Website vs Browser type

[cd_cd_cd]

Apologies if this has come up before, I couldn't find a way to search through the 75 pages of the main thread.

I've found the quality of CyclingNews is now highly dependant on which browser you are using. I found the new site quite sloppy when I first saw it, at which point I was using Internet Explorer.

Unrelated to CyclingNews, I installed FireFox the other day, and lo and behold, the website now looks singularly better, to the point here I think it is now an improvement on the old website.

The problem with IE though isn't just natty formatting problems, more what seems like genuine bugs. For example, on a race report the results list are horrendously garbled...

 

[BroDeal]

I get results on two lines and garbled placing numbers with IE 7. It looks okay with Safari and various versions of Firefox on various OSes.

I am no expert on front end web dev but the standard method is to make a standards compliant design using best practices and then test it against a wide range of browsers, tweaking the HTML and CSS to account for browser bugs and non-compliance to standards. I have a hard time believing that they went through that tweaking phase before deployment, which is just insane.

 

[cd_cd_cd]

I guess the typical web developer doesn't use IE, maybe?

Given that two thirds of people online use IE then it's got to be considered quite important that it looks good on there.

Maybe the whole thing is just a marketing scam to get people like me to sign up to the forum...

 

[stefan]

I guess the typical web developer doesn't use IE, maybe?

Given that two thirds of people online use IE then it's got to be considered quite important that it looks good on there.

Maybe the whole thing is just a marketing scam to get people like me to sign up to the forum...

We try to support a set of agreed browsers, but it's a moving target. Both IE 8 and Safari 4 came out after the project inception, but before we went live. IE 8 is actually good to work with, as the standards compliance is massively improved. Safari 4, although standards compliant, is very buggy still, and we've had reports that it crashes in places, although unable to reproduce it here. But reports from elsewhere on the web suggests it's not specific to Cyclingnews.

Every browser has its idiosyncrasies. The worst offender is IE 6 - although completely unsupported by Microsoft (current version being IE 8), it's still in reasonably widespread use. It's horridly non-standard in its support for CSS and other features, including transparency in PNG images.

As someone said above, during development, we focus on implementing standards, and then spend some time trying to iron out the exceptions where certain browsers don't stick to the standard. If you think about it, doing the reverse - targeting say IE6 specifically, would be rather unwise, as it's officially obsoleted by Microsoft (and IE8 being a mandated upgrade by MS).

So, we develop to standards, and tweak to get around incompatibilities. Our IE6 support will only ever be 'best efforts'. We have to draw the line somewhere.

The browser share for the various types can be seen here:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

As you can see, the various IEs take less than 50% - but the only difficult one is IE6. IE7 and 8 may have the occasional glitch. Let us know, and we'll get right to it.

 

[cd_cd_cd]

For what its worth, I got my two-thirds usage for IE from here:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0

I don't know whether one is more accurate than the other, I would hope that w3 have it right!

I can hear what you're saying about IE6 being difficult, I have had the same issues myself on development teams in the past, but on the other hand the old website worked on it and according to w3 an average of 14% of cyclingnews readers are going to be on it. I wonder how this correlates to the number of people how have complained?

From my point of view, since I've been on FireFox I think the website is an improvement on the old one. In particular the 'new' news items being available instantly and the prominence given to other articles that previously I would never have known existed.

 

[Ziptie]

... I installed FireFox the other day, and lo and behold, the website now looks singularly better, to the point here I think it is now an improvement on the old website.

Just tried this myself. What a difference. Much, much better.

 

[Anonymous]

basically people shouldnt be using internet explorer anyway...
It isnt secure, it isnt standards compliant, and a lot of the time it simply doesnt work..
sadly for years it was a nessasary evil as so many sites where designed around IE's flaws, so where IE didnt do something properly the sites just chucked in scripts that kept internet explorer happy...

Basically use opera or firefox.. Opera is the most standards compliant (which does sometimes introduce its own problems when you come across slopping coding) but it is the quickest and most secure (and built in email, rss and bittorrent is a plus).. firefox is the most popular and is pretty good as far as standards goes, but does lack some of the features of opera without adding on 3rd party plugins..

but basically, please chuck internet explorer in the bin and just use it for myspace..

as for browser share there are a thousand different figures going around..
IE does not have that big a share though, and the share IE has is largely down to it being pre-installed on windows.. FF share is much higher, and operas share is much higher as well.. The problem with both FF and especially Opera is a lot of people set them to identify as IE a few years back to stop being rejected by websites with the old "you are using an incompatible browser, we suggest you use internet explorer" bumpf and never switched them back.. lol... an awful lot of sites do falsely report browsers as well..

last i heard IE was struggling around 50-60, ff was heading to 35 and opera was moving up to around the 5 mark (but moving up very quickly being the first browser to launch a version 10, even if it is only at beta).. but.. you can take these figures with a pinch of salt.. for instance, if you did a browser share look on a pc technical site you would find FF and Opera with over 50% between them and IE getting its bum whupped.. Myspace you will find IE miles in the lead because it can be so flakey with other browsers.. Facebooks opera figures for may are almost zero because they decided to change a load of there scripts while opera was in alpha and where the other browsers responded with patches, opera waited until its beta release to fix it..

anyway.. chuck IE in the bin..