Lazy compatibility

Preparing a website to be compatible (and backward-compatible) with all the different browsers and their versions is a pain. It literally destroys everything you designed and developed, because it often requires changes in the HTML, clutters CSS with new special cases etc. and generally forces you to compromise. I claim this unnecessary — I claim you could spend less time and resources on it (and money) and it would not hurt your image as much as you think.

I have a small website that generates around 100 unique visits daily, and looking at the statistics I see two things. Firstly, Internet Explorer is not as dominant anymore as it used to be. Firefox is in the lead by more than 5%, while Opera is constantly gaining in pursuit of IE. Interestingly though, number 4 and 5 is Safari and Chrome. It really is pleasing to see four out of five top browsers to be the compatible ones.

It is not so pleasing to see that almost 38% of IE users are still on version 6, the worst nightmare of the web. Not because it was a bad browser, it was bad and most popular browser. The horror… It may be a difficult decision to focus on IE7, but its previous version had so many incompatibilities (like no alpha channel), that it actually takes more hacking than the result is worth.

I hope within a year or so IE6 should vanish into one digit market-share (it’s 20% now, according to w3schools). And the time spent on customizing your site for it could have been used in a much better way. Therefore, I say — this is the new compatibility list: Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE7 and Chrome.

What are the pros? All these browsers except IE7 are virtually the same in rendering most of the HTML and CSS code. So in fact, you end up coding for just one. And making it look good for IE7 is just a matter of fixing some margins and paddings.

What are the cons? IE6 users don’t always like what they see, but maybe that make them think to upgrade. And that’s kind of a positive side…