Well, it is more than five years ago that I blogged about the fading away of people using Netscape Navigator 4.x versions to visit my website, a year later about the reduction in people browsing my site with Internet Explorer 5.x and about the first sightings of Internet Explorer 7.
Today things are different, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.x is the beast that keeps me from implementing cleaner HTML code for this website. But there are good news: In the last months, the number of people visiting this site with Internet Explorer 6.x has more and more often been smaller than the number of users browsing the web with the current 8.x incarnation of the beast. This is good news, because the new version 8.x is much more standards compliant and it finally, finally supports the use of the quote tag <q>. That means that more people will acutally see the quotation marks around the quotes (“” for English, „“ for German) that I coded into this blog and the other pages offered here.
When the amount of IE 6.x users consistently remains below three percent, I will kick out the hacks that I put into the code to work around IE 6.x’s annoyances. Maybe that will also be the day when I will introduce the first pages that are coded in HTML 5, something that I am really looking forward to because the new <video> element will make embedding video in a standards conformant way much easier.
Posts Tagged ‘browser’
Bye bye, Internet Explorer 6.
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009Time to update.
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005Yesterday, the Mozilla Foundation has released the new stable version of Firefox. I definitely recommend downloading and installing the 1.5 release if you are on windows. It is more stable, more web compliant, and of course, it includes some security fixes. If you’re using Internet Explorer please give Firefox a test drive for a few days. If people would stop using Internet Explorer versions 6 and prior, the web would become a much more efficient and accessible place because websites could be coded using modern standards without tons of hacks to work around the catastrophe that is Internet Explorer’s rendering engine.
Making Mozilla.
Friday, August 12th, 2005Yesterday, I made my first direct contribution to the Mozilla Project, the organization that programs and distributes my favorite browsers, Camino for Mac OS X, and Firefox for most other platforms (AOL‘s Netscape is also built upon the Mozilla sourcecode). I would have liked to contribute to this great open source project earlier, however, a lack of resources and programming skills made this difficult. Therefore I have so far only contributed by posting in related forums, voting for bugs that bugged my in particular, and generally spreading the word. Yesterday however, I was again annoyed by one of the quirks that sometimes make you frustrated – in this case is was the non-standard way of Camino’s bookmark export function. A vote for fixing this seemed to be in order. To my surprise several searches in the Mozilla’s bug database bugzilla (yes, I know) turned out nothing. After some gnawing of fingernails I decided to take the plunge and write my first bug report. It is Bug 304118 – improve export of menu spacer / bookmark separator. I was crossing my fingers hoping not be told that this is an old hat, see bug number blablbabla. Seems my fears were unjustified: the bug was acknowledged (thanks Jasper!) and, to my utter astonishment, a fix has already been submitted!
I guess that’s a birthday present ;)
It is not easy to be compliant.
Saturday, February 12th, 2005Dear readers, I must ask you to bear with me in this time of mishaps: a few days ago I changed the way my blog is delivered to your browser – at least if it is a standards compliant browser. Now, this weblog is being delivered with the correct MIME type of application/xhtml+xml, instead of being delivered with the type text/html that is appropriate for mere old-fashioned HTML.
The side effect of doing this is that browsers of the Gecko familiy (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, etc.) only render this page if the underlying code is 100% correct. Not a single small error is permitted. If the browser encounters such an error, you will see a short description of the error in the browser window. May I ask you to send me a quick note describing where you encountered what kind of error? Just like Christian (M.D.) – always an example to the rest of us – did today.
It is out!
Tuesday, November 9th, 2004Come and get it: Firefox 1.0 final release is ready to be downloaded! Two things make the user experience in Firefox stand out:
- Extensions: You can customize your Firefox to block ads, to use mouse gestures, to better code your website, and much more.
- Searching: You can easily extend the search field in Firefox’s toolbar. Just click at the Google
G
in the search field in the upper right corner and click the lowermost entry to add other search engines. I enjoy accessing dictionary.com, the wikipedia and the leo.org dictionary in that way.
If you are a mac user and do not heavily use extensions in Firefox, I recommend trying out a recent Camino nightly build, which is better suited to Mac OS X – it’s really sleek!
When will the day come?
Wednesday, February 25th, 2004It is not to be believed. It is nerve-wracking. I’ve put my diploma thesis online two years ago – since then the percentage of people visiting my site with the dreaded Netscape Navigator 4.x versions has not really declined. (Navigator 4.x dreaded? Why? Check these links if you want to know more: for people who know html, for Germans who are interested.)
In the beginning the percentage of Navigator 4.x users was hovering about four to eight percent. These days it may still reach 3 percent. This is just so utterly frustrating since I don’t want to introduce the more interesting features offered by CSS if they break the browsing experience for a significant amount of visitors; especially if those visitors are marginalized because of their hardware/software combination anyway. Not everybody has access even to a Pentium II 300 Mhz upward machine on which Windows 98 SE and Internet Explorer 5.x is installed. However, seeing the technological conservatism of many academic internet users, it seems to be likely that many people are browsing with Navigator 4.x versions because that is the browser which introduced them to the internet, and they don’t want to change the way they access the net. *sighs* Please spread modern browser evangelism and help people install browser that are more modern that Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.x! Of course, I do recommend the browser developed by the open source community such as the Mozilla family.
That was quite a bit of work.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2003A few minutes ago I put the new official website of my post-graduate college online. Take a look – I hope you like it. If have a moment of spare time you could check the site with different browsers and tell me if you encounter particular problems. One disclaimer: the layout does not work well with 4.x versions of Netscape. I would recommend updating to a browser using the Gecko engine, i.e. a Mozilla related browser.
New homepage for the Graduiertenkolleg.
Tuesday, September 16th, 2003Soon I will change the layout of our post-graduate college’s homepage – it is utterly ugly and confusing now. You should take a look and try to navigate a bit. It’s embarassing. I hope you’ll like the new layout: it will have no tables, it will be W3C conform, more accessible for handicapped people, no frames – but, it doesn’t work well with Netscape 4.x …
A test page will go online in a few days, I would appreciate any feedback then.
Some more optimizations.
Thursday, July 10th, 2003Yesterday I finished fiddling with the HTML and CSS code of my web pages. *sigh*
You probably won’t notice any differences, but everything is much better now. ;-) The blog displays exactly as it should in a ton of different browsers: Internet Explorer 5.0 on Win98, 6.0 on WinXP, 5.23 on MacOS X, several different Mozilla/Firebird/Camino builds on different platforms, Opera 6.02, and Safari (which uses a tweaked version of the rendering engine of Konqueror on Linux). Only the trusty iCab has it’s usual problems with the correct rendering of pretty basic CSS code. But the page still works nicely even in iCab.
The code for my other pages has undergone some optimizations too. It might now be rendering a tad bit faster. It has also been revised to be even more accessible to handicapped people, and people with text browsers or slow connections. Hopefully this also has a positive impact on my google ranking, because I am now using the appropriate tags wherever possible (i.e. I am formatting the contents list using list tags, I am formatting my contact information using the address tag etc.)