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

By: Ann

Ann — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:24:55 +0000

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.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:02:36 +0000

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.

By: Frog

Frog — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:14:09 +0000

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!

By: admin

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:03:56 +0000

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.

By: Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:51:28 +0000

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.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:38:33 +0000

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.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:30:55 +0000

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?

By: admin

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:32:12 +0000

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.

By: Sam Brown

Sam Brown — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:20:34 +0000

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.