rendering engines revisited
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July 12, 2006 at 10:54 pm)
· Filed under KHTML
, browsers , cross platform , debugging , firefox , gecko , mac , opera , safari
No! Don’t groan! I can be long winded, yes, but this one’s short and sweet. There was a point I had wanted to add to the last post but as happens, it got left out. But it is a good one… why, exactly, do I care so much about which browsers user which rendering engines? Or even on their general history?
When I’m checking to see if my web pages work across various platforms and various browsers, I don’t have to start out by going through and checking how they appear in an all encompassing, exhausting review using each and ever on any and all. If I hit the four main engines in the order of their percentage of use: Trident, Gecko, Presto (Opera), and KHTML, I’m in a very good position. Granted, for more troublesome nit picky detail, it is possible for two different gecko-based browsers to have different problems with some bit of HTML or CSS or JS or other, but in the main, I’ve likely shaken out all the major glaring problems in the most efficient manner.
Knowing that Safari has the lion’s share of the Mac OS lets me ensure that I’ve taken care of the majority of Mac users by checking with that one. If there’s some issue with MacIE, I can pretty much leave it alone or let it degrade. Or if I’m pressed for time, I can choose Safari over MacIE or Camino or Mac Firefox and get pretty good Mac coverage.
Speaking of which, I’m aware that this blog doesn’t display well in Safari. I’m hoping to have some time on a borrowed Mac soon to figure out why.
Brian Layman said,
July 13, 2006 @ 6:11 pm
My order is a bit different than yours… We should also remember that Opera is usually reported lower than is really real because it is often configured to report itself as IE…
Here’re my figures for this month… IE and FF have been rapidly converging. For a few months IE was around 90%
MS Internet Explorer/Trident 67.60%
Firefox/Gecko 24.40%
Safari/khtml 2.50%
Opera/Presto 1.90%
Unknown 1.50%
Mozilla 0.60%
Netscape 0.60%
Konqueror 0.10%
Camino 0.10%
UP.Browser (PDA/Phone browser)
Brian Layman said,
July 13, 2006 @ 6:16 pm
oops typo there… KHTML is Konqueror of course. I should have labled Safari Webcore…
Cindy said,
July 13, 2006 @ 10:53 pm
Actually, you raise a good point. The actual “best matrix” will depend on the particular site, of course. The one that I maintain at work is a little atypical as we have a fair number of Max OS 9 users — and Mac IE is basically useless (not because we won’t support it but it simply cannot deal with unicode) and so Mac Firefox is a relatively high percentage for us. If I look at the stats for this website, well they’re slightly skewed since my Firefox usage puts Gecko up much higher
I’d have to revisit that in a year when I’ve got a more statistically valid sample of visiters…