Clients: the best browsers

Your online home, email and the internet. Your browser is your portal to the internet, the window upon which you see your sites through, but many people do not realise how their browser can affect their online experience.

A large percentage of people are not able to tell you what browser they are using, and for many clients, when I ask I get greeted with a silence followed by “I don’t know” - so I thought it would be nice to dispel some myths and let you know how you can enhance your online browsing experience.

Which browser do you have?
If you are on a PC the likelyhood is that you are using Internet Explorer, if you have to click a big blue “E” to bring up your browser window, you’re using IE. The big question is, which version of IE are you using. I’ll keep it brief but IE6 and below are bad news, they are very buggy and web designers have to create all sorts of hacks and workarounds in order for you to view their websites correctly, not to mention the fact you are probably seeing websites that have been made to work with IE6, if you were to view websites through a different browser you would more likely have a totally different, more pleasant experience. IE6 support is being phased out across many major websites due to the release of IE8, it is seen as a terrible browser by many and if you have IE6 or below, upgrading to Firefox will seem like an upgrade from a Skoda to a Ferrari for you.

Any of the other IE releases are fine(ish) but personally I think Firefox is by far the best browser for you on a PC - best of all, it’s free and has excellent security features as well as add on’s and customisations that you’ll love.

Firefox and Safari on a Mac.
These are known as “modern browsers” they can handle all the capabilities of modern websites, and fast. Safari has just released a beta for Safari 4 on Mac and it’s lightening quick compared to Firefox and previous versions of Safari, possibly a little too OTT in the gadget department for the everyday user however, some interesting features do still stand out despite this.

Firefox on the Mac is basically the same as it’s PC’s counterpart - it really is an excellent browser choice for both Mac and PC.

Being a web designer means I need multiple browsers installed on various platforms, in order to test that the websites I build look great no matter how the user is viewing it. But when my hand isn’t forced into these other browsers, I sit firmly with Firefox and if you haven’t done a browser upgrade in a while, give Firefox a whirl.