Friday 14 January 2011

Just Browsing

2011 has started with a flurry of activity altering websites. If you visited the main website recently, you will have noticed that it has a brand new design. The work is, by no means, finished. There are plenty of bugs, design elements and additional pages to sort out, but I'm slowly getting there. Simplicity has been the keyword. Several pages have been combined, so for example, the podcast page now has the main podcast and the audioBoos together. The digital image services (Image repair, manipulation and copying) will also be placed on just one page from now under the (working) title of  Photoshop services.

One problem I have run into has been to do with web browsers. Wow, what a choice we have these days. For many years, I exclusively used Microsoft's Internet Explorer as really there were no other options available. Now I'm using Firefox and Google Chrome more and more. I have five browsers on my laptop - Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. My reasons for having five browsers on my computer are many, but it comes down to choice and checking website compatibility. I also like the speed and intuitive design of browsers like Google Chrome.

While developing my website's new portfolio section, I've come across the fact that all of the main browsers work with my new Wordpress plugin flash gallery EXCEPT Internet Explorer. For some reason the gallery images and links do not work in Microsoft's popular browser. My only conclusion is that Microsoft are lagging behind in developing their browser and keeping it up-to-date.This is a potential problem, although not one big enough for me to scrap the development of the gallery. I need the gallery to be as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, to view on as many ranges of systems and set-ups as possible - not easy to accomplish at all. In my portfolio's case, I believe that Internet Explorer needs to catch up with its rival browsers. It seems odd that the others work perfectly well, but Microsoft's does not.

If you haven't tried another Internet browser other that Microsoft's, then I'd have a look at some of the others available. You might be pleasantly surprised.

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