Which Browsers must a site work with

This is my first post and I hope it is in the right place.

I would like to know the browsers that I must design for to gain inclusion in the ODP. I am particularly concerned about 2 issues
1) NN4.x
2) The various browsers interpretation of the CSS box model and other CSS issues.

Any help and guidance would be appreciated.

Short answer: All of them

If an editor cannot review your site because of incompatibility between your site and the editor's browser of choice, the site will not be reviewed. (Unless the editor is willing to switch browsers just to review your site.)

We have editors who still use Lynx. For a content-rich site without a lot of "flash" ("bling-bling" as opposed to Macromedia Flash) this is usually more than adequate. For myself, IE is too much of a security risk and lacks some of the nice features I prefer in Mozilla Firefox.

However, since 90+% of the general user population uses one of the more recent flavors of Internet Explorer, you can expect that editors are about the same percentage.

Let me reinforce: We can only review sites that we can access, and we are not required to use any particular browser. If your site is hostile/inaccessible to certain types of browsers, you can expect that you have effectively reduced the pool of editors who can review your site by some amount.

Thanks for the quick response wrathchild. Please let me clarify my question

To give an example of my concerns:
IE5.x uses a non W3C compliant interpretation of CSS box model. If I design W3C compliant it would display as intended in IE6 and Mozilla Variants such as Firefox (my preference) early IE versions 5.x would however display in a quirky way as MS unilateraly decided was correct at the time. Also by using a NN4.x specific set of styles a page can be designed to gracefully degrade and still be functional.

I do have other concerns related to the different interpretations of the same code or CSS style by different browsers that are genuine problems and not down to my coding techniques being too ambitious. Also to use the lowest common denominator for evermore would be a bit of a handicap for progress towards a fully standards compliant Internet.

All I am asking is for guidance so that when designing or repairing a clients site, I do not do them a disservice due to my ignorance of what is a genuinely practical ODP "Requirement".

If I may comment, for someone who is trying to get listed in ODP, one would assume that in many case it is to increase business and increase the number of views to the site. So why not make the site available to those other browsers anyway?

I have talked to site owners who will say that if their site works with IE, that is good enough.

I'm not sure what the current stats are for browser use. I know the stats for one of my sites shows that IE is around 70%. However, lets say users of Netscape/Mozilla are only 10%. Why throw away those customers?

I find a large number of sites either fail or display incomplete parts of the site using the Mozilla browser [my choice of browsers]. If a site displays incompletely, I may choose to not publish it, and assume it's incomplete/under construction. If I guess it's a browser problem, I'll put in back in unreviewed, and later on try it with IE, if it works, it gets published but gets the words [May not work with all browsers] tagged on the description - I don't think that looks so good.

We don't have a requirement.

If you consider your users and design a site that degrades gracefully[1] when viewed on an old or non standards compliant browser, then whichever ODP editor reviews your site won't have a problem.

[1] We care about content and the site must obviously be navigable and respond in a reasonable timescale. All the rest is cosmetics and frippery.

<added> Beaten by bobrat - again </added>

I guess I'd like to reinforce what's been said and add a small point here.

Editors will review the site using whatever browser they happen to be running. I suspect that ODP editors tend to use Mozilla and Netscape more than a general cross section of the population.

If the site doesn't degrade gracefully, and the editor cannot successfully review the site because of browser issues, he or she will leave it for someone else to review. So while the site might have lost *that* opportunity for review. It does not loose *all* opportunities for review.

As Jim Noble said, there's no requirement, and just because the site cannot be reviewed by an editor running Lynx, it won't be removed from the heap of unreviewed sites. It will simply sit there and wait until someone who has both an interest in working in that category and a browser capable of viewing the content comes along.

I wouldn't worry too much about IE 5. NN 4 is the last refuge of DOS/Win16 bit users, and may have some value in checking it. As for CSS boxes not working, in my experience very few sites get CSS boxes coded right -- maybe less than 5%. The "absolute" placement based on an assumed font size is extremely common -- probably based on the IE's idiotic handling of font size.

I wouldn't worry too much. If you really need a particular browser, put that in brackets at the end of the description [requires W3C-compliant browser; will not work with IE 5]. The editor will think about the best way of saying that, and any editor who doesn't have the right browser will just skip the submittal.

If you _don't_ mention that on the description or the front page, you run a slight risk of an editor using the "wrong" browser and thinking the site is so badly miscoded as to be unreadable. (Not all editors are sophisticated technology users; and most of the time we don't need to be.)

Thanks hutcheson
That is a bit more of what I am looking for. I intend to code my CSS to be W3C compliant to CSS2 spec. Mozilla variants are the most compliant. This does however leave too many browsers and therefore visitors with a less than ideal page view. The biggest group of these is IE 5.x that is all 5.0 and 5.5 series, a sizeable number that I don't intend to ignore. There are coding hacks that will get round this problem for al IE 5.x browsers.

There are however IE 4.x IE 3.x and even earlier versions of IE. In addition there are NN4.xx and NN3.x and even earlier versions. Then we have Opera and many others. I don't intend to spend hours and hours trial and error coding every CSS defined element to find hacks for every version of every browser for to artificially simulate their compliance.

What I really want to know is which obsolete browsers can I safely abandon very time consuming support for without endangering ODP inclusion.

