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Supported browsers | Video resolution and colors | Recommended browsers | Known problems
The goal of MG Web sites is to work
on every existent browser. However, I chose to support the most
advanced specification given by the W3C, i.e. XHTML 1.1
1 and CSS 2.1, and the code for
every page is automatically fixed by HTML Tidy before displaying. In
particular, if you have a browser with limited or absent support
for CSS (like Netscape up to version 4.8), you could have major
displaying problems. I don’think I’ll wirte much code
for old browsers, because I think that the use of shared and
accepted standards is most important in Web design, more than
accesibilty for old-generation browsers, so if you have such I
browser it’better to update it. Is it exaggerate? I think
that it’s worse to force Web users to a particular browser
because of ActiveX controls or other proprietary technology,
especially for public interest websites (e.g. institutions)
Instead, MG Web sites are built on open standards (XHTML, CSS,
Javascript in some cases), and all the pages with XHTML and CSS
validity logos should work perfectly with those (and later)
versions of those browsers: Firefox (and probably all derivatives),
Safari 1.2, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 5.0, Konqueror 3,
Camino 0.7, Opera 7, Epiphany, Iceweasel, Iceape, IceCat,
SeaMonkey, Mozilla 1.0, Firebird 0.6, Netscape 6.0, Galeon 1.2,
Lynx 2.8, Links 0.9 and ELinks 0.9. Is that enough?
So, please report only problems with these browsers, after checking
the known problems section
below. If you have a browser not listed here, test the site and
report me your results: if they are OK, I’ll put it in the
compatible browsers. You can check your browser version and its
capabilities using the link below. Suggestion: don’change
your browser identification, as Lynx, Opera, Konqueror and others
make possible, except if you want to make tests.
As for screen resolution, 1024x768x16bpp or better is strongly suggested. Font choice should be good under either Windows, Linux or Mac OS, if your browser is CSS-compliant.
The best
browser 
If you want my opinion about what browser to use,
here’s my answer: Firefox
(Iceweasel in Debian), for Linux/Windows
platforms. Because it is quite light and standards-compliant, it is
good to see, it features tabbed browsing, popup blocking, RSS/Atom
support, good AJAX support, and because it is OPEN SOURCE,
providing you the opportunity to improve it, either participating
in the development or writing extensions. That's why it reached, in
less than a year after the announcement of 1.0 version, 100 million
downloads, and 200 million in 2 years. Particularly suggested is
version 2.0, which includes some features from the most used
extensions (like RSS/Atom reader built-in and session saving),
possibly with Tab Mix Plus extension. And the others?
Mozilla (or SeaMonkey, its
respawn, named Iceape in Debian) is heavier and
has less graphic integration with modern Windows environments than
Firefox (on Linux, SeaMonkey and Firefox use a more up-to-date GTK2
library, while Mozilla uses GTK1); and if you still want its e-mail
client, you can easily switch to the stand-alone clone Thunderbird.
There’s nothing more to say, as Mozilla uses the same
rendering engine as Firefox (called Gecko).
Netscape is not free software, but its rendering
engine is based on Mozilla's, and as of version 8 the browser is
built on Firefox code and can use, on Windows, the IE rendering
engine, for those sites still unaware of the existence of MANY
browsers. Probably, many innovations will be implemented in
Firefox/Mozilla, but not immediately on Netscape. And IMHO,
Netscape graphic is very heavy.
Galeon and Epiphany require GNOME
e Mozilla to work, while Firefox only needs GTK2 on Linux. Galeon
interface is also more complex, while Epiphany has no RSS/Atom
support and a more limited set of extensions.
Konqueror has a compact interface, but it depends
on KDE, and this could make the browser slow, especially if you
don’use KDE as your desktop manager; like Safari, it has a
great CSS2 support, but it doesn’t support inline use of XSLT
through the <?xml-stylesheet?> declaration, like
Firefox does. Also, like Safari, it is not up-to-date about AJAX
support, making some Web applications (like Gmail, Google Reader,
Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar) not work or work
bad.
