[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] browser usage breakdown

[web gurl]

Not to get back into PNG topic too much because I think the image formats
question has already been resolved by the style group ;-) but lots of web
users (including libraries) have  not upgraded to IE7 (or even 8).

W3C reports for July 2009
IE7 15.9%
IE6 14.4%
IE8 9.1%
Firefox 47.9%
Chrome 6.5%
Safari 3.3%
Opera 2.1%

These numbers more or less mirror what I've been hearing/reading in addition
to the site stats for which I have access. 14.4% seems small (and it is
shrinking) but that could still be a lot of visitors.

from:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

I don't think legacy software should CONTROL design, but one part of design
is how it will render across a variety of platforms. ;-)  So, that is the
only reason I mentioned the IE6 workaround as well as the potential PNG
transparency problem.

I confess -- I am not an IE user unless you can count the few times I check
a website for potential design issues in IE6 ( and 7). Yeah, I do know
better than to believe that "support" or "compatibility" always mean what I
think they should -- LOL (I've had to search for too many hacks, codecs,
workarounds, and mods in my life...)

IE8 seems to be a step in the right direction, but it's hard to know ... and
then there is Chrome, Google's baby -- no telling if that will catch fire.

happy Saturday. ;-)



On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Nathan Eady <eady at galion.lib.oh.us> wrote:

> web gurl <georgiawebgurl at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > From my perspective -- image file formats IE6 is notorious for not
> > rendering PNGs properly
>
> At this point, even Microsoft doesn't really support IE6 any more.
>
> Well, they SAY they do, but in practice the level of actual support
> fell off to basically nothing sometime between three and five years
> ago.  The last really significant update came out in 2004 with XP SP2.
> In addition to not being significantly updated, IE6 is also not
> available for operating systems released since that time, including
> Vista, and recent web development efforts at Microsoft (since early
> 2007) have largely ignored IE6 as a possible user agent.
>
> I suppose there's the Compatibility View mode in IE8, if you count
> that as "support" for IE6.
>
> > but IE7 seems to be addressing this issue
>
> Seems to be addressing?  PNG works fine in all versions of IE7, to say
> nothing of IE8 (which handles a number of other things better, too).
> The only current browsers I know that *don't* support PNG are
> text-mode browsers such as Lynx and elinks.
>
> > There is a CSS +JQuery workaround for IE6 to force a pseudo
> > transparency for IE6.
>
> Meh.
>
> Several years ago (when it looked like further updates to IE would not
> be forthcoming, before the start of work on IE7 was announced) I
> experimented with that stuff and even thought about deploying it on a
> website, and probably would have done if it had worked reliably, but
> it only worked on about a third of all the IE6 installations I tried
> it on, possibly because of something to do with security settings.  In
> any case, it's clearly no longer worth the trouble at this point, IMO.
> IE6 has been relegated quite firmly to legacy territory for a couple
> of years, and if someone does insist on still using it, the problem it
> has with PNG images is purely aesthetic; there are no actual usability
> consequences (unless, I suppose, the foreground of your image matches
> the shade of grey IE6 uses for PNG backgrounds, but that would be a
> real corner case and can be more easily worked around in other ways).
> Effort is better spent elsewhere, as far as I'm concerned.
>
> --
> Nathan Eady
> Galion Public Library
>
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> OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION at list.georgialibraries.org
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>



-- 
http://contentdivergent.blogspot.com
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