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So I am planning to make an existing website mobile friendly. The good part is that it is entirely text based with a few images which can likely be omitted from the mobile version of the site.
The bad part is that it is a VERY complex site with a ton of pages (and each page can vary based on the data and the user accessing the site) A lot of it is also legacy code (as in, old html which does NOT validate)
So I would like to know what should be the best strategy to make the mobile friendly site? Creating a parallel version is out of the question because that would be a huge task
A separate CSS is obvious. But what about the best practices/guidelines to design for mobile devices to ensure that the site is usable and looks decent?
For reference, the backend is in PHP + MySql and Front end in htmls + CSS and bits of JS (the JS is degradable)
Edit: To be more clear, I would like advice on the design aspect. What are the good practices in designing for mobile devices?
A few quick tips for designing for mobile:
Vertical scrolling only, not horizontal.
Make links large enough to easily press with a finger (If it's a touchscreen device).
Keep pages small (under 20KB is best) - including any image or css files
Accept that some devices will render some element differently
Make sure you're XHTML is valid
Choose colour schemes that work even in bright daylight
Only include what is relevant - make the most of limited screen real estate
Try and avoid complex navigation
Don't use absolute sizing in CSS
Use minimal CSS and Javascript - test thoroughly when you do use
Take advantage of features that are part of the phone (click to call, etc.)
Mobilize, don't just minimize
Avoid user input where possible (selecting from drop down is preferable to entering text - when possible)
Test, Test, Test! (emulators first, then borrow your friends and colleagues phones to enable testing on a wide variety)
Design for short periods of user interaction - make it quick and easy for the person to complete a task.
Be consistent - follow design guidelines and defacto standards
Use accesskeys for links
Hope these help.
iPhone specific answer:
For the iPhone, I'd choose not to optimize. Safari for iPhone is very capable of displaying webpages as they are. Check this answer, and the question for more about iPhone optimization.
General answer:
I'd agree with mr-euro for the technical optimization. Design wise you'd have to take into consideration a small resolution (like 320x240). I'd leave the drop down out or any fancy javascripting for that matter. Most mobile devices aren't very good at handling scripts and tend to become sluggish.
If you manage to convert the site to W3 validated XHTML 1.1 then it would render properly in a mobile phone browser.
You could try to setup another server which proxies the request from mobile browsers to the real server and feed them to a program such as tidy, which can build valid (X)HTML from pretty ugly HTML. This may let you use the existing service with absolutely no change, at some processing cost.
You can find a small ruby example here (which uses a local proxy).
I think you have to be more specific here. Mobile browsers for regular cellphones are really primitive. If you target them, you have to make sure there is nothing "hard". The page basically should be just short pieces of text with full-width images.
If you target iPhone/whatever touch, you only need to kill flash/java, hovers and other non-touchable things you most likely don't have at all. Mobile Safari is truly like his big brother, you don't really need anything specific.
For Blackberries and the stuff, I'm not sure, but check out wsj mobile site as an example.
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I am programming since quite some years now.
Until now I was mainly focused on writing "normal" applications which run inside a console or with a GUI, sometimes also applications which interact with hardware components such as sensors / actors / ...
During this time I got to know a lot of cool programming principles and tools such as object orientation, modularization, unit-testing, test-driven-development, desing-patterns, code-analysis, ..
Also I have some first experience with hosting a wordpress blog, running static web-sites on a nginx webserver, and writing some small php-forms. But I feel like there is still too much magic in all these web-development topics. And I would like to fill this gap and learn a bit more about all these connected scripting / programming languages and technologies. (Because I hate, when I don't understand how things are working :D :D )
I started with some online "Web-development bootcamp" course at udemy to get a rough overview. This took quite some days now and I think HTML, CSS and Javascript for DOM manipulation / animations are clear to me now. Also I heard a lot about NodeJS and all it's derivate languages and databases like Mongo-DB. But still I feel like there is a lot of things unclear to me.
To get to a better understanding I wanted to development some small web-application. Nothing very special, just some website where you have to login to, are able to generate some data and this data is then persisted into a database and once you login again you are able to see the data again.
