Today's topic is more of an addendum to last week's post. So I've been designing (actually programming) websites recently, trying to turn this into a career, or at the very least, a profitable summer job.
Ethan, my brother, had been helping me with the designing some of the web graphics. His work is quite groundbreaking. Sometimes its hard to even know how to properly implement some of the stuff its so cool.
Anyway, one unfortunate job of being a web programmer is making sure your site works with every browser known to man. Well, here is a quick little list of the browsers and browser versions one should check to make sure your website is fine in all of them.
Internet Explorer (IE for short)
Version 7.0
Version 6.0
Version 5.5
Version 5.0 (Optional, sites are beginning to discontinue support for IE 5.0)
FireFox
Version 3.0
Version 2.0
Version 1.5 (Again, this could be optional)
Opera
Latest Version
Safari
Latest Version
Flock
Latest version (Unnecessary, because Flock is essentially firefox under the hood)
You get the picture. Counting all the different versions of browsers, I currently have 9 different browsers installed on my computer. And I sure do love checking every page of a website 9 different times making sure everything looks the same.
Anyway, I would encourage everyone to try out some of the new browsers. My personal favorites are Flock and Opera.
Flock is a social web browser made primarily for viewing sites like facebook and blogger.com. And opera is awesome purely because of one feature. When you open a new tab, it opens a page with 9 thumbnail images of sites you have set which you can visit very easily and rapidly.
Lastly, with all the energy I have in me, if you are viewing this webpage in anything but the most current version of your browser (go to "Help -> about" to view your browser version), use the links above to download the most up to date browser of your choosing.
And if you happen to be using IE 6 or earlier, PLEASE DOWNLOAD IE 7 or FireFox NOW! As a web developer, I have learned from personal experience that even if a site looks perfect and crisp in IE 7, FireFox, Safari, and Opera, it will look like a happy meal (toy and all) stuffed into a blender and left on high for 30 minutes in IE 6.
I wish I were joking. And the next time you see a message telling to update your browser, do not click ignore. Those thirty seconds for a quick install will give me more piece of mind than you could know.
Your description of the blender paints quite a picture! I've heard that sites can look different with different browsers, but I didn't realize how different or what a difficult job it can be to make it right in all of them!