Acorn Web Studio - Melbourne web design and web development

Internet Explorer

The most important web browser is Internet Explorer, with something more than 80% of the market. It comes in two different versions, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).  Version 6 was first released in 2001, when it was far and away the best browser available at the time. Now it is officially a piece of old rubbish, plagued by security problems and bugs.  Version 7 was a recent attempt to fix some of these problems, but with only limited success.  Tragically many people continue to use IE6, unaware that there are much better browsers out there.

Trying to make websites work successfully on these two browsers often takes 25-30% of our development time.  We hate them (and we're not alone). Its deeply disappointing that such poor pieces of technology get to dominate the market.

Firefox

Firefox is a new open source browser that can be downloaded for free. Its success was the main reason Microsoft finally decided it better start improving Internet Explorer.  Its our favourite browser, with the best mix of features, usability and security.  There is an amazing array of plugins that can be installed to extend its functionality.  All of these plugins are free too, and built by enthusiasts and supporters - many of them are amazing!.  Firefox will run on Windows, Apple OSX or Linux.

Regardless of your operating system we recommend FIREFOX!

Safari

Safari is the standard browser that comes with Apple OSX on Apple computers. It is a very capable and modern browser as well. You can download and install a free Windows version now as well.

Opera

Opera is the baby of the bunch. It builds a very good browser too but it is not very widely used. They do build some very good products for mobile phones and portable devices.

Both Safari and Firefox are being developed and improved at probably twice the rate as the Microsoft Internet Explorer product at the moment. At least at the time of this writing they both do a better job of following the official international rules for rendering web pages than Internet Explorer.

Same language, different accents.

Web pages are written in HTML. This is a universal language. Web browsers interpret this language  each in their own way. This means that the same web page may look quite quite different on one browser than another.  All of the browsers have their own unique accent.

One of the key parts of our job is getting our web pages to present appropriately when viewed in all browsers. Particularly when a site is just getting completed there may be small differences, even display errors in some browsers. We work hard to repair these as they come to light. Usually it only takes a few minutes to repair them.

Sometimes we are not able to make a web page look exactly alike in all browsers (this usually means IE6), then we make sure that the end result is still practical and attractive. The term “graceful degradation” refers to this process of delivering reduced results to browsers with less functionality.

Security

Partly because it is such a popular browser, and because it has a history of vulnerabilities, Internet Explorer is the main target of hackers. It was security rather than functionality that was the main driver for people leaving IE for Firefox in the last 2 years.  However, since they have released more patches, and more importantly blocked popups the flood of converts have slowed.

Microsoft has worked hard to try and improve the safety of its browsers, with some success I think, but it is still true that you are much less likely to suffer from security exploits if you use alternatives like Firefox or Safari.

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