I first started with developing some classes in Javascript to represent the data in the browser while you are logged in. But I very soon realized that the Javascript which can run inside the browser is very limited and already for unit-testing and modularization into separate files that include each other I actually needed to do some crazy work-arounds or use other server-side languages like nodejs / php / ... .
After some time coding I decided to take one step back, trying to understand the basic design patterns of web-applications and not running for a long time into the wrong direction.
My questions are:
Is there some typical way to go / best practice while developing web-applications?
What are the typical key players? I know there is the difference between front-end, back-end and databases.
But are there some do's and don't's that good WebDev's follow?
For example:
which code is usually written in back-end / server-side languages?
What is usually done in the front-end? (Only desing and animations?)
Do I have to move all business logic into the back-end, also for security reasons or is this maybe also a bad idea because of peformance reasons?
What programming languages are more or less dead and not to be used in the future?
What things are typically reused from frameworks, for example authentication and session handling?
Also I felt like some things I know from other programming languages are not so easy in languages like javascript / nodejs. I am willing to spend time and effort into learning all these things but I would also like to keep the quality standards that I know from C++ /
Python. On the other side I also wondered if these patterns that I have in my head are maybe just boundaries that are completely useless in modern web-development? (e.g. typing, object orientation, modularization / splitting the code to be very reusable )
What do you think am I on the wrong track here, or do I maybe simply use the wrong languages?
I hope the long text is not knocking everyone down / keeping everyone from answering me :o
I would really appreciate your help and guidance to understand everything a bit better and to not repeat the things already a lot of others have done wrong ;)
BR, mezorian
First off, most of the questions are very opionated (at least the answers are) and your question will probably be closed for that reason. So I will post my answer before completing it and expand on it after.
First off a good roadmap to become a web developer. I like it mainly because it shows the crazyness the web development world has come to (don't be shocked!): https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-2020-web-developer-roadmap-76503ddfb327
Trying to answer some of your question (answers are my opinion):
Is there some typical way to go / best practice while developing web-applications?
I'm tempted to say there are as many ways to do web development as there are web-developers in the world, but that might be a bit exaggerated. If you want some guidelines, I'd pick one of the major web frameworks and learn the way they do web development. With web frameworks I mean all kinds of frameworks starting with JS-frameworks all the way to static site generators, etc. They all have their ecosystem and their own rules.
What are the typical key players? I know there is the difference between front-end, back-end and databases.
(personal opinion) I work with Go in the backend. I love it because it brings back some simplicity in the crazy world of choices being a web developer. Since you know C, Go will probably be easy for you. It has static typing, structs, etc, but no need to manually manage your memory. It is also much faster than most other backend languages used in web development (Python, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, etc).
In the front-end I have used native JS, jQuery, React, Vue, etc. I'm still waiting for something that makes things easy again. Flutter seems to be something that has a good approach, but is not really a web front framework (yet). (Don't do public websites with Flutter! They are not indexable.) We'll see where it goes.
Databases I will not go into here as that is another huge topic. Let's just say that I'm more a fan of using multiple databases for their specific strengths rather than a big one that is supposed to be good at anything.
which code is usually written in back-end / server-side languages?
Even this depends largely on your choices (framework and preference). One thing for sure has to be in the backend and that is security related stuff. Anything you put in frontend code is visible to an experienced user.
Apart from that there are some ecosystems where you don't write any backend code but talk to a (cloud) service that is basically like a database with a web endpoint on top with secured login. (for example https://firebase.google.com/.) Here the security related stuff is baked into the service.
If you do both, keeping business logic in the backend is probably a good idea. If the frontend calculates something (for quick response), the backend should double check that (e.g. calculating the total in a cart). But this is too general. There can always be use cases where some business logic needs to be implemented in the front-end.
Do I have to move all business logic into the back-end, also for security reasons or is this maybe also a bad idea because of performance reasons?
Performance can be a problem, but mostly because the roundtrip time to the server and back. If you do that for every tiny information, the UI will become sluggish. You might want to think about doing e.g. a calculation client-side.
JS-Frameworks like React, Vue don't request html from the backend, but data and build the html based on that data client-side. I'd use them if I have a very data driven website / webapp, especially if it is user-dependent. Transferring only the data and building the html for every site from it in the browser based on user settings and data, saves a lot of roundtrips.
If you are worried about server performance: For the server to hit its limit, you'd need heavy usage of your website for that to become an issue (at least with Go). If you get there you can still use horizontal scaling (multiple instances of you server) to solve that. Unless you are working for a large company with millions of users daily, I'd not worry about scaling for now.
What programming languages are more or less dead and not to be used in the future?
Warning: Very opionated!
I'd say PHP is dead. Many headhunters I've spoken with agree with me. Companies are desperately looking for PHP developers, because many developers are moving on from PHP to something "cooler". You'll definitely find a job with PHP, but might not be so happy with your job. For me it is also a sign of how modern a company really is (if PHP is not it's main backend language (any more)).
Python currently has a big boom. Mostly because of AI development. I'm not sure if that boom is also in the web development, but I'd say not. I used Python before Go (5+ years ago) and before that PHP (8+ years ago). I rarely get Python web developer job offers (at least compared to PHP and Go).
Go is the language of the cloud. It is perfect for concurrent programming which is an essential part in web development (every http call should be handled concurrently). It is fast and light weight and doesn't need anything installed on the server to run (compiles to a single binary without dependencies).
NodeJS: Haven't used. I'm not a fan of Javascript (but it was (and kind of still is) the only option in the browser), so I never liked the idea of using it also in the backend.
TypeScript: might be an alternative to JavaScript (thinking of frontend here) if you like a more structured language.
It sounded like you want to build a user baser web app with data being managed by each user. This is what I would (probably) do in that case:
Backend in Go
Go serves static files (start html, css, js, images, etc.)
Go server has an api endpoint that serves data (e.g. REST style)
Vue (or React) in the frontend
Vue requests data from the api to build the user-specific content
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I'm ready to use the subdirectory format for my multilingual website.
My first question is:
For SEO, have I to translate the page name in the url or it is useless?
Example:
- Same filename
site.com/fr/login
site.com/en/login
OR
- Different filename
site.com/fr/connexion
site.com/en/login
Then, when user is on site.com: Should I redirect him to site.com/en and site.com/fr depending user's IP? Or have I to set a default local, and have my url like site.com/page and site.com/fr/page
Finally, what is the best way to get the local from user's current URL?
Parsing url to get /fr or /en, or add a GET parameter in url with lang=fr (hidden with htaccess)
Thanks :)
As a precondition, I assume that you are not using frameworks / libraries. Furthermore, I never have solved similar problems only using .htaccess (as the title of your question requests) and thus don't know if it is possible to do so. Nevertheless, the following guidelines may help you.
Your first question
In general, a web page's file name and path have influence on its ranking. Furthermore, having page names and paths in native languages might help your users memorize the most important of your URLs even without bookmarking them.
Nevertheless, I never would translate the page names or directories for pages which are part of a web application (as opposed to a informational or promotional pages).
The login page you mentioned is a good example. I am nearly sure that you do not want your site to be found because of its contents on its login page. Actually, there are many websites which exclude login pages and other application pages from being indexed at all.
Instead, in SEO terms, put your effort into your promotional and informational pages. Provide valuable content, explain what is special about you or your site, and do everything you could that those pages get properly indexed. IMHO, static HTML pages are the best choice for doing so.
Furthermore, if you translate the names of pages which belong to your actual application, you will run into massive trouble. For example, after successful login, your application probably will transfer the user to his personal dashboard, which probably will be based on another HTML template / page. If you have translated that page name into different languages, then your application will have to take care to take the user to the right version. Basically, that means that you need as many versions of your application as languages you want to support. Of course, there are tricks to make life easier, but this will be a constant pain and definitely in no way worth the effort.
To summarize: Create static pages which show your USP (unique seller position) and provide valuable content to users (for example sophisticated tutorials and so on). Translate those pages, including names and paths, and SEO them in every way you could. But regarding the actual application, optimizing its pages is kind of pointless and even counterproductive.
Your second question
I would never use IP based redirecting for several reasons.
First, there are many customers in countries which are not their home country. For example, do you really want to redirect all native English speakers to your Hungarian pages because they are currently in Hungary for a business trip?
Second, more and more users today are using VPNs for different reasons, thereby often hiding the country where they currently are.
Third, which IP address belongs to which provider or country is highly volatile; you would have to constantly update your databases to keep up.
There are more reasons, but I think you already have got the idea.
Fortunately, there is a solution to your problem (but see "Final remark" below): Every browser, when fetching a page from a server, tells the server the preferred and accepted languages. For example, Apache can directly use that information in RewriteRule statements and redirect the user to the correct page.
If you can't alter your Server's configuration, then you can evaluate the respective header in your CGI program.
When doing your research, look for the Accept-Language HTTP 1.1 header. A good starting point probably is here.
Your third question
You eventually are mixing up two different things in your third question. A locale is not the same as a language. On one hand, you are asking "...to get the local from...", and on the other hand, you say "...lang=fr...", thus making the impression you want to get the language.
If you want to get the language: See my answer to your second question, or parse the language from the current path (as you already have suggested).
If you want to get the locale, things are more complicated. The only reasonable automatic method is to derive the locale from the language, but this will often fail. For example, I generally prefer the English language when doing research, but on the other hand, I am located in Germany and thus would like dates and times in the format I am used to, so deriving my desired locale from my preferred language will fail.
Unfortunately, there is no HTTP header which could tell the server which locale the user prefers. As a starting point, this article may help you.
See the final remark (next section) on how to solve this problem.
Final remark
As the article linked above already states: The only reliable way to satisfy the user is to let him choose his language, his locale and his time zone within your application. You could store the user's choices either in cookies or in your back-end database; each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
I usually use a combination of all methods (HTTP headers, cookies, database) in my projects.
Think about humans at the first. Is the URL translation important for users in France? Some people may think what it’s fine to get translated words in the URL. Users from other locales may think otherwise. Search engines take into account user behavioral factors. SEO factors will higher if you solution is more convinient for users.
It whould be nice if users get an expected language version. A site could help them if it suggests a language version by IP, HTTP headers, cookies and so on. Some people may prefer another language, some people may be on a trip. So it's still important let them to choice a language version manually.
Please read manuals and analyze competitors sites in case of doubt.
i usally show in mostly website they give url like site.com/en and site.com/fr as you mention but it upon you how you want to show website to user. i prefer make default site.com/en and give user option to select his language.
if you still confuse then refer below link it will usefull.
See Refferal Link Here
Should you translate paths?
If possible, by all means - as this will help users of that language to feel like "first class citizens". Login routes probably won't have much impact on SEO, but translating URLs on content pages may well help them to be more discoverable.
You can read Google's recommendations on multi-regional and multilingual sites, which state that it's "fine to translate words in the URL".
Should you redirect based on IP?
This can help first time users, but there are a few things to bear in mind:
How accurate will this be? E.g. if I speak English but I visit France and then view your site - I will get French. If your target market is mobile-toting globe-trotters, then it may not be the best choice. Is looking at Accept-Language, for example, any better?
Will geolocating the IP address on every request introduce any performance problems for your servers? Or make too many calls to an external geocoding service? Make sure to carry out capacity planning, and reduce calls where you already know the locale (e.g. from a cookie, or user explicitly stating their preference.
Even if you guess a preferred locale, always allow an explicit user preference to override that. There's nothing more frustrating than moving between pages, and having the site decide that it knows better what language you understand :-)
As long as you make it easy to switch between sites, you shouldn't need a specific landing page. It doesn't hurt to pop up a banner if you're unsure whether you should redirect a user (for example, amazon.com will show a banner to a UK user, giving them the option of switching sites - but not deciding for them)
How should you structure your URLs?
Having the language somewhere in the URL (either as a subdomain or a folder) is probably best for SEO. Don't forget to update your sitemap as well, to indicate to crawlers that there are alternate content pages in different languages.
Is there a benefit to implementing micro-formats (or itemscope) in the html for a web app? So far it only looks like it is useful for seo and my web app is behind a login screen, so I will not have to worry about that. Are there any plugins or browsers which automatically process the information.
Or as unor proposed, is there a benefit in adding structured data to non-public sites?
If you generalize the question like unor proposed:
Is there a benefit in adding structured data to non-public sites?
It has got a definit advantage! For someone with visual disability it is easier to navigate through sites if micro-formats are implemented. If there is a possibility that someone with a screen reader will use the application it worth the effort. Not to mention that it is a one-time task with a long term positive effect. I think it is a good thing to proactively thrive to serve all kind of user.
Answer to the original question: browsers do not have to process those information, but some advanced technology could use it in the browser like preload. There was a research at my University about which pages to reload and those were using this feature. (Eg: in free time of the processor the browser plugin preloaded home to enhance the browsing experience.)
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Should we support IE6 anymore?
ripie6.com
I would like to know which browsers we can avoid. Many sites have stopped support to IE6. So, as developers we can also start avoiding some sites? If yes, what are all? (which versions of what broswers)
Even though I have asked the question already here: which browser to start with? IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari? , I dint get the answer since its combined with another question.
Assuming it's a business site:
What's your target market?
How long do you expect until you release a working version of your website?
If current trends continue, what will be IE6's market share by then?
How much profit/value will those users bring?
How much will it cost to support those additional users?
Unless the costs are far below the profit, then don't bother. Otherwise, it might be a good idea.
If it's not a for-profit site(hobby, for instance), then you probably shouldn't bother, unless there's a really significant IE6 market share in your target market.
By the way, remember to use graceful degradation when possible and use feature detection instead of browser detection.
Finally, avoid blocking IE6 users and instead just display a warning saying the website is untested in their browser and suggesting an update(this last piece of advice only applies if you don't plan to support IE6)
Support the browsers that your users use.
stackoverflow.com can probably be less strict than other sites in the browsers it supports, since the vast majority of users are technically adept, and likely to be using a reasonably modern browser. amazon.com probably needs to support more browsers, since it will attract a broader spectrum of internet users.
Who uses your site? Who uses similar sites? What browsers are they using? That's how you decide what browsers to support - not based on what the population of internet users use, since the population of internet users probably isn't your audience (unless you're Google, that is).
You need to evaluate a few things:
Your audience. If you are targeting home users, informal or young audience, or technically advanced audience, you may wish to consider not supporting IE6. On the contrary, if you are targeting conservative business audience or large corporations, you should take IE6 in consideration
Are you developing for yourself, or on commission? If you are developing for someone, you need to discuss this with them
Is this a restructuring of an old site? You may use instruments like google analytics, to find out who your visitors are, and what do they use
Not supporting IE6 will save you a lot of headache, and many sites are starting to avoid it, to be free to implement new features using modern tools. But there are situations where you just can't afford this.
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Keep in mind that I'm not looking for a list of current browsers to support, I'm looking for logical ways to make that list, backed by some kind of hard statistics.
Since it's been a while since my last web job, I decided to do this latest site up from scratch. Now I have to decide again what to support in terms of browsers. Certainly I have a list of what I'd like to support, but the decisions that went into that list seem to be a little arbitrary to me. Where can I go to get a reliable picture of browser usage and what seems to be a good point at which to cut off an old version of a browser from support?
Browsers don't die out completely for about a decade. The first thing you must realise is that you will have some visitors that are using a browser you don't support. The question is not which browsers are not dead, but which browsers are worth supporting (the benefit) relative to the work it takes to do so (the cost).
I've never seen browser statistics I'm comfortable recommending, they all seem to be snake oil. A rule of thumb I feel is appropriate is that a browser isn't worth supporting if somebody using that browser is going to regularly run into problems on other websites as well. In other words "stick with what everybody else is supporting". To that end, Yahoo's graded browser support is useful.
Ultimately, the best choice depends on your individual circumstances and will change over time. For instance, 37signals have recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 and Facebook are slowly heading in the same direction. This isn't a decision that most organisations can make yet, but give it a year or two and you'll see a lot more organisations follow suit. Right now, it's a bold step that you probably can't justify, but give it time.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that supporting as many browsers as possible is automatically the best choice - it may be that you are doing your visitors a disservice by wasting time working on compatibility with a browser used by five people when you could be improving the experience for the other million users you have.
Also, it's worth considering that you can "officially" not support a browser. For example, one thing I've done in the past is use JavaScript served only to Internet Explorer 5.5 and below (via a conditional comment), to automatically remove stylesheets, JavaScript and replace images with their alt text. Without those measures, the site would be unreadable due to Internet Explorer's many layout bugs, but with it, the site at least works, even if it's too much work to "support" it.
The easiest way to do it is sign up for Google Analytics and add their tracking code to your site (there are a number of similar services, but Google's one is the best I've found). It gives you detailed statistics as to what browsers people who visit your site use.
Once you have a couple of months data, you can start making decisions as to which browsers you will support. I work for a mainstream web company who want to make our site work for as many users as possible, so we consider any browser with above 0.5% market share to be within our testing matrix. However, other sites may choose to only support and test on major browsers such as IE and Firefox.
As a rough guide, the major browsers you'll see are IE 6 and 7, and Firefox 2 and 3. This should cover well over 90% of your audience so is a good starting point for the first couple of months. Then use your analytics data and make a business decision as to whether the potential revenue (or whatever you're trying to achieve) is worth the additional effort it will take to support other browsers.
Added 2008-09-18:
Admittedly one issue with this method is that if your support for some browser types is so bad that your site is unusable with them then it will potentially skew the statistics as those people will stop coming back, and thus those browsers will appear to have a lower percentage of users.
To determine whether this is happening, you can use Google Analytics' detailed breakdown of behaviour for each browser type and version. This gives you the bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit, and percent of new visits. If the figures for a given browser type and version are significantly worse than others (i.e. the bounce rate is higher, time on site is lower, pages per visit is lower, or percent of new visits is higher) then it's possible that your site isn't supporting that browser sufficiently well and that you might get more users with it if you had better support.
At this point the figures will still give you a reasonable feeling for how important the browser is (i.e. if it you don't support Google Chrome and it is being shown as 2% of your traffic, then it wouldn't jump to 20% just because you added support) so you can use that browser to see how bad your site is, and make a judgment call as to whether you add support; sometimes this may involve fixing only the worst issues and leaving the site imperfect but usable until the browser gets to a higher percentage of users, or out of beta status.
You could take a look at the way Yahoo! supports browsers at Graded browser support.
The browser is dead when (a) a very small percentage of people use it and (b) you don't care about (selling to? educating? whatever your business is) such a small percentage of people.
Unfortunately, you won't find a good answer to this; even if you found some hard statistics on browser versions for visitors to your website, that almost certainly doesn't tell you what you need to know.
What you need to know isn't "what percent of my visitors use Browser X", it's "what percent of my revenue comes from visitors who use Browser X". That one guy visiting your site using an ancient copy of IE might be the managing director of a big company wanting to buy a site license; the 10k visitors you had last month using Firefox 3 might be college students wanting to plagiarize your documentation for an essay.
Really, you need to know your market - not just the raw browser statistics. If you pay the bills by selling stuff to graphic designers, then rock solid Safari support matters a lot more than if you're in the job of selling Visual Studio plugins. Not helpful, I know!
There are 2 main groups to target. (There are plenty of others though)
Group #1 is browsers that use Webkit (Safari for example), Presto (Opera for example), KHTML (Konqueror for example) or Gecko (Firefox for example). These browsers should all get the same markup, CSS and Javascript code (as they're all in the same group of standard-compliant browsers). Only work around bugs in one of these if you absolutely have to and have the resources to do so. Instead, test in the latest stable versions of each (as you're developing so they can keep each other in check as to what the expected behavior is) and (after checking in the nightlies for the bugs) file bug reports. Again, avoid workarounds for a specific browser if you can. Instead, plan a cross-browser compatible solution from the beginning.
With Group #1, you don't have to worry about older versions much, if it all.
Group #2 is browsers that use Trident (IE for example). Target IE versions you care about and still only workaround the most severe bugs.
Also, don't deny browsers you don't officially support. Let them fend for themselves instead of blocking them (either intentionally or through crappy browser detection).
Also, remember that when looking at market share percentages, try to figure out the numbers they represent so you can see how many millions of potential visitors with that browser there are. 1% or 5% might not seem like a lot, but that could still mean millions.
Most of all, listen to the visitors. If you're getting multiple complaints about a certain browser, look into it if you can. Even if it's for a browser with low market share, if it's a trivial fix, you should just do it.
Ones that are definitely not dead are: IE6 (starting to push it), IE7, IE8, latest Opera 9.x, latest FF 3.x, latest Safari 3.x and others that have about the same capabilities. FF 2.x isn't dead either and is needed for Win9X users (if they don't want to use Opera)
See also this topic
You should use a good UI framework that solves most of the compatibility issues among browsers, like YUI!, jQuery, and so on...
Personaly, I recommend YUI!
Try to answer this locally, consider your audience. For example when I was developing my own Blog Engine, my appeal was mostly to .NET developers. I hope it stands to reason what browser I primarily develop for. From that point I consider the market share and try to ensure a "reasonable" support level for all other browsers. For example even .NET developers occasionally use Firefox, maybe even Opera. Safari and Chrome are possibilities too now. So my current level of support ranks in this order:
It MUST run perfectly in Internet Explorer 7. All features I intended to build are there
It MUST run reasonably in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 3.0, Opera 9+ and Safari for Windows, not everything has to be flawless, but it can't look downright ugly either
Everything else I don't care about. I just don't have the time and willing effort to support everything.
How do I determine whether or not I want to even consider supporting another browser or continuing supporting one of the above browsers any more? Simply I look at the market share and the statistics of who is hitting my page. If someone is dying, or I just haven't seen them in awhile, then I consider support dropped.
So in short, I would simply make a statement to yourself about the browsers that must run your code perfectly then reasonably and update periodically as the browser world changes. For the first run of your website, just think about your audience, for subsequent updates, your statistics should tell you enough.
My (very poor) solution was to get stats from w3schools and base my decisions on that. While those numbers aren't really terrible, they are skewed because viewers of that site are more likely to be upgrade-conscious. Also, it doesn't give a breakdown of any browser versions except FF.
If you purely build to standards, some browser won't render correctly since no browser supports all standards. You have to pick a few browsers and test your site in those.
Don't try to be too bleeding edge. If you must use some cutting edge CSS, then you have to expect it not to work 100% of the time.
What are you really going to do with the list? Are you planning to block browsers you don't support? What if the user hacks the User-Agent response?
Like others, I would strongly suggest going with something like Yahoo's "Graded Browsers" and, if possible, leveraging YUI or other libraries so you don't have to do it yourself.
<1% market share isn't a criteria - esp if the browser is new.
For me, < IE6 is dead, and the HTML monkeys I work with WISH it was dead. < FF2 is dead. Opera is a nice to have. < Safari 2 is dead, tho most are designing for Saf 3 now.
So it's:
IE6,7,8
FF 2,3
Saf 3,4
Chrome (which is basicly Saf4)
But depending on your app, and how many people you think you are going to get wih hold machines, you COULD drop IE6, which would make your life so much easier.
I would say IE6 and below are dead... but many are still stuck using it.
This site has a nice live listing of each browser and its actual age.
http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/2008/08/browser-life-statuses.html
I'd go with the http://browser-update.org/ defaults, which currently say the following are dead:
IE <= 6
FF <= 2.0
Op <= 10.01
Sf <= 2.0
My opinion (has always been) build it to the standards and leave it to the browsers to render it correctly.
Start with the browser with the highest market share and work your way down from there.
If you have existing metrics on browsers that visit your site, use those instead of the general market share.
Whichever has < 1% market share.
I agree with Unkwntech.
You should try to make the website compatible to both IE and Firefox
It's simple - most users keep using the browser that came with the PC when they bought it (think of your mom). The browser is dead when the machines that it pre-installed with are not longer used for Internet access... which is probably around 5 years. As prices of new PC's drops and they become more of a consumer electronics item then this period will drop as people will easily buy a new PC