Internet Explorer? The only positive note up to
version 6 is that maybe it still has the best XML/XSLT support, but
a very bad CSS support, which makes displaying different from other
browsers (there’s also a bad PNG support). AND it will
never be open. AND it will never be ported to Linux. AND version 7,
which makes things better for CSS, PNG, feeds and tabbed browsing,
is available only for Windows XP SP2 and upcoming Vista. It’s
good to know, however, that the challenge launched by Firefox had
made Microsoft to improve a product that still has about 90% market
share.
About Opera, the discussion is more complex.
Before 7.50 version it was really upsetting: quite all IE problems
(but with Linux support), very heavy interface, a nonsense
THIRTY-FOUR (34) euros price, which (if not paid) led to heavier
ads. With 7.50, things went better: lighter interface, more
standards-compliant, a complete Internet Suite (with mail user
agent et al.). Then, with 8.02, Opera went free. Now, Opera is a
good browser, but if you want your browser to share the look
n’ feel of your GUI, or a if you want a standalone browser,
then it’not for you.
So, I suggest to install Firefox (which also has a beautiful
eye-catching logo). You’ll always get the best displaying of
MG Web pages. At least, avoid Internet Explorer before version
7.
What about Mac? I don’know what to choose between
Camino, Safari or Firefox itself;
the first and the third are indeed more “free” than the
second (which, moreover, is available only for Mac OS X), but
Safari seems to be faster and more robust (surely Safari on MacOS X
is better than IE on Windows), and it has probably the best CSS2
support available and a good built-in RSS/Atom reader (developed
before those of IE7 and Fx2). Alas, like Konqueror, AJAX support is
weaker than in IE/Firefox, making applications like Gmail chat not
work. My choice (I have a MacBook since November 2006) is to use
Safari, switching to Camino/Firefox whenever necessary. Probably, a
Safari with a full support of AJAX will definitely be the best
choice.
* Massive use of entities (thanks to Tidy) would permit better visualization of non-7bit characters, like accented letters, euro symbol, typographic quotes and apostrophes etc. In some cases (especially with text browsers) you should have to manually set the encoding to ISO-8859-15 or ISO-8859-1 (UTF-8 for some pages); with old browsers, some entities would not be displayed correctly.
* Fixed positioning property, a CSS2 feature, is not supported by Internet Explorer up to version 6; PNG handling is also faulty (both things are corrected from version 7). This will lead to a slighty different displaying for some pages.
* Currently there is no mobile version of the site; only MG Web homepage was adapted. This is work in progress; I want to make both a specific address for mobile (something like m.mg55.net) and a auto-redirect on “mobile” version if a device of that kind is found. I want to point out that mobile/non mobile device recognition is done through User-Agent processing with the php_browscap.ini by Browser Capabilities Project, so any error is their fault :-)
1There are two differences
between XHTML 1.1 and XHTML 1.0 Strict that give me
problems in migrating pages to the newer standard.
The first is the absence of the name attribute in the
<map> element. Ideally, browser had to find a
client-side image map using the id attribute; actually,
all browsers use name and don’t consider id
if used alone. The problem is that, with 1.1, you can’t
specify both id and name attributes to solve the
problem, like you can do with 1.0 Strict, because the document
wouldn’t be valid 1.1. So you have to remove image maps or
keep 1.0 version.
The other problem is that, for some unknown reason, Tidy downgrades
XHTML 1.1 pages to XHTML 1.0 Strict if it finds
onmouseover and onmouseout attributes, besides
these attributes are present in the XHTML
Modularization specification (on which 1.1 is based), and the
validator
accepts them. For the moment, I have to live with that.
So the policy is: pages without onmouseover and
onmouseout attributes or image maps are valid XHTML 1.1,
the other ones are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
W3C®, XHTML, CSS are registered and unregistered trademarks of World Wide Web Consortium (MIT, ERCIM, Keio).
Mattia
Gentilini
Last update: 2009-06-25 15:38:36