If you're like 99.99999999% of the people on earth, your computer came with Microsoft Internet Explorer, otherwise known as MSIE. Many people will spend their life never experimenting with anything beyond this simple, bug ridden pile of horse poo.

Then a small group graduates on to FireFox. Probably half of the people on this forum use FF. After reading some good advice from the really bright candles in this room ( LadyNRed, SteveGogh, and ForrestCro ) I tried Opera. It was kind of fun for the first 10 minutes, like any new toy, but then the newness wore off and I just don't like it. Too strange.

So that covers it, right? You could build a time machine to 1982 and use Netscape Navigator, but that comes from back when the web was made of paper. Or you could get Lynx and other silly text browsers. Nope. That's not it.

What if I told you you could run Safari on your Windows box? You'd probably tell me I'm out of my dang mind, and why the heck would anybody want to? And you'd have a point, the ugly user interface is dog puke. But Safari the MSIE of Mac. You know, the lousy but in-built software that most people will never move beyond.

So as much as it pains me to recommend anyone look at Apple's web site, y'all might want to mosey on over and download Safari, so you can see what your pages will look like for the 7 % of people who use a Mac:

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

installed it and on a couple of my pages its ignoreing the divs bg color.. in css



weird.. i guess its another thing to try and help make sites browser compat

I've got all four installed (though I'm not as cool as Dan right now since I only have one version of IE running) so I can test sites.

Firefox is my browser of choice for all the extensions. My guess is Opera probably runs with the least amount of problems and it does have it's own set of extensions, but not to the same extent as Firefox.

Opera doesn't play nice with gmail. It has some nice features, but FireFox is my favorite. And I don't even use that many add ons.

I'm an extension junkie. I have close to 70 installed and enabled and if you can believe it I use the majority of them on a daily basis.

i have FF, opera (somewhere NEVER use as its erm crud), FF - use for compat test, and have IE 5.5, IE 6 and IE 7

My preferd browser is IE 7 (which i know everyone just groaned at)

but i find IE 7 the fastest loading browser where as FF takes time to open

IE 7 is the cleanest and best ease of use browser i use.

Dan

Oh Dan, now you have to leave the forum for using IE7. I'm so sorry. Thank you for playing our game.

Just kidding of course. IE7 seems pretty decent to me, though I can't say I've used it much. It opens slowly for me. FF probably opens slower, but that's because of all the extensions. If I load it in safe mode without the extensions it's pretty quick.

Dan I would suggest giving FF more of a try since you develop sites. There are some very good extensions that will make your development life much, much easier.

yea, i know i have loads of them, but i have never been able to use them , it just ends up annouying me a bit, because it takes ages to load and it seems every time i open it (even everyday) it has to update one plugin or FF, and so i have to wait for it to install, and then of ocurse it has to restart FF and then i have to wait for it to all load again.

where as IE 7 i click -> it opens -> i browse! isnt that how it should be?

fair enough the engine might be a bit dodgy, but in running i find it easiest.

Dan