition, which Chrome 23423 will support, but IE7 won't, then you can either emulate it using Modernizr and jQuery, or leave it as is, and IE7 won't enjoy the goodness. BooHoo.
You must however, give older browser users a message to encourage them to upgrade to a better ones, especially talking about IE<=7.
You built the website in the wrong direction.
If you want to support older versions, instead of building a cutting edge website and then trying to get it to work in older browsers, you need to build a basic site that works everywhere, then use advanced CSS and Javascript feature detection to add features for the newest browsers.
Like the title says I'm just wondering the current support for canvas.toDataUrl? I have it working in Firefox 4 but haven't really tried it in any other browers. When I look it up on Google most of the results are pretty scattered as some are from a year ago. It says its only supported with webkit nightly builds. (which I assume now are the actual releases)
I'd also like to know the support for mobile devices as well.
I personally prefer using caniuse.com for finding out the current browser support. Caniuse covers various major releases of each browser, as well as some mobile browsers. However, I always recommend that with anything mission critical, you test in all browsers just to be on the safe side.
If you take a look again at caniuse.com you will see that the support tables are all color-coded and they tell you whether a browser fully-supports, partially-supports, does not support, or does not support (but a polyfill exists). The canvas.toDataUrl, property would fall under the category of "basic support", which shows that the canvas api (or rather the current working draft for it) is fully supported in all major browsers, and there is a polyfill available for IE.
So while it doesn't go into great detail about the specific properties browsers support, it stands to reason if a browser "fully-supports" the basic canvas API, you can safely assume that includes toDataUrl. Once again, if you dont want to leave things to chance, or if you for some reason do not trust caniuse.com, your best bet is to build a test-suite and personally test your app against all browsers.
Actually it's currently broken in the webkit nightly build, a minor security bug I found a couple days ago:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=91016
But in general in the stable release of Chrome it works just fine. In IE9 it works just fine too.
Is anyone writing applications specifically to take advantage of google chrome?
Are there any enterprise users who are considering using it as the standard browser?
Yes, I have started to pay very good attention to Google Chrome for my applications. Recent analytics show that between 6%-15% of my users are accessing my applications (varies between 6 to 15 in different applications) on Chrome. And, this number looks on an upward trend.
Thus, I can't really ignore it for testing right now.
As far as taking it as a standard goes, thats a long way off. I still have to test for IE6! :( Though, we have been planning to start using features like Gears (inbuilt in Chrome - downloadable elsewhere) once Chrome crosses the 25% mark. Thats when I believe that we will be looking at Chrome to be our preferred browser. I hope that we have Chrome 1.0+ by then! ;)
I switched to Chrome and haven't looked back except for the occasional site which doesn't work properly, forcing me to load it in Firefox. All my existing web applications work fine on it, and I'm using it for primary testing on my current development project.
I'm not actually targeting chrome, but I have added chrome to my browsers to test sites on. I've found some odd quirks in this product where some plugins cause the browser to hang, or run really slow in some environments, but they are still in beta in active development. But I definately now make sure sites I work on render well in chrome, as well as firefox, latest versions of IE, safari, Konquerer and opera. I usually check out how it looks on lynx as well, that helps me catch "un-alternated text" in images. Yeah, I know that isn't a word, but some people will understand what I'm saying.
Because chrome uses the webkit to render HTML, you can be assured if it works in safari, it'll work under chrome, however it's rendering engine isn't up to scratch quite yet. I think writing applications that take advantage of it is similar to writing iPhone applications, remember chrome is expected to be adopted by android to make it similar to iPhone. That way it pretty much takes advantage of all those iPhone apps.
Would I install it as the browser of choice? not yet - but i'll certainly work on valid web pages that will render across all browsers.
One of our major customers has outlawed Chrome because it installs on the C drive without asking. They deploy a standard image with a small C drive and large D drive so they can easily re-clone the system part of the image on C without destroying the client's personal files on D. Most software allows you to choose the install directory. Anything that violates this is disallowed, and they're a big enough company to have some weight with most vendors.
We have enough headaches trying to support
Firefox
Two versions of IE which have their own iffy bugs
Safari
I'm not sure why we continue to support Safari. Most of our users (corporate) use IE6 or IE7. We try to make sure that things work in both of those.
Maybe not for programming purposes but Chrome w/ Google Reader makes for the most powerful RSS reader. Can handle up to 1500 feeds w/ performance still ok, managing subscriptions still functioning.
I'm using it on my work machine, but that's about it. It's been stable for me, and I like the barebones UI. I'll still switch to Firefox for the web developer extensions however.
I'm liking some of GoogleChrome- the Start page with your 9 most recent is the winner for me. The interface takes a little getting used to, but the speed is impressive, especially with Gmail.
However, it glitches with Java, which rules it out for serious work at the moment. I use FireFox mostly and have Chrome for the "other" websites at work.
I'm considering using GWT on an intranet project and considering suggesting to the users that use Chrome to take advantage of the enhanced Javascript performance. Any AJAX-heavy app would be a great candidate to target Chrome.
At my company, we're not targeting it, but we're definitely paying attention to it. My boss is using it as his primary browser, and I have implemented browser detection for it in our scripts in case we ever to need to target it for some reason.
Chrome has the .png opacity bug where the transparent parts of the .png are a solid color if you try to transition the opacity from 0 to 1. In IE7 the opaque parts are black, and in Chrome, they are white. Today, I decided to go ahead and account for this bug in my JavaScript. I don't really test sites on Chrome that often, but I am actually using it for almost all of my browsing.
I will target Chrome as soon as a stable Linux and OSX client is available.
Targeting Chrome/Chromium right now, I think is like targeting Konqueror web browser. It will get popular, but you should wait to a more stable beta, and/or some Linux and OS X client.
My website statistics shows 3.xx % visitors using Chrome which arrived just few weeks back. And Opera is only 4.xx % which has been around for several years.
Easily you can see that rate at which Chrome is picking up.
You can see how easily Google takes over all areas of your computing world and personal world too.
Since Chrome uses Webkit, it has the same rendering engine and DOM support as Safari (not necessarily the same revision of Webkit though). By testing in Safari, you can generally get by without worrying about Chrome. Any differences you find are probably just bugs that you should file on instead of work around.
However, because Chrome uses a different JS engine, there may be a few incompatibilities with Safari. So, if you're doing anything with JS, you might as well fire up Chrome and see if there's anything obviously wrong.
Generally though, you don't target browsers, you target rendering engines (with their associated DOM support and JS engines).
I am using Google Chrome, so far all the web apps I have work fine in it with no modifications.
No.
Why help Google further build an evil empire? In this particular case it is so obvious that they do not care about users but only obsessed with gathering usage info.
It's not any major player yet