15 Feb
Web browsers and compatibility
Web Design
To search and view pages on the Internet, Internet users use software called "browsers". Web browsers support the development of the Internet since its early days. Today the variety of browsers with very different performance is not without questions of compatibility.
History of Web Browsers
A browser is software to view and interact with websites. Web browsers are the best known: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.
Their story really began in 1994 with Netscape that will quickly establish itself in the early years of the Web, before declining gradually in favor of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, whose first version was soon free and built into Windows 95.
From 2000 to 2005, Internet Explorer browser itself as the leader with a peak usage of 95% in 2002 and 2003. After winning the "browser wars", Microsoft suspended the changes in its IE6 browser for 5 years.
In November 2004, Mozilla revived the race for innovation with its Firefox browser. In 2008, Google accentuated the cycle of innovation with its browser Google Chrome. End of 2011, the combined market share of these two browsers has exceeded 50%.
What is the cross-browser compatibility?
Each browser has its own "display engine" and a single site will have a display and a very different behavior depending on the browser. The cross-browser compatibility is then to show a result almost identical to the same site regardless of browser used.
Consequences for the user experience
Generally the majority of websites are designed to have a very close view of a browser to another (except for small shifts or fonts can be slightly deviant from the original version). The important thing is to keep the general spirit of the website, however, Internet users who read a site from a single browser does not will suspect the existence of these differences.
Because of the growing gap in the ability of browsers, certain Web agencies have instead opted to develop sophisticated websites, viewable only on the most efficient versions of browsers, even abandoning the browser compatibility least performing or older.