420 Design Blog
Best Viewed With…
24 Mar 2007 | Angie H
Back in the earlier days of the web – say, oh, the 90s – when Internet Explorer and Netscape were pretty much the only browsers people used, you'd very often see a message like this:
This site is best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer version X or higher, or Netscape Navigator version X or higher.
Other browsers that have come to light in the past 5-10 years, like Firefox, Safari and a whole slew of others have made these types of statements completely ridiculous and deprecated. If anything, it shows the laziness of the developers of such sites and in my opinion, reflects poorly on the company or organization whose site it is (government sites seem to be notorious for this).
One of the fundamental premises of good, solid web design/development is accessibility. I won't get into it too much here, but website accessibility is essentially making websites usable by the largest number of people possible. It forces us to remember that not everyone is on a PC using Internet Explorer, or better yet, that not everyone is even using a traditional web browser. This is good for any company, organization, business. After all, within your target market, aren't you trying to reach as wide an audience as possible?
Unfortunately, every so often you'll still see messages like the one above. But here's one that completely caught me by surprise:
Sure, in my opinion (and many others'), Firefox is a superior web browser, but that message isn't any different than the previous Internet Explorer/Netscape Navigator message.
Moral of the story here is if you want your site to be accessed and usable by as many as your customers/visitors as possible, you don't develop your public website* for one browser. Otherwise you're going to frustrate a lot of people and that's just bad business.
- The exception to this rule is company Intranets. If your company only runs Windows then building the Intranet for just Internet Explorer is appropriate.
Technology, Web Design + Development