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.)
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Firefox (or any mozilla) | |
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Safari (or any webkit) | |
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Opera | |
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Internet Explorer |
We need to right up front about something really simple here: Browsers hate each other. And all the bickering really gets annoying (at best), but for right now we'd have to suggest that people go with Firefox since only Firefox and Safari have already begun to adopt some of the nifty CSS3 standards, and we like those a lot. You will too. So if you want the "quick" and "general" answer, almost all serious geeks that we know currently develop in Firefox, and that will "probably" give you the best experience with the site.
Now, as of this writing AOL purchased Netscape a couple years back and simply allowed the browser to die a quiet death, starting February 1, 2008. That's OK, because it really is/was the worst of the browsers. Growing steadily over the years, Firefox has been a superior one, even if it doesn't show those old-school "IE Optimized" pages all that well. Interestingly even though now "adopted" by AOL, they have so far managed not to kill it. And Safari works great on the Mac, but the PC version ... well ... we wouldn't be "PC" if we told you how Safari works on the PC. As an interesting aside, we had a very good friend that was part of the development team for AOL. Internally, the Geeks called it "Rainman" .... Enough said (which almost never happens for us).
So what to do? If you want our advice for something besides naked women worth noticing and even talking to, then we'll give you one more little insight. Like Every Geek Everywhere, none of us like IE either, and if you want to know what we "generally" use, we'll tell you: Opera. Lately it has started to emulate some annoying IE quirks, though, and even though many of us really like the look and functioning of the browser, we never use it at work. We'll still browse around aimlessly on occasion, but it has lately become much like an old favorite shoe. It has great comfort, but you really can't dress it up and take it out much anymore. That's too bad because it really showed some promise.
In case we haven't been clear, it really might be time for you to download one of those FREE "other" browsers and play with them for a bit. You'll be amazed. "Standards Compliance" happens to be the key here, and Microsoft has just never liked to use the same standards as everyone else, and they've been quite uncompliant about it if you want to know the truth.
Now if you join the site, we have to say that for some of the much older material, it's still better to use IE if you want this all to function "exactly" like the designers intended it, but anything created within the last few years will work LOTS better in Firefox, and it's a lot faster than IE ... and it doesn't have Microsoft's name attached to it – at least we think it doesn't. If somebody knows any differently, please don't tell us. It has taken us forever to find a suitable replacement for IE, and if that turns out to be a false sense of security (literally) ... well, then we're going to have to go find Jimmy Stewart so he can remind us again of all the good reasons we have to keep living. We can also ask him to help us pray that Microsoft eventually gets a clue. Yeah, right.
Finally, we need to publicly state that, like a lot of creative houses, ours too includes some (predicatably rabid) Mac Users who swear by everything Apple. Rather than try to shoot the apples off of their collective heads, we will say that the Safari browser comes in a very close second in the voting here, and both Opera and Safari rock on the iPhone and other portable devices. Even the PC geeks here will admit that Safari may "look" the prettiest while surfing, but at least in the windows version, it almost tries to help you as much as IE. And always "helping" us lead to the demise of Internet Explorer, if you want to know the pure geek facts. Microsoft keeps insisting that they know what's best for us, irrespective of any web "standards" and such.
Silly Microsoft.
