Is Chrome Welcome?
2008 saw the release of Google’s entry into the (already crowded) Internet browser market with Chrome. On the face of it Chrome comes packed with some pretty impressive features and with the exception of a few initial bugs looks like a welcome addition.
However, spare a thought for your web developer in all of this. Web design is not like designing for print. Print designers have the luxury of knowing that every end user sees their work in an identical context. Web designers have to cater for an ever changing user environment that takes in different operating systems, different screen resolutions, different colour depths and, of course, different web browsers.
You might imagine that the diverse range of browsers freely available would be a good thing for the casual web browser and in many respects it is. New innovations such as tabbed browsing are a direct result of this competition.
There is, however, a downside. The disadvantage of this proliferation of browsers is that they all function slightly differently. The manner in which each browser implements HTML and CSS standards varies greatly, resulting in web developers the length and breadth of the land pulling their hair out as sites that they thought were finished get tested in a lesser known browser.
Perhaps the worst aspect of all this is the fact that the most popular browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (shipped free with every version of Windows) is one of the worst at implementing HTML and CSS in a standards compliant way. Developers are therefore faced with the invidious choice of adhering to standards and having most of their visitor’s experience a compromised layout or ignoring the standards to satisfy the majority.
Fortunately, in most cases, experienced developers can use skill and patience to circumvent these inconsistencies. What it does highlight is the need to test websites in a wide variety of user environments and not to assume that everyone uses the same browser as you.
At Bradley Dyer we strive to create sites that meet W3C standards for usability and accessibility and we routinely test all of our sites in the following broswers:
Internet Explorer (version 6.0 and above)
Firefox
Safari
Opera
Chrome
