home
Ensuring that webpages look the same in every browser can be one of the most labour some tasks that faces modern web developers, especially with the range of browsers available today. Alternatively one could just ignore the browser market share and continue developing and debugging in your favourite browser, however unfortunately this just cannot happen.
With browsers becoming more and more powerful and more versatile, were seeing an increase in fundamental technologies being made available without the need for third party extensions, on the verge of establishing the new html5 and css3 standards a lot of browsers are racing to keep up.
Traditionally if your using a pc, you’re likely to be using one of the three main browsers currently available, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome, and of course the loyal Safari users of the Mac.
Each one of these browsers provides developers with a fantastic array of developer tools giving them the ability to test their rich internet applications thoroughly before publishing. Google Chrome offers its Developer Tools out of the box, showing events, properties, events, triggers, XHR tacking, resource management, loading times, and thanks to Chromes inbuilt Flash Player (which self-updates without the need for installation of a plugin) the resources within a Flash document. Firefox while including its debugging console has an optional plugin known as Firebug, which provides many of the same features found in Chrome’s developer tools. And finally Internet Explorer’s own developer tools, which are included within the IE8 installation, but not with previous versions (requires a download from the Microsoft website).
Unfortunately for Microsoft it has been evident that Internet Explorer lacks the capacity to display webpages to the formal standard specified by the W3C, even throughout its own version revisions, and has seen a slow decline in its market share, with more users switching to the powerful Chrome of Firefox browsers.
In an attempt to catch up with the other browsers Microsoft has started development on Internet Explorer 9, boasting full html5 and css3 capabilities, and increased JavaScript performance, however this browser is not yet available other than in the format of a hardware accelerated preview.
However an interesting development from the folks at Google, have produced a Google Chrome ‘Frame’ that runs inside Internet Explorer, making use of the its powerful Web Kit rendering engine, and allowing the use of html5 technologies such as the canvas or video tag, and vastly increasing JavaScript performance.
Currently at Montage Media we are optimising our solutions for use with Internet Explorer 8, 7, Firefox, Chrome, following suit with many other publishers we are no longer supporting features for use with Internet Explorer 6, as this will compromise our creative ability somewhat. It is under debate as to continue support for Internet Explorer 7 pending the release of Internet Explorer 9, only time will tell.