Jo reminded me on the phone that this site is currently messy in Microsoft’s favourite son. Since this design is going to stick around rather longer than I once planned, consider this a commitment to hack it into shape in a few weeks time.
In related news, Google Analytics reckons I’ve only got 35% IE usage visiting the site, with ~50% using Firefox and a whopping 10% using Safari. I guess the low IE usage is quite likely linked to the aforementioned brokenness, though.
My site breaks in IE probably worse than yours, and despite putting a sign up to download Firefox the greatest percentage of my visitors still use IE. Weird.
I used to use StatCounter (quite a good service) but now also moved over to Google Analytics for my blog stats. In comparison, it seems like Google Analytics gives me better stats, is faster and most importantly simpler to set up. Well done to Google on this one!
I’m generally an any browser kind of guy, but the issues with IE here were only going to be temporary when I intended to reboot back at the beginning of the month. It seems just to be some mis-sized margins and screwy floats so it’s probably only an hour’s work to fix.
And yes, Analytics seems like another smart aquisition for Google. I do want to try Mint out, but will need to wait until the interactive demo is alive again to judge it. And take a look to see if its Peppers are offering up functionality over what Google has going for it. MeasureMap is also of interest, but I’ve not been invited into the alpha yet.
http://www.explorerdestroyer.com/
“Think how psyched you would be if less than 50% of your sites’ visitors used IE. It’s a good target: ambitious, but achievable. So we thought we’d make it a friendly competition.”
Go girl!
Your browser stats are probably that way because of the people you know like me who check every few days and use good browsers :D I wonder how many of the Safari people are NascentSteve – or is he still with Omniweb or whichever one was taking his fancy last?
Firefox is definately making an impact. I’ve got a counter on two websites, the second of which is more gamer-oriented and so likely to get more Firefox installs, but they’re running at 21% FF/72% IE and 28% FF/66% IE respectively.
I get the feeling my Blog breaks in IE, but I’ve not got round to checking again for ages! It’s not like anyone reads it much :D
IBBoard – Your blog does indeed break in IE, such that your side bar ends up pushed below all your content (much like Ben’s).
And for my site it’s IE 31%, Unknown 29%, Firefox 25%, Mozilla 13%.
Sidebars pushed down is 99% likely the IE float margins bug, so a * html rule should be able to correct it. IE7 claims to have fixed it (when they release it next year)
IE has corrected it? good :) And yeah, I thought it would be margins – I was actually just going to look at it now.
One important thought for IE’s ‘fix’ though – is it a fix for the margins, or does it fix it completely so that it won’t pay attention to the * html rule as well? Would be interesting to know :)
Thanks to Ben’s Bloglines list (I needed something to read while waiting for my site’s server load drop from being through the roof!) I’ve just read the IE Dev Blog. In one message they talk about CSS Hacks and the Slashdot website. From the looks of that the ‘* html’ hack will be handled correctly in IE and so we won’t be able to use it if IE7 still messes certain things up.
That’s correct Stu. They’re designing IE7 with correctness in mind, so they’ve fixed hacks like that. It’s probably the right thing to do, since it allows us to filter between IE7 and IE6. Based on their fix list, that should be more useful than filtering between IE7 and Firefox.
However, it only takes one bug in their CSS implementation and we have huge problems if we can’t filter IE some fixes, I mean patches, err hacks. While a serious CSS bug in Firefox or Opera will get get fixed quickly, IE releases are few and far between. I dislike conditional comments (the whole mark-up purity thing has stuck with me, however unrealistic it is), but there may yet be ways.
Last I checked, I believe that if you do @import url("foo") screen, print, with media types on the end, it also filters out IE. I don’t know what other browser support is like, but I haven’t seen it listed in the IE7 fixes.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.