What I didn't want and didn't expect is the stock answer "ALL of them" which I imagine is no more true than it is helpful.

Inclusion in ODP is not determined by techniques used on your site. It is purely based on content.

You only should think about your potential visitors and use techniques they can handle. This can be very different for different target audiences.
One of my own sites for example gets
Internet Explorer 6.x 88.9 %
Internet Explorer 5.x 8.9 %
Netscape 7.x 2.2 % (this includes Mozilla and variants)
Do I bother about Opera and other browsers. No. But I know it works in Opera as I have it installed myself next to IE6, Netscape 7 and Mozilla.

My advice is: life isn't long enough to try to work around all the IE 3 and IE 4 bugs, even in someone were actually using them, which hardly anyone is.

From the above, it seems that I can ignore IE5.0 and previous versions of IE.
I am confused about NN4.X - is an editor likely to review a site in NN4.X and exclude on non compliance? It would seem earlier NN versions can be ignored.

My list of "Must work Browsers is looking like:
NN6 onwards
Mozilla variants
Opera 7.0 onwards
IE 5.5 onwards
Any other Browser that is fully WC3 CSS2 compliant.

If any site that I submit for review is fully functional in the above browsers, is any editor likely to use another type of browser that would result in rejection.

I stress that this is not a lazy coding approach but an attempt to quantify the number of browser tests and debuging loops for each page before uploading for the world and ODP Editors to view.

Many sites that I am repairing for clients have been put together by designers that apparently only tested in one version or another of IE. I need to quantify the repair effort needed and in some cases whether a complete new site is required. As one of my criteria would be to provide them with a site that merits inclusion in several manual reviewed directories (ODP included), I thought I would join this Forum for guidance little realising that it would be so difficult to get an answer to what I thought was a straight forward question..

Eventualy there seems almost enough info to proceed with, thank you to those that contributed in a constructive way.

If any site that I submit for review is fully functional in the above browsers, is any editor likely to use another type of browser that would result in rejection.

Click to expand...

Chances are most editors using older browsers know they're using older browsers and would merely not review a site that didn't load properly for them rather than toss it out completely.

I think what motsa said is true.

I know I used to use Netscape and switched to IE because I got fed up with putting sites back for review later with IE. I have been using IE with high security and no Active-X - and some sites have to wait for people who can handle Flash.

A lot of sites display a warning that they have an Active-X control and so may not display properly on my machine, but seem fine even without the Active-X control, and I review those. (However, I seriously considering switching back to doing my reviews with Netscape. I still have it on my machine.)

The bad news for you, if I do is that is that I have Netscape 4.7 on my machine. I passed on 6 because I know people who have had problems with it. Netscape 7 is not an option for me. My computer is too old. So while I would not be apt to delete a listing because I couldn't see it with 4.7, I wouldn't be listing it either. It could make the wait for review longer.

This is why you got the answer you don't like - "all browsers." We don't know which browser the editor(s) who review(s) your site will be using. However, I agree you can forget about the really old ones like IE3.

For Mac users I'd add Safari to your list.

Thanks for that additional input, it fills in some gaps. If your equipment is too old for Netscape 7, try (MOzilla) Firefox.
V0.9 has just come out and with the right tweaks, it is the quickest cleanest browser that I have come across. Because it is mean and lean it demands less Computer resources to run and is a better bet than going back to NN4.7 (IMHO).

I also steer clear of Flash whenever the choice is mine and even when forced to, I use it as a graphic insert on a straight HTML page. As for Active-X I will not allow it on my browsers or through my firewall so I certainly don't incorporate it in my designs.

All I want is to present visitors (and Reviewers) with a pleasant, informative and functional site. I use CSS extensively to remove code bloat that comes with tables and font tags by doing this I can speed up download considerably as well as (almost fully) control the load order to improve the useability for the majority of visitors with dialup speed restrictions.

Replacing tables and multi nested table with CSS increases the Browser compatibility problems hence my visit here.

Thanks again to all those that contributed opinions and knowledge.

Thanks for the recommendation, but alas, my machine is not fast enough for Firefox.

I think the real problem is that the ODP basically has very few requirements "for itself" -- everything is for the users. And you know the users as well as I do -- they're a mix of grannie geeks running test Mozilla versions on liquid-cooled Commodore Pets, and computer-illiterate teens running whatever happens to be installed on their parents' system, and everything in between. And ODP editors are just a random sampling of users (perhaps slightly above the average at grammar).

Aim for your users, give them the information they need about what technology they need for your site, and the ODP editors will have been amply provided for.

hutcheson said:

Aim for your users, give them the information they need...and the ODP editors will have been amply provided for.

Click to expand...

I think this would be a suitable response to all those "what do I have to do to get into ODP?" queries.

Not to jump in with useless advice...but can't you throw in a few little lines of Java that sniff out what browser they're using? Seems like a simple matter to create one site to cover 95% of users, and a single "Upgrade, Dammit!" page for the other 5%.

Good luck,
Nareau

Hum...

This document is obsolete and the information in it should not be relied upon. The practices described here are not recommended and this document is provided only for historical reference. Please see the web-developer documentation index page for more up-to-date documentation.

Click to expand...

[Box placed at the top of http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/browser_type.html]

*ahem*

JavaScript is not Java.