What browser?

HitByLife a lot of people still use IE6 - its more used than IE7 - why would you want to stop designing for it?

No, you are right, it was just a remark in pure furstration. Even if the IE browsers, both 6 and 7, are the least standard compliant ones of the most common browsers, they are also by far the most used browsers on the net, so, no: one cannot stop developing for them. There are still some people left on IE 5.5, but there seem to be a growing consensus that it is now OK to drop that browser from development.

The only reason they are the most used is because they are the ones that come pre-installed on the OS.

It doesn't matter that it sucks. The only reason MS have made any vast improvements to it at all is because people started jumping ship and realising how good FireFox was.

But of course. And if there hadn't been much of a competition in browsers like FireFox (and hopefully Opera), it's probably quite likely MS would have kept ignoring W3C standards (which admittedly perhaps are not always that compelling either) and forced through their own standards, designed to work with IE.

At one point I dropped developing for Netscape Navigator as all the things I did tended to look horrible in it. Of course they looked more or less the way I wanted in IE, simply because I was developing for IE. I kept on developing for IE and ignored the first versions of FF.

Now we have a different scenario. Web developers are doing the coding for FF (well, I assume most do) and then test in IE to check what they need to tweak or hack.

Ok, Im gonna tell ya what ya need to do.

EDIT: oh and that Mac Browser (Safari is it?)

Design for Firefox, hack for IE. Thats it. Don't worry about Opera, Netscape, and all that jazz as their usage percentages are so low that its not a huge market anyhow. Netscape used to be really high, but that was when government employees and schools used to have Netscape as the only internet browser available. IE was disabled on their pc's. That is no longer the case for the US anyhow, and this has dropped the usage of Netscape down a ton. Also, Netscape used to have some nice add-ons for web developers, but FF has those now too, so Netscape dropped again.

Opera is a pay to use browser, or Advert Supported. So, it has always been a low choice, and most Opera viewers are viewing from cell phones now-a-days so you'd need to worry more about mobile devices for that browser than regular PCs. I do use Opera on my PC for the wonderful download manager.

BTW, I do spotcheck in Netscape and Opera. If theres nothing major I don't bother changing anything.

I find if you design for FF and hack for IE then it'll be pretty sure to work in the others anyway. if not it'll be nothing major.

It's a long time since Opera was a pay to use browser or advert supported. It is very standard compliant, so if you develop for FF, you will not see Opera diverting much from that. And the community of opera users is not limited to mobile phones, by no means, however, the ratio of opera users in the big picture is not great - here are estimated stats from OneStat.com, June 2007:

IE: 84.66%
FF: 12.72%
Safari: 1.79%
Opera: 0.61%
Netscape: 0.11%

I use safari mainly as they now have it at college and I have it at home