Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Browser Roll-Call

It is critical that professional web developers be familiar with the most popular browsers in current use and not just the ones on their own desktops. This section provides basic information about the browsers that web developers care about most, whether because of total share of web usage (Internet Explorer 6 for Windows) or because its technology and standards support is important to the development community (Opera). The browsers listed here make up more than 99% of total usage as of this writing.

Tip

There are scores of less common browsers, some with loyal followings, as well as older browser versions that are still in use. Unfortunately, it is not possible to list them all in this chapter. http://Evolt.org, a site for the web development community, keeps a complete archive of browsers old and new at http://browsers.evolt.org.

Table 2-1 lists the browsers and their release dates, platforms, rendering engines, and level of standards support, while the following sections describe each browser in more detail.

Table 2-1. Various web browsers

Browser	Release date	Platform	Rendering engine	Standards support
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6	2001	Windows	Trident IV	CSS 1, some CSS 2, some CSS 3, ECMAScript, DOM (with proprietary implementations and quirks)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 (Windows)	1999 (5), 2001 (5.5)	Windows	Trident II (5) and III (5.5)	Most CSS 1, some CSS 2 (with bugs), partial support of ECMAScript/DOM
Microsoft Internet Explorer ...