Thursday, January 20, 2005

Macs and Browsers

At my day job, we've just recommended that we design to "a Firefox standard browser." This is a change from the IE-standard.

What that means is that we guarantee that the content appears as we intend it should appear for anybody running a Firefox browser. Before we only guaranteed IE. Most of what we did worked for other people. We got tripped up a lot by AOL folks who used the network browser that came as part of the AOL interface.

The good news is that Firefox is a standards compliant browser. That means that the only browsers that won't display what we post the way we intend it to be displayed are those browsers that implement the standard in a radically different mode. IE is one of those browsers. There are several positioning standards that Microsoft does in its own way, for example.

The bad news is that too many people are still using IE. And OS9 Macs don't have a Firefox option. I'm about to go boot up an OS9 machine and see how far I can get with Netscape 7. This notion that the IE version available to Mac OS9 people can't do simple things like deal with the Blogger.com interface is very troubling. Folks shouldn't have to spend a big chunk of change to access content that should work.

Call me an optimist.

2 comments:

Nathan Lowell said...

Ok.

For the OS9 people.

Go to Netscape. Search for Netscape OS 9 Download Netscape 7.0 which works on OS 9 and allows you to use blogger.com without any problems.

Lesley said...

Hi Nate, that's very conscientious of you commenting on your own blog :-))Anyway, the combination you suggest is exactly what I'm using from home now: OS9.1 + Netscape 7. It's not great but then don't have anything to compare it with. This evening I got two "There were errors messages" when I tried to post. See you soon on the wiki page to collate our findings? Lesley