I normally don’t post twice on the same date, but something came up yesterday over at Scott Kelby’s blog that I felt compelled to let people know about it (in case you for some reason stopped here <strong>before</strong> stopping over there…). So, read this about FF3, but keep going down as there’s some buzz going on about his guest author yesterday – none other than Matt kloskowski. Enough of a buzz to even get lazy ole me off my arse! 🙂 Anyway, two posts for the price of one today. First off, some browser bewilderment over Firefox3:
Well,it’s not really bewilderment over which browsers to use, because I use browsers for a number of reasons. Yes, a good portion of it is spent solely for surfing different websites. I do occasionally spend some time on web design. While I know that the latest release from Firefox is going to be a boon for photographers due to its support for color profiles – I can’t help but wonder about designing with FF3 in mind. How does one incorporate this into their array of considerations?
Clearly, you have to design for whoever your audience is, and for me, that means FF2, IE, and then Safari are where I devote my time. But, it would be nice to move toward a browser base that is W3C compliant. However, FF3 makes no impressive strides toward those ends anyway. I did some testing of the three main browsers (IE, FF, and Safari) against the Acid3 test, and found that while none of them pass, most certainly IE performed the worst, and the FF update is no great leap forward. See the screenshots below of each browser and it’s performance on Windows and Mac (Tiger). First, here’s the reference image that each browser rendering effort should result in:
And here’s the actual results for each browser/OS setup:
WINDOWS
Macintosh
Does anyone have any thoughts on what the probable trends would be? I’ve heard lots of glowing things about Safari, and lately it has been growing in percentage of people that visit either CB or my photo site, so I’ll have to take that into more consideration. What about others out there? What browsers do you use? Are you a “surfer” or a “designer”, or both? Some feedback ehre would be very instructive.
For those that don’t know what I am talking about, feel free to skip to Friday for your next read. In the meantime, for those that do know, or are interested in learning more, here’s the resources I’ve read thus far:
Rob Galbraith’s page: http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-9311-9478
ICC Test Page: http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter
Mostly Lisa: http://www.mostlylisa.com/2008/06/20/convince-me-to-use-firefox-i-dare-you/#comments