The Browsers.

There are many many browsers but at the time of writing this document there are 8 that commercially you need to know about:

1. Mozilla Firefox. Now at version 4, Firefox runs the Gecko engine. This engine is strong but some may argue secondary to the WebKit engine which runs Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Firefox is fast; forgiving of errors, and; HAS THE BEST DEVELOPERS TOOLS. Firefox is the main browser I debug in...
2. Google Chrome. Now at version 10. Google's VERY fast and lite browser (to be even faster look at chromium). (N.B. Google are set to launch an operating system of their own, so this already popular browser may be VERY important in the future.)
3. Apple Safari. Now at version 5. Again a very fast browser AND THE BROWSER SHIPPED NATIVELY WITH OS/X, which means that a lot of people who use a mac will using this browser.
4. Opera. Now at version 11. An under-rated and lesser known browser, you feel that opera was ahead of the game for a long time but didn't deliver exactly what its customers required. And not being open source meant that people didn't develop an involvement with it, or add-ons for it: In short, very good, but wrapped in its own reality.

The next browser I'm going to deal with is by far and away the biggest hunk of shit you'll ever have to deal with. Tragically for you as a web developer, it is shipped natively with windows and therefore has the majority of the market share. The company that make it are notoriously arrogant and the words 'cutting edge' need rarely be applied (although when they are #Ajax, #@font-face, they are REALLY impressive). It will be the bain of your life and you will spend approximately 33% of your time de-bugging for it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 'Microsoft Internet Exploder', er, I mean 'Explorer'...

1. IE9. The demos were full of features which weren't real, to anyone with a tech background - such as the 'deep zoom' demo. Being fair now. IE9 should be OK. It's too early to tell its idiosyncrasies yet, but they should be less as Microsoft have been getting a severe ear-bashing for the state of their browsers for such a long time now. It scores 95% on the Acid 3 test (don't get hung up on Acid 3; I don't think it's that great a test).
2. IE8. 8 was the first IE browser that I didn't have to scrutinize massively. Generally it copes, and that's about it.
3. IE7. Well, at least it's not IE6. IE7 can be relied upon to throw a wobbly fairly regularly (about 10-20% of the time, when it comes to layout)
4. IE6. This browser is the bain of your existence. Microsoft, Google and various others have now totally withdrawn support for it after a massive internet campaign to have it ended. (although you'll note that Microsoft still have a download page for it). Microsoft themselves have recently launched a campaign to get users to update their browser. Typically for Microsoft, you'll notice that 33.8% of the worlds users are Chinese - of course no Chinese language version of the site was provided! (NB. Just for comedy value. ) IE6 was a great browser 11 years ago, however times change and so does what is required of a browser. The main problem is that apart from being woefully behind in terms of technology (JS engine, etc.), it was also using THE WRONG 'box model'!! A list of IE6 bugs and fixes are provided here. Top tip, if you have 2 anchors next to each other in your code, make sure there's no white space between them...

IE browsers all use the Trident layout engine, just FYI. One issue that you will have is that in order to debug you will need to run multiple versions of the same machine. Here you'll have to get yourself a series of 'Virtual Machines' and load them up with the appropriate 'virtual hard disks'. If you're using a mac you'll need a VM to see IE at all...

A comparison of web browsers will help to fill you in a bit more on the current state of play, but for now I'll see you next time.