The Adido Digital Blog

Cross browser compatibility

For those of us unfortunate enough to be web developers or designers, cross browser compatibility is a constant thorn in our collective side. For the most part, said thorn exists in the form of Internet Explorer 6. As one of the most widely used browsers, web developers are forced by necessity to cater for this sinking ship. At the time of writing, IE6 still holds an impressive 25% of internet users in its demonic grip, while its younger, but equally frustrating sibling, IE7 maintains anywhere between 25% and 50%, depending on where you get your information.

Now anyone who is familiar with the topic knows what is coming next: I’m about to tell you about Firefox, an open source browser whose compliance with web standards makes life easier for developers. While the end user is unlikely to notice much difference, most developers not in the pay of Microsoft will preach the graces and virtues of this most pious of browsers. In fact, five minutes of reading various forums on the topic will have you believing that Firefox has descended from heaven to lead us all to the Promised Land. And while I am occasionally inclined to agree, I like to think my opinion is a little more subjective than that.

The fact is, IE6 is neither evil nor stupid. At time of writing, Windows XP and Windows Vista collectively occupy over 85% of the market. And since each copy of Windows comes conveniently bundled with Internet Explorer, it is the browser of choice for most casual users. So what’s the problem?

Web standards

The problem is web standards, or the lack thereof in Internet Explorer 6. For any of you scratching your heads right now, let me explain: there is an organisation called the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short, whose main job is to develop standards for how websites should be written. They are headed by a man called Tim Berners-Lee, the man heralded as the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Now when a web browser is created, it is supposed to interpret web pages according to the web standards set out by the W3C. Many browsers, Firefox most prominent among them, manage to maintain full compliance with the standards. Even Internet Explorer 8, currently only in the beta stage, is apparently standards compliant. What this means is that when a web developer writes a page, the outcome is predictable, no matter which browser the end user has installed. Unfortunately IE6 seems to ignore the standards in many cases, making extra work for the developer, who has to fix apparent “bugs” on the page. These aren’t problems with the page itself, but problems with the way IE6 is interpreting it.

The future

Now this argument is nothing new, but serves as a background for my main point. That is: IE6 is a lot of work for those of us creating web pages. It’s not only display bugs that cause problems, but lack of functionality. Many elements of CSS 2 remain unsupported in IE6. For developers, it’s like having a shovel to dig a hole but being told to use your hands – if you use any of these unsupported features then IE6 users won’t see them. For a long time this has been the case, and has become something developers get used to.

I’m sure that other developers, like me, are looking forward to the day when we can stop catering for IE6. After all, we used to complain about catering for IE5, which was even worse. And when IE8 is released, I’m sure we’ll complain about IE7. But as things stand at the moment, I am just about ready to throw in the towel anyway.

Why? Well I started thinking on the topic last week, when Google released Chrome. Along with IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari, this makes 5 browsers for developers to test their websites in. On top of that, IE8 is on the horizon and will add even more testing to the mix. As a result, development costs for websites steadily increase. Clearly the most volatile of the above line-up is IE6. The question is, when is it ok to stop supporting it?

The day Microsoft releases a full working copy of Internet Explorer 8. At this point I intend in my personal projects to stop supporting IE6 for anything more than functionality. If the page “looks” broken in IE6 but still works, I will point my users to a small icon in the page saying “made for IE7 or greater”. Similar icons have been used in the past to explain to users why the page appears broken, and hopefully my users will say to themselves “maybe I should upgrade”. After all, IE7 is a free upgrade, and comes as standard in Windows Vista. But until developers stop catering for IE6, many users won’t bother to upgrade, since they don’t notice the difference.

Soon enough the time will come when we can abandon IE6 and start using CSS 2 in earnest. By that time we’ll probably be wishing we could use CSS 3, but as the saying goes, you can’t have your cake and eat it.

So... yet another summer is over. The question everyone seems to be asking is 'where did it go?' It seems that yet again, a summer which promised so much from the weather forecasters back in Spring turned out to be mainly wet and generally quite miserable, save for a few glorious days.

While the sun was shining/rain was coming down, we were hard at work on several search engine optimisation campaigns. When planning an SEO project, it is imperative to know which phrases to target based on common sense, key phrase research, competitor analysis and various other techniques. Quite often we can predict how easy/hard it will be to get a client website ranked on the target phrases for their website. And now that we have more information at our disposal about which phrases generated the most traffic, and more importantly, how much, our selection process is becoming easier.

However, the figures we work on are predictions, based mainly on previous behaviour with search engines (although sometimes Googles figures are not that great when compared to reality...). But what effects search engine usage? There are a number of factors ranging from user age or experience, through to time of year or even the weather...

Having worked on some campaigns for clients in the last few months, we've seen that traffic has gone down in the last few months. Ok, the summer holidays have been and gone which means that most of the (small) business world stops for several weeks. But surely Google/search engine searches never stop. Or do they? There are dozens of industries which rely on the weather to make their businesses work, but it's interesting to see what affect this has on search engine traffic and searches.

Some industries which I can think of which rely on the British Summer are shown below using Google Trends to show traffic over the last few years.



The aim of this graph is to show where searchers in the UK look for their holidays; either camping in the UK or trips to the sun in Spain. As you can see there are various peaks and troughs which we can assume are down to the weather for those years (see the BBC news article showing sunshine and rainfall recorded in the UK).

Comparing two great British summer pastimes Cluedo and Conquet (ok, well not 'great', but still relatively popular to make it onto a Google Trend graph) you can again see that the Summer of 2006 bought people out in the dozens to play croquet rather stay indoors playing board games. In 2007, it was a different matter with Cluedo nearly catching up with the famous lawn sport. I guess everyone wanted to know if Mr Plum did do it or not.



These are just two examples of where we can see external factors having an affect on search engine traffic and user behaviour.

The weather isn't something that you can control yet (although I'm sure Google are working on that) but it may need to be considered for your business website. When planning a search engine campaign, it is important to try and take into account every possible factor you can to ensure that you get the best results from your marketing spend.