Oh the joys of modern Computerdom.
When you "publish" a web site, it obviously makes sense to consider how people are going to be looking at whatever you are showing off for the day. Without getting too technical, let's lay out a few things you should know:
- Despite what anyone says, even the most conservative of estimates consistently put Microsoft's Internet Explorer still at somewhere greater than a 50% usage rate, as far as browsers utilized in English-speaking countries goes.
- Everyone still hates Microsoft.
- Experts from various fields, including those that have competing web browsers, have long been telling us that "IE" (Internet Explorer) has seen its glory years pass, and any day now we'll all realize that [insert competing product here] will soon show itself to the masses to be a vastly superior option, thus enabling us all to catapult it to market dominance. Very recently it has begun to look like Firefox (and its technically superior code rendering) will soon surpass IE in percentage usage, and those of us in the web business feel very happy about that.
- It still hasn't happened, even though any Geek with much web development experience will laud either Firefox or Safari (depending on which OS they use, basically), and all will band together to think evil thoughts about IE, particularly before version 7 came out. Still, some significant percentage of the people out there seem to continue to use IE6, curiously relying on technology that is YEARS out of date, probably just because the company where they work remains hopelessly behind the times, or maybe simply because they're honestly quite foolish, and they don't know any better. Therefore …
- In the Web World, you just can't please everyone. But we do our best.
Browsers
So here's the deal: The very early stuff on this site was built by a group that thought Internet Explorer was the be all, end all, of browsers. Consequently, those of us that now champion standards compliant approach, are basically just really embarrassed by that — but not enough to go back and republish all those pages or anything. Also ... since the New Geek in Town Herself hates IE, we have worked quite diligently to make sure that it at least "functions" in Internet Explorer, but it admittedly works A LOT BETTER in other browsers. It may not "look" exactly like it should, even in the newest IE but it should basically work. Now if you don't seek the "basic" approach in life, we should suggest the browsers in the following order. (Didn't Microsoft try to "improve" BASIC very early on in the game? We should have seen the foreshadowing. We hate missing foreshadowing.)
