Browser News Updates

>Some recent browser news updates:

• the Safari 4 beta has been released by Apple
• Microsoft has posted some Internet Explorer 8 performance statistics, which (surprisingly) render IE 8 as better performant than other major browsers, see the Arstechnica article
• the Internet Explorer team has written a quite extensive compatibility checklist for IE 8
• Opera Labs has released Opera Turbo, see the Opera Desktop team blog. – stability may not be as desired, though
• Camino 2.0 beta 2 has been released
• OmniWeb is now free, the current version is 5.9.1, see the announcement on their weblog
• the next Firefox release will be named 3.5 (instead of 3.1)

Another thing worth noting: Peter-Paul Koch is currently testing mobile browser compatiblity, paid by Vodafone.

 

Firefox Usage Up To 20%

>NetApps has provided some statistics regarding browser usage. According to their report:

• Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines (November 2008)

Firefox usage is still climbing and now almost at 20%, while Internet Explorer usage is still decreasing and now down to just above 71%.

Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on the kind of site, your geographical location, etc.

But it is becoming more and more obvious that web developers programming Internet sites to Internet Explorer only are irresponsible and are causing issues for their employers and for the visitors of the sites.

An approach that works very well:

• program to web standards, avoid JavaScript and Flash initially;
• add JavaScript support to make things look better or work nicer (without disrupting the functionality for user agents without JavaScript);
• add some Flash if you must, but have replacement content in case Flash is unavailable;

Benefits:

• standards compliance;
• accessibility for visually impaired is likely to be easy to achieve;
• the same applies to Search Engine Optimization.

 

>MSIE 8 default is standards compliance

>This is great news! Microsoft is announcing they changed their standards compliance policy for Internet Explorer 8. It will now default to the new IE8 rendering engine, offering the best standards compliance so far.

This is great news to the Web, to both users and developers.