Cross-Browser Compatibility

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996 ^*

I am a firm believer that websites should function acceptably in any browser your visitors choose to use to view it. You'll never be able to make a website look absolutely identical in all browsers, but it should look good enough and work well enough in the vast majority of browsers.

I believe the best way of doing this is to ensure that your coding confirms to the recognised W3C standards as closely as possible.

I've tested this site in many browsers including Internet Explorer, Netscape (4.x,6,7), Mozilla, Konqueror and others. Hey, it even works well enough in Lynx.

If you find any problems with this site in any browser, I'd very much appreciate it if you could contact me and let me know!

However, I know that, in Netscape 4.x a number of parts of the site display in a reasonably ugly way, and the guestbook page is horribly wrong. The guestbook page renders correctly in IE 5, IE 6, Konqueror 3.1, Mozilla 1.3, and a number of other browsers. The W3C validator says that the coding for the page is 100% valid - not even one error. I'm not going to put in browser-specific kludges for Netscape 4.x just because it cannot support general standards such as HTML and CSS. From my browser logs, Netscape 4.x makes up a tiny percentage of the various browsers in use.

With no offence intended for anyone who still uses Netscape 4.x, IT STINKS. Upgrade to a better browser if you can - Netscape 6.x and 7.x are actually very capable browsers, and do follow standards.

You could write a web browser, in five minutes, in assembly language, on a ZX-81, and it would outperform NS 4.x in almost every way. Every dog has its day, but Netscape 4.x is the old, blind, senile, incontinent, crippled dog that you take out behind the shed and give it the news with a 12 bore shotgun.

I fully support the "Any Browser" campaign.

"All browsers support the internet, and this internet site supports all browers" -Jacob Ozolins