Designing for the web: Don’t forget about newish browsers
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008The 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!
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This isn’t nearly as bad as it first seams. The majority of Firefox users are early adopters and tech savvy, that combined with automatic update notices the adoption of Firefox 3 is high.
Looking at the statistics across a lot of my sites I see that of all the Firefox users well over 90% are using Firefox 3.
I don’t disagree though, the site should have rolled out with a bit more browser testing, such is the nature of night before deadlines though.
Web designers are so critical of one another aren’t they! You’re probably right: if it is a small proportion (10% of firefox users), then like other less popular browsers, they’ll be later priority.
Take into consideration the audience this site caters to. How many web design/development folks browse the web in old-school browsers? Might as well pull out all the latest greatest CSS techniques here, cuz rarely will there be other times to do so in a practical environment. No?
Agreed, that this site is for web designers, who should have the latest browsers. My point is: they’ve made efforts to make it look “ok” in ie6 and ie7 but not in firefox 2, when firefox 3 is only 6 months old.
I think you possibly need to do a hard refresh to make sure you have the latest stylesheet. It doesn’t look great in browsers without RGBA support, but it should be ok. Better than IE6.
We launched with (and still have) a lower level of browser support than we’d ideally like, but we’re also mindful of the site’s audience. The site is very squarely aimed at professional web designers and developers. If there’s one place we can push the boundaries a little and expect visitors to have capable browsers, then it’s here.
Obviously we don’t want to exclude anyone, because this is a web site and that’s not how web sites work. It needs to be available no matter the capability of your browser. We’ll certainly get it to that stage as quickly as we can, because it’s very fundamental to how we believe the web should operate.
The reason it wasn’t that way from launch is simply that we’re all on volunteer time (everyone – me, Tim, the authors) and the decision to redesign was made only a couple of weeks ago. We implemented the site over the space of 2 or 3 days.
I hope you can enjoy the content all the same – we’ve got 24 really top-flight articles lined up in this year’s series.
Thanks for your comments Drew. I have now done a hard refresh and it does look better in firefox 2 now. I’m sorry if I sounded harsh… I think the whole thing just surprised me. I am indeed enjoying the articles and have been reading back from the years before (as I’ve only been doing web stuff for a year!). Thanks for all your hard work.
Great post. I disagree with you on the target audience though, this shouldn’t be used an an excuse to have a malfunctioning website. Us designers need to be critical sometimes of each others work because we are the one’s with the trained eye and see problems that Joe public wouldn’t. Constructive criticism acts like feedback to help improve the site’s userbility and accessibility.
On another note, love the funky flash footer!
To be honest, Kat, I didn’t much like the look of the site when I first saw it and I still don’t. I appreciate how clever the CSS is and how it’s an excellent exercise in progressive enhancement but it’s not a design that I particularly like. Personal Preference I suppose.
I think this was a good post, and you shouldn’t backtrack on it.
No matter how enticing or flashy the new techniques are, if they don’t serve their purpose it just isn’t design. A designer still has clients, and if they see a poor presentation they will just dismiss the designer outright. Such sloppiness indicates contempt for the client and the consumer. A new hammer doesn’t make an architect.