The first thing I learned about web design – don’t use IE to build your site. Build it to work in Firefox, then fix it for IE. This not only insures the site is coded per web standards, it also makes life easier.
Like many web designers, I am a Mac user. This is more because Adobe doesn’t make their programs for Ubuntu (a very user friendly Linux flavor) than anything. Yes, I know there are workarounds, but I don’t want to mess with them. Having a Mac also makes it easier to test Safari for Mac users.
Yes, I know there are less Safari users than there are IE, Firefox or even Chrome users these days. However, as more people buy Macs, Safari is the default.
On the most recent website I built for a client, that client was a Mac user. While my direct contact had both Safari and Firefox on his computer, he used both interchangeably. This meant that anything I showed him for approval had to work in either browser. Once I got approval, I could go back and make it work in IE.
This exercise taught me something very valuable – if it works in Safari it will work in Firefox. However, if I made a very simple code error, as far as web standards go, it did not work correctly in Safari – even if it worked in IE.
There it is, I said it – it is easier to code for Safari, and go back to fix IE later than to code for Firefox, Safari is just more web standard compliant.
Yes, Safari users are less than 6%, and I can see why – the browser is just not as usable as its competitors. Firefox has lots of add-ons and even IE has better overall functionality, in my opinion as a user. That said, Safari is the most web compliant.
For the record, testing in Chrome, Google’s upstart that seems to be taking the browsing world by storm, was just as good as testing in Firefox.
I’m sure there are blogs out there that talk about which browser is the most compliant, I remember reading one while back in Linux Format Magazine. However, until you see a practical use, people are just going to use the one they like to brows the web. For me, that is Firefox.
When you are designing/building a website, you want your test browser to just work, because you want to get the job done quickly. My advice, build for Safari, then fix for IE. Firefox and Chrome will be just fine, but you’ll want to test your site in them anyway.