by Tony Short
This year, especially over the last few months, things have started to get a bit complicated with web browsers. Imago, our technology, and our courses are designed to work on all browsers for all learners – regardless of their system specifications. There was a time, and not that long ago, that pretty much everybody was using Internet Explore 6. And then, the browser ratings war split most of the vote between Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Now, after a bit of a slow start, many learners are now switching to Internet Explorer 8 (used by 23% of learners) – probably because Microsoft Automatic Updates have been responsible for upgrading from version 7 to 8. At the same time, Firefox has been growing in popularity (currently used by 14% of learners).
Why is this important to us? Well, the way that our Development Team constructs pages needs to change to ensure that we are optimizing them for a wider variety of browsers (Opera, Safari and Chrome are starting to feature more heavily on our usage lists). It also means that more time is devoted to testing new features! The latest version of each browser type – whether that’s Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox – has its own idiosyncrasies that have to be catered for.
The Development Team asked me when all the different browser types might start to behave in a more predictable and standardised way – it could be a decade before things settle down completely. But the good news is that the really primitive browsers – the ones that used to constrain the use of some elegant page designs – finally seem to have disappeared from the list of browsers in use. This means that we can use less code to create better looking pages, and make the pages more flexible and sophisticated to boot.
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