Why Wait Webs

With this article, I am going to attempt to convince you to stop using Internet Explorer for web browsing on a day-to-day basis. I will start with a brief history of the Internet, just to get you familiarized with the subject if you aren’t already. Then I will move on to the 5 reasons you should switch away from the most popular web browser, Internet Explorer. After that, I will introduce you to my favorite alternatives to Internet Explorer and show you how easy it is to switch (you won’t lose all your favorites!). Well, let’s get going!

A Brief History

I will try to keep this as brief as I know how, since I could easily go into A LOT of detail about it! If you’re interested in reading more in-depth, you should definitely check out this great article: History of the Web Standards Project at WebStandards.org.

The two most popular web browsers at the beginning of the world wide web.

A web browser is what you use to view the world wide web. In the early days of the web, there were two vastly different web browsers duking it out for supremacy: Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator (logos pictured to the right). Each browser was developed completely independently of the other, and as such, the technologies were complex and wildly varying. Pages rarely, if ever, looked the same in both browsers, and as a result the web as a whole was made a less compatible, less accessible, and generally less fun place to be.

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With Safari now hovering around 8% of browser market share, it is important that web developers and designers test it almost as thoroughly as they would Firefox. Although the numbers don’t lie, plenty of developers/designers still don’t test Safari at all. Even those who do are easily prone to missing this one, as it’s rather difficult to see on lackluster monitors. There is a little-known issue in Safari where color in images mismatches with the CSS background colors. I won’t pretend to know the nitty-gritty details of how this works, but essentially Webkit renders CSS hex codes slightly different than it renders image colors.

Safari Background Image-Color Mismatch

Normally this background image/color mismatch is not noticeable enough to be a problem. However, if you are trying to fake transparency, and part of your image is meant to look like the background, the image/css color profile difference becomes immediately visible on modern monitors, since the background image intended to blend with the CSS solid color does not quite match up. This is shown in the image to the left, but again, you have to have a nice and bright monitor to see it. In case you’re having trouble seeing it, I highlighted the edges of the image, where the gray varies slightly, in the second image below and to the right.

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