On Browsers
Actually, I took down the browser compatibility chart, but I will say a few words on web browsers and compatibility.
Why is it important to be aware of browser compatibility? If you design webpages, you will need to realize that the appearance of your webpages may vary among different browsers, sometimes drastically if the code isn't written properly. A significant number of people out there design their pages with only Internet Explorer in mind either out of laziness or with the excuse that most people use Internet Explorer anyway. For example, the scrolling marquee may not show up in earlier versions of Netscape, or any version at all, as far as I know. CSS {body} tags will not work in some or all versions of Netscape either, as well as some versions of Opera.
Why do these discrepancies occur? Sometimes, a browser is supporting something or interpreting something its own way, despite the W3C standards. Internet Explorer has a way of making its own rules. For example, customizing the scrollbars in a browser may not be part of the standards. Neither is using "alt" tags for both "alt" and "title" tag functions in an image.
I confess that I used to prefer Internet Explorer, but I did begin to attempt in 2001 and 2002 to make my GordeonBleu pages fully compatible with Netscape 4.7, Netscape 6.x, and a version of Opera I can't remember. However, I kept having trouble with more advanced scripts in my pages in these other browsers, and I used to take out my cross-browser compatibility complaints out on the "other" browsers. But since the end of 2003, my preference has been towards Mozilla Firefox (previously Firebird in 2003) and the rest of the Mozilla family. I had to tweak various pages in the GordeonBleu network over the end of 2003 and early 2004 to make them comply more with the W3C standards. This tweaking is basically complete.
So from Safari to Opera to Camino to Netscape to Mozilla Prime to Firefox to Internet Explorer... GordeonBleu will continue to aim for compatibility across the browsers.
Camino | Safari | Internet Explorer | Internet Explorer Mac | Firefox & Mozilla Suite | Netscape | Opera | Chrome
Below is a bit of Javascript that detects which operating system and browser you're using. For example, Windows NT 5.1 is Windows XP, and Firefox/0.8 is Firefox 0.8.
The Full Personal Journey
My earliest cross browser compatibility tests began around the time when my home site was named "Dinoworld" in either 1998 or 1999. Up until that point, Internet Explorer 4 was the dominant browser of the day by a huge margin, and the only browser on which I had done any testing. I was sitting in an airