Research & Development for 3D & the Web

As someone who works with the web day to day, there are some things which tend to give you ‘groan’ moments. The moments where you can’t help but feel sorry for those less ‘browser-endowed’. This post is aimed at being a little provocative and if you are reading this post (and make it to the end) and are not using a Modern Browser, you are obviously somewhat interested in what a modern browser can offer and should definitely go and upgrade. If for any reason your web-cataract is clouding your vision and you  still feel that your current, old browser is adequate, please post a comment with your reasoning and let us see if we can’t work a little virtual Fred Hollows magic for you.

Lets start by looking at a couple of the more popular ‘Modern Browsers’ such as Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. I’ll purposefully not include Internet Explorer in this post, except to say that should you be unfortunate enough to ‘have’ to use it, I pray that you have got at least Internet Explorer 8 (for XP) or 9 for Vista/Windows 7 users and that you will at some stage in the near future entertain the thought of a switch to one of the aforementioned three.

Accessibility and compatibility of these modern browsers is becoming ever better and easier to do. Jump onto their website, grab the latest install file for the browser and use the wizard to install it (5 minute job). Should you already have a version of one of these browsers installed, the auto-update features now days are fantastic as they will notify you when an update/newer version is available – you can even have them do the download automatically so that all you need to do is restart the browser. If you don’t have auto-update enabled (this comes enabled out of the box, so you’ve turned this off for some reason) you can generally poke around in the ‘About’ or ‘Help’ Menu options and there will be an option to ‘check for updates’.

Check this, DO this! It’s benefiting yourself and everybody else. To see what browser you are currently running, you can click this link: http://www.bfinternet.co.uk/browsersniff.html?TB_iframe=true&height=200&width=400

The web is an ever evolving thing/place/object/entity. Things are always improving and evolving and this is primarily driven by how you can view it and access it using your Web Browser, be it on your laptop, PC, smart phone, tablet or other web enabled device.

For me, users who do not update/make use of the newest features tools on offer are shooting everyone else in the foot. When developing a new website for a client, something a client wants is some cool bells and whistles to aid in attracting traffic and capturing their viewers attention so that people want to come back. This is great, and how things should be! For a developer this is the fun part – creating something new or innovative or eye catching.

The saddest part comes when something which sounds amazing and fun (for both viewers and developers) gets the browser compatibility conversation from the team: ”oh and how will that work for users using Internet Explorer 6, 7 (or even 8)? What about older versions of Firefox eg. pre-version 3.6? Suddenly this idea becomes a series of great idea destroying compromises  ‘perhaps we could do this as a work-around’, ‘what if we tried this so that it KIND OF does what we want’.

Unfortunately, out of date browsers is still something web developers have to take into consideration even 8 or more years after Internet Explorer 6 was released. In that amount of time, you would almost certainly have updated something like your mobile phone or bought a new car or television, and why else would you do that but because they are newer/better with more gadgets and improvements  so why is the same not true for your Browser? It’s Free!

Here are a number of other good reasons why you should always keep your browser up to date if my rant has not yet convinced you:

- Most obviously is the increased security standards!
- Modern browsers allow you to view sites which are richer, nicer and neater to look at,
- Faster Browsing
- Support HTML 5
- Better customization options (turn off things you don’t need to speed things up for example)
- Plugins (enhance your browsing using plugins which are particularly good in Chrome and Firefox)
- Browser enhancements to things like Bookmarking, tabs, searching, look and feel

There are so many other good reasons – those are just some others which spring straight to mind.

Do yourself and the world a favor and update today. After getting to the list of reasons when writing this, I suddenly recalled an article one of the guys linked in the office a little while back. This article captures a lot of what I’ve said (perhaps in a clearer and succinct way) and I do like the idea of having an ‘update your parents browser day’. Enjoy: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57331117-264/a-worthy-cause-update-your-parents-browser-day/