Browsers: Switch or Upgrade...?

We want you to have the best web experience possible. Because of that, we want you to think about the tools that you use when you are online. This post is geared specifically at web browsers.

Browsers
Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox (FF), and Safari are the most mainstream browsers out there. The reason for this post is to encourage you to make sure that you are using the latest version of whichever browser you have chosen to use. To be perfectly honest, that comment is directed to anyone who is using IE for a browser, sorry.

IE doesn't play nice with the web community at large and is slowly beginning to change because people continue to switch. How do I know this? Check out the statistics that are found here at the w3schools website. You can see that users are upgrading to IE 7 from IE 6, but more importantly, users are switching all together to FF or Safari!

FF and Safari render the text and graphics on your website as they should and adhere to the rules of the Web community.

Graphics Lesson
If you really love IE, then stick with it. Know that I will be praying for you. HA! In all seriousness though, the reason why I want to encourage you to update your IE version is because the websites that you visit will look better. This is because IE 7 finally decided to render graphic files with the file extension of PNG.

Images that you have probably heard of are JPG and GIF. PNGs trump these other formats because they are the best of what JPGs and GIFs have to offer. PNGs will render a gradient (fading from one color to another) without degradation (this is what a JPG does) as well as render a transparent background correctly (that is what a GIF does).

If you go to a website (with IE 6) and you see a strange box or a graphic that looks completely out of place, this is probably because the designer of the website needs to render a gradient (like a drop shadow on an image), and it needs to sit on top of another graphic without blocking the background image from view (thus needing transparency), so they are using a PNG. BUT...because IE 6 can't figure out what to do with the graphic, it renders the graphic with a whacked out color in the background.

If you would like to be uber nerdy, you can check out Wikipedia's explanation of JPGs, GIFs and PNGs by going here:

• PNG - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphic
• JPG - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG
• GIF - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF