Designing for Web Browsers

Web design is always a challenge: new web browsers make website owners to turn to web designers to redesign their web pages; different web browsers display websites in different ways, leading to the same problem: redesign. This is costly, needs time and if the job is not done right, the release of a new web browser may lead to the same trouble. Moreover: a non-standard-compliant website is not a user friendly website (obviously!) and it might damage your business, by driving your visitors away.

To avoid the inconvenience, ask your web developer to create an "all browsers compatible" website.

Design for All the Web Browsers

It's advisable that you have your website designed according to the World Wide Web Consortium's accessibility standards. These standards were created to improve user experience and Internet functionality. The most popular web browsers are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari (for Mac) and Konqueror (Linux). Once upon a time there was Netscape ruling over the Web. Right now Internet Explorer (IE 6) is the most popular browser, but Firefox is winning territory... fast! However, let's not forget the PDAs! If you have a website designed according to the accessibility standards, your site will stay functional in the future.

As IE 6 is not standards compliant, you might want to try designing for Firefox first. Preferred coding is XHTML, but HTML 4.01 will do too. When your web page looks great in Firefox, you may start editing it for Internet Explorer. Then validate your markup. Don't write on your website "best viewed with Mozilla Firefox" or "Best viewed with IE", etc. It's you who should have a browser compatible website and not your visitors who should change their browsers to be able to see your website. Write a "best viewed with..." on your landing page and you are going to drive customers away. User-friendly websites are "best viewed with any browser".

Design for the Future

Standard compliant web pages are the pages of the future. The Internet is constantly evolving and the future belongs to quality websites. Now it's the right time to start optimizing your websites. If you are a web developer take your job seriously and design for the future. This is how you are going to build up a good name and get more clients.

Webmasters are advised to support the "best viewed with any browser campaign". By creating an all browsers compatible website you make a promise of quality and a commitment to excellence.

To verify your "any browser compatibility" you might want to try the free services provided by AnyBrowser.com. Here you'll find a site viewer, html validation tools and many useful resources that will help you create the perfect website.

Other Technical Considerations

When you use non-HTML elements, remember that they are not compatible with all browsers, so provide alternatives. That works especially for Flash sites. I've seen a lot of "to view this web page you need Macromedia Flash" on websites. Do I really need it? Make me! Well, actually they cannot make me. Why? I can leave as fast as I came. I browse... browse away!

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Automating Web Browser Using Macro Software

Macro software's in web browser automation automate the tasks in the web by creating the activity of a user. It is also capable of operating a particular web browser. This is an exact tool that stored information and details on different activities you do on a particular web browser. On top of that, it also evaluates the fields you complete and the objects you click on as you go further. In addition to that, it identifies the objects and builds a macro as you click on several links, navigating through pages and selecting buttons as well as logging in to pages and complete it respective fields.

Macro programs for your web browser automation can record different activities that you do on the web which you may able to play it back later on. In fact, you can keep these macros on your personal computer for your own use. Perhaps, you can also impart this with other people by embedding them on the intranet of your company.

There are actually many cases wherein you can use this macro program for web browser automation. Firstly, by means of having this kind of program, you do not have the need to check similar sites on a daily basis and you do not need to make certain in remembering passwords as well as filling out of web forms. It directly automates to record the processes you go and store in macros the moment you operate these tasks on the web. What is more interesting is that you only have to replay the macros that you have recorded. At the same time, you can also record again the recorded macros.

One more thing is that with macro program for your web browser automation, you may use it for functional testing which is checking out whether the links does exist or not and simply making sure whether functions answer back or not. To make it concise, macro programs can absolutely do repetitive web testing. The only thing you need to perform is record the testing procedure and make a macro from it. The succeeding time you need to do it again then the entire macro will function in just a click of a button.

Apart from that, macro programs can also accommodate the transfer of data. It is known that many companies share most of their data and information in-house enterprises. The data should be up to date as soon as one changes it. In using these programs for web browser automation, all you need to do is to create a macro for coordinating files that store data and put it on the intranet of your company. As a result, all of the data being saved can easily be shared and interconnected by all companies. Lastly, these programs can do web navigation for easier locating of necessary information you need.

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Browser Standards and Security

Introduction

When designing a Web site it is important to consider how the users will see the Web page. There are many browsers available that a user could be using to view your Web site. Consideration of the standards between each browser is important. There are so many browsers available on the market that the Web page that has been created could, and, most probably will look different on every browser. Some browsers handle certain scripting languages better than others e.g. Mozilla Firefox has no problems handling animated gifts as rollovers on buttons, whereas Internet Explorer 5 cannot handle them and will not display them correctly or may not display them at all. In section 2 of this report will discuss the standards between browsers, browsers available and how the browsers handle the HTML language in different ways. This section will also show the usage between the most popular browsers and will display the statistics as a pie chart with each chunk representing a different browser. In section 3 of this report, will discuss the security risks from both the client side and server side and will list the top ten vulnerabilities that a Web site must overcome to stay protected. This section will also display the statistics of security risks in a bar chart. Section 4 discusses how the information that is in this report will be used in the main project.

Section 5 is the conclusion of all the information that has been gathered to make this report and how it can be used to create a better compatible and secure Web site.

Browsers
As the internet was created to unite the world into one inter connecting community, the use of so many different browsers that view Web pages in different ways makes it harder for a Web designer to create a Web site and it can stop users seeing a Web page in the same way. When designing a Web site, the designer must test their pages in different browsers to check the outcome of that page. With so many browsers available, it is important to consider which browsers to test for and how many past browser versions need to be catered for within the designs.

As technology has advanced, the situation has improved to that of a few years ago but the problem has not been completely resolved. You can now be confident that at least 99% of users have browsers that support nearly all of HTML 4. However, there are still inconsistencies in the way Cascading Style Sheets are implemented and older browser versions pre-dating the current standards take a long time to fade away entirely. A Web site designer must now also consider the mobile user; phones, PDAs and other handheld media devices that have access to the internet. The browser that these devices use will be a variant of a standard browser but the user will view the pages on a much smaller screen. A mobile browser, also called a micro browser, mini browser or wireless internet browser (WIB) are optimised so as to display Web content most effectively for small screens on portable devices. Mobile browser software must also be small and efficient to accommodate the low memory capacity and low-bandwidth of wireless handheld devices. Typically, they were stripped-down Web browsers but as of 2006 some mobile browsers can handle latest technologies such as CSS 2.1, JavaScript and Ajax. Jennifer Niederst Robbins (2006) says;

"1996 to 1999: The Browser Wars begin.
For years, the Web development world watched as Netscape and Microsoft battled it out for browser market dominance. The result was a collection of proprietary HTML tags and incompatible implementations of new technologies, such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, and Dynamic HTML. On the positive side, the competition between Netscape and Microsoft also led to the rapid advancement of the medium as a whole."

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Which Web Browser to Use For Testing Your Website

What is a Website Programmer? Answer. Someone who has taken at least two years to learn and experience the art of writing web pages by hand, in the HTML programming language. And even this would not qualify you as a website programmer really. A "Proper" website programmer is someone who can programme, by hand, in HTML (HyperText Markup Langauge), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), PHP (Personal Home Page and then PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), JavaScript, MySQL and other programming/scripting languages. So what has this got to do with Web Browsers? Well. If you are not a website programmer and you (or someone you have hired) are using a HTML Software Package such as Dreamweaver to create your web pages; You should be aware of the following:

LAYOUT ENGINES

A Layout Engine is basically the core coding of a web browser that dictates how it should format (i.e. display, position and style) Text, Images, Tables, Paragraphs, Embed Audio/Video and so on. Although the website programmer has some control of this formatting via HTML and CSS instructions, at the end of the day web browsers have their own unique way of interpreting the website programmer's instructions. For example. If a website programmer creates a questionnaire form made up of standard elements (i.e. drop-down menus, edit boxes and check (tick) boxes) most, if not all, web browsers should display those elements perfectly - In the correct positions, just as specified by the programmer. However. If the programmer decides to use a scripting language such as JavaScript or JQuery to create the same questionnaire form things may go wrong; Simply because the standard code would be understood by all web browsers whereas the JavaScript or JQuery code might not be understood by all web browsers. This could mean the elements are not positioned properly and/or are displayed too big or small for example. These errors (bugs) can be caused by the programmer's code, the web browser's layout engine, the scripting language or all three.

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How to Get Your Freezing Internet Explorer Back

Internet Explorer is one of the most famous and widely used browsers in the world. It is a long standing and popular product with a lot of supports.

Even though some newer internet browsers are introduced nowadays, most of people still prefer Internet Explorer. However, even the most loyal or faithful Internet Explorer users can not avoid of the moments when Internet Explorer freezes. Then, what should you do when such problem happens? This article will help you eliminate the problem at once. I once had the problem too and I found an answer.

Here are 3 steps:

Running antivirus and anti-spyware software on your PC

We have to admit that sometimes the problem does not lie with the Internet Explore itself but our computers instead. Seeing is believing. Unfortunately, this idiom doesn't necessarily apply in the case of these virtual pests that can infest your computer undetected. The viruses can be the reason why your Internet Explorer freezes up as they place invalid keys in your registry. You can then perform the scans with the appropriate anti-virus and/or anti-spyware software.

Internet Explorer updates

Just like any other software, Internet Explorer requires regular updates. Most computer users update their software automatically which is recommended to obtain the latest upgrades without the need for you to manually search for it. So it is important for you to take note of the patches or bugs fixes that might help you.

Sometimes, Internet Explorer will release an entirely new version of Internet Explorer. These new versions need to be downloaded and installed. So you should pay attention for this.

Check your registry

The Windows registry is a main database in your PC which is used to store all of the configuration settings for all hardware and software installed on your pc, all of the user accounts and your settings of computer's network, operating system, file associations, start up and shut down and even security. Therefore, your Internet Explorer web browsing experience will be impact if there is something to happen within the registry. Like every other program on your PC, the Internet Explorer is constantly reading from and writing to the registry from which we can find that Internet Explorer is heavily reliant upon that the registry must have few errors and the data within registry should be optimized for speedy read or write access.

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Spyware - Your Web Browser is the Culprit

The producers of spyware know that many people now have spyware removers installed on their computers. They also know that quite a few people have the ability to check what is in their start-up. Because of this, BHO's are crafted so that the spyware lies dormant until Internet Explorer is opened. Then it can start its dirty work.

The best program to remove an errant Browser Help Object is HijackThis. This program was originally designed to remove homepage hijackers and gradually morphed into an all-around removal tool for everything. If there's any one tool that I couldn't part with it's HJT.

To start, download HijackThis 1991 [http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/]. Once you've got it, open it. Click the button that says "Do a system scan only". Following that, scroll down to the items labeled 02 - BHO. Remove anything here that looks suspicious. Internet Explorer does not require any BHO's to run. Just keep an eye on the path that it loads from, and the name of the file. A legitimate one will be fairly easy to spot, as it'll have a legit title and OK looking path.

If the filename looks like it was randomly made, like ASGSRT32.DLL or whatnot then there's a good 90% chance that it's bad. Even if you do remove one that's good, you can always use the restore feature of HJT to bring it back.

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Are the Most Popular Browsers Always Going to Be Under Attack ?

If you use a popular browser, you will be open for more security attacks. Consider using a less popular browser but don't think this alone will make you secure.

One issue with technology is that whatever is the most popular seems to have the most security problems. This means that people who write malicious code will always be attempting to make attacks on whatever software or operating system is the most popular to negatively effect the most users possible. No one will ever understand why this happens but it does. Is it important to consider using less popular browsers to be safer while surfing the internet?

When Internet Explorer had more than a 90% market share, there were quite a few issues with security and other problems since that browser was constantly under attack. Many started to use less popular browsers like Netscape which eventually became Firefox. These other browsers allowed users to stay away from some of the big problems like popups and spyware that were a huge problem.

With today's technology it seems the same issues are happening. As Firefox gains market share so do the problems. Logically, the only way to get this to stop is to start using a browser that is less popular since these typically won't be attacked by malicious code writers.

One big issue that you might miss is that the browser plugins can also be a problem regardless of what browser you choose to use. This means that using things like Flash and Java can have security issues which will effect you while using your obscure browser. You have to keep these additional plugins updated as soon as you can to be the safest as you possibly can be.

Additionally, keep your virus and spyware scanners on and up to date to catch anything that might have come through. No matter what browser you use, if you download spyware on purpose or on accident, it will still be on your machine.

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