I remember back a while ago when it was really important for web sites to be back-compatable with older browsers. Is that really so important these days? Are enough people still using Netscape 3 that I should be worried about them? Can a person generally just be w3c compliant and not worry so much about CSSs not functioning, or frames not being supported?
I think it is just a matter of who your target user is. I work on a web application for a major company and they require that the users at other companies view it through IE 5 or higher. There are lots of web sites that are written so that they only function in IE. That is something that I and a lot of other people think is rather dumb. However, even the universal more modern standards will cause a problem with very old browsers. It is the same problem that you run into in both hardware and software all over the computer industry. At some point you just have to draw a line and say move up or be shut out. It all depends on what you want your site to do. If it is only to convey simple information in a basic way, then it may be best to make it so that it can be viewed from virtually any browser in the world. If you need some fancy stuff to achieve your goal, then you draw a line somewhere else.
If the cost of adding support for X browser is likely going to be less than the expected revenue gained from X browser, then you should support it. Any half decent web hosting should give you a breakdown by percentage of what browsers people use to visit your site.
As a general rule, it runs something like 95% IE, 3% Mozilla/Firefox, 2% other (Safari & Opera mainly). The share of non-IE browsers is increasing at something like 2% per annum IIRC. Obviously, usage depends on who your target audience is.
Those figures are outdated. Browser News has the current statistics (as of February 26th 2005):
" Roughly 84% use IE-based browsers, down from a high of ~94% as users switch to other browser families — mainly Gecko and KHTML — with this downward trend likely to continue as the alternate browsers improve and as IE remains stagnant with no planned upgrade till late 2006."
I worry not so much about the older browser individuals , most of the time I just add the handicapped script which any browser will read, but the proliferation of devices that were never meant to access the web is on the rise , my new samsung phone has a web enable service , on a one inch screen. So basically web development is still a very dynamic field
Declan
I would say that I worry less about it now than ever before…but that’s mainly thanks to CSS. By using CSS to do all of my document layout (images, colors, sizes, positioning), I am left with relatively clean HTML (look, ma, no tables!) and know that anyone using a significantly older browser to view pages I’ve designed will still be able to get at the content of my site.
I haven’t done much thus far for other devices (e.g. Declan’s phone), but plan on learning more about their displays and ways to accomodate them in the next six months or so.
BTW, thanks, aldiboronti, for posting the more recent browser stats. I didn’t think IE was still dominating to the tune of 90% and wasn’t aware of Browser News as a resource. 