Safetygoat

Designing for the web: Don’t forget about newish browsers

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

The other day I found out about 24ways.org, a design-style advent calendar, which gives us 24 articles until christmas for the month of December. Imagine my surprise to see the site design…. First thought was, “Um, is it finished?” I was looking at it at work in firefox 2 (maintained on my machine for testing purposes), and it looked a mess. Take a look at what I was seeing….

People were RAVING about it on twitter, and I just didn’t get it. It looked like garbage to me, and I was a bit upset, because max voltar is one of my favourite designers, and I have been wearing his made by elephant button with pride ever since I got it down at dConstruct. So yesterday I was deathly ill, but still on board for my daily december design dose, and looked at the site in firefox 3. It looked very nice. It was very unique, very clean.

Now, back at work today, and I’m reading my dose in safari to get away from the non-pretty version. Question is, shouldn’t web designers make sure that their sites look kind of similar in firefox 2, which is a fairly new browser? I mean, firefox 3 only came out about 6 months ago! For kicks, I checked the site in ie7 and ie6, and while ie6 had a few issues, it at least looked mostly like the design is supposed to look.

I don’t propose to be a front-end genius, and I don’t think that designs need to look pixel perfect across browsers (heck, safetygoat looks like CRAP in ie6, but that’s another story) but there should be a standard for browser support, especially amongst web designers. They are obviously using all the cool new css tools that are just coming out, but for those browsers like firefox 2 that doesn’t have support, it looks like they’ve just forgotten about it. If we don’t abide by our own rules, how do we expect the rest of the world to do it? This is disappointing, as this is supposed to be a drool-worthy site which pushes boundaries. It just makes the whole lovely thing slightly bittersweet… not that I won’t be gagging to read the articles first thing every morning until christmas!