I stumbled into the world of web development quite accidentally mind you, stepping in as a desktop programmer and thus with no real bias towards any real browser or operating system at all. However, the one thing I keep hearing over and over again from established web developers all around me is how it literally “takes only about 10% of their time to whip up a really cool website and then the last 90% is spent making that cool site work in that damnable Internet Explorer”.
Hello? You’re a fool if you don’t believe that you need to make Internet Explorer your primary development focus because whether you like it or not, IE still holds the browser market share majority. Yes we all know that Internet Explorer is (or rather was) not a good browser, yes we all know it hates standards and doesn’t confirm to the “right way” of doing things, but bloody hell, almost all non “techie” people use it as their browser of choice… and that means that your product had better look pretty as a picture in it, right from the get go don’t you think!?
So here’s an idea then. How about you actually do your web development work in Internet Explorer right from step 1? This way you can whip up a nice site and guaranteed, when the time comes to test it over in Firefox or some other browser, chances are pretty good that the thing will run like a dream and if there are any “fixes” to be made (probably padding issues anyway), they’ll be so quick to sort out that you’ll almost cry at the thought of why you didn’t think of developing like this in the first place!
Of course, I do understand you hardcore Firefox fanboys, and I know that my suggestion will be almost impossible for you to even begin to process before tossing it out of the door and hurling a rocket grenade after it, so at the very least can you do me a big favour and at least toggle the switch to show image placeholders in Firefox on?
Pretty please.
That way you’ll actually know when you have a broken image on your site. You know, the ones that usually slip you by because you don’t actually know that they were there in the first place!?
Anyhow, that’s just my two cents worth on the whole “Damn you IE, my tests on Firefox worked perfectly!” saga. Thought I should share because sharing is caring…
And if you must know, I do my development work on Internet Explorer and am in no way embarrassed to admit that. After all, it saves me a lot of hours in development time when one gets to the final stretch just before release date! :)