Internet Explorer v.s. Other Browsers

[dan]

Personally I'm a firefox user however, my logs show the I.E. story. By looking at my logs I'm forced to pay attention to I.E simply because of the overwhelming number of people who use it.

Usually when I do a new page for the site, I will preview it in both I.E. and Firefox. You will be amazed how that same page can differ depending on the browser you are using.

There are times I forget about I.E. and only when another member reminds me there is a problem do I look at that page through the eyes of microsoft. I should be use to it by now, but I'm usually shocked how off a page can be in I.E., especially if you use CSS. My job is to make that page look ok in I.E. It may not look exactly like it does in firefox, but I have to make it acceptable to I.E. users. To ignore the mass number of people using I.E. would be a bad move on my part.

But browsers are not always the problem. When trying to diagnose a problem, I ask the user to clear his cache first. I have to remind myself to do the same when using firefox. I may be looking at the last page that looked ok and only after clearing cache do I see the error or problem.

Recently, vista and windows xp users have been saying things don't look the same. I use xp and I'm not about to intall vista to program my site for that program. Most users still use xp and I will stick to using that format until the day vista takes control.

When it really gets tough is when I cleared cache, things look ok for me in I.E. and Firefox yet the user is still having problems. I try to get as much details as I can and look at my site using another computer that does not house my site files on my local drive. I have seen my browser access my local files more than once, especially graphics. I had one user who kept getting a 404 when trying to look at a photo. I did not. Than I realized I was accessing the photo stored on my local drive and not on the server. That is why I will look at my site using another computer.

When all seems ok on my end and I can't duplicate the problem a user is having, it doesn't mean there is not a problem -- it may be the problem comes and go and I may not be checking my site at that time.

Recently I had that occur. I would of never found the problem if it was not for users who was checking my site during my bed time hours. Usually these were folks overseas and because of the time difference, my night hours was their day hours when they used my site the most. It was discovered that a bot was eating up my resources during certain times and only because of the many emails I received from users having problems did I investigate.

We eliminated that bot or stopped it from crawling our site and things were back to normal for all users.

Problems will never go away as long as a webmaster is sharing server resources and has to deal with spammers. We curently are having some problem with one of our main email accounts being used by spammers. Yuk! I'm about to delete the account but this will require me to make changes throughout my site that uses that account. Oh well, life goes on.