What browser do you use? (Please READ before voting)

[darkuni]

In pursuit of making the BTV web interface better for all browsers, it would be interesting to poll everyone on what they use.

This would be your PRIMARY browser (we ALL have to use IE for SOMETHING - thanks to overly poor web development) - the one you use MOST.

If you use a browser that ISN'T listed here but DOES use a browser's engine (i.e. Avant, Crazy Browser, myIE2, etc. are ALL IE browsers - that's the engine they use. They should not be considered "Other").

OTHER should ONLY be used if the engine driving your browser is NOT listed here. I'll include the MOST popular ones with their 'engines'.

If you use an EARLIER version of the browser listed, please select that browser, not OTHER. For example, if you run IE5 (God help you), then select IE6, not OTHER.

Thanks guys; I think this will be interesting

[mcowger]

You might add Kameleon under Gecko and Konquerer under Safari (both Safari and Konquerer use the KTML engine/widget)

[flavius]

Interesting? Yes. Pointless? For sure. There is no question what engines have to be supported. Btw: Anything Netscape 4.7x does not have to be on that list. Amazingly enough some people are still using that one.

[darkuni]

Its actually not pointless. Anyone developing web applications should be asking this question to a broad base of users.

Why is that? Why can't server logs provide this information? Because its spoofed. I don't know about Firefox, but Opera can be made to spoof pretty much any browser it wants to. This means that if a million people are using Opera spoofing IE6, then IE6 is getting a million more hits in toto while Opera is showing as none. That's not exactly a fair accounting of browser usage. With all the plugins Firefox has, SURELY there is one in there for spoofing other browsers, no?

Its also important because people building .NET web applications need to realize that Microsoft's approach to "anything but IE" is crippling their applications unjustly. ASP.net will happily take a fully capable browser like Firefox or Opera, and render a powerful DHTML-enabled page to HTML3.2 (removing anything cool and worthwhile) simply because its not IE. Not like I needed to hate Microsoft any more than I already do, but that sucks. A good web developer cannot ignore this heavy Microsoft slanting and NEEDS to do the cross-browser manually to avoid this.

The good web applications developer can make W3C compliant code (achieving 99% of what they wanted to) and disable "ASP.NET Intelligent" (damn, that's almost the DEFINITION of oxymoron) serving of pages - rendering everyone a rich and glorious experience in their web application - not just people sheeping along using brain dead browsers like IE.

Pointless? I don't think so. Unless you use and love IE .. then I guess its pointless. Me, I do not ... and the survey shows a lot of other people don't either

[flavius]

All I meant was that one would have to support Gecko and Opera at least anyway. And as you state that's best being done by writing compliant code, not by asking browsers who they are and relying on it.

[darkuni]

Unfortunately, developers are ... well .. tend to be lazy. "Works in IE, IE is on every computer - so who cares about compliance and cross browser compatibility? We can demand they use IE."

.NET did NOTHING to improve this paradigm by promising 'cross browser compatibilty' which does nothing more than screw anyone NOT using IE out of a rich web experience.

These sort of polls I think are helpful to developers - for them to see that there are MANY of us that really want that rich experience without slaving to IE.

[flavius]

Looking at the results. Gecko seems to be gaining ground. Excellent!

[darkuni]

I'm an Opera man myself, but as long as you're not using IE, I'm no bigot

[SmokyMtnz]

Interesting to see the Gecko/Mozilla 1.x (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 7.x) choice beating IE by a slight margin. I use Firefox.

Will BTV 3.5 support other browsers?

[ticklemeozmo]

yes__

[kramsauer]

I use Maxthon as I get the best of both worlds: power of firefox, compatibility of IE (though of course it retains most of the negatives of the IE world).

That said, I am glad 3.5 appears to support other browsers. Hopefully this is a trend across the wider web community.

[dequire]

Originally Posted by SmokyMtnz

Interesting to see the Gecko/Mozilla 1.x (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 7.x) choice beating IE by a slight margin. I use Firefox.

Will BTV 3.5 support other browsers?

That's because we're knowledgeable computer geeks

Ma and Pa surfers would yield vastly different results. But hopefully, that's slowly changing with all of the security publicity out there. Plus, no matter what anyone says, once you go tabbed browsing, there's no going back!

[Leaf]

I'm the resident pc geek amoungst everyone I know. They all have mozilla installed on their pc's now!

[dequire]

Originally Posted by Leaf

I'm the resident pc geek amoungst everyone I know. They all have mozilla installed on their pc's now!

Is that because you 'nudged' them in that direction, or did they do this of their own free will?

[richt]

I nudged!!
But only because I know it will buy me some time until the hacker and adware writers figure out how to mess with Firefox. At least until then I have saved myself some time and frustration fixing these types of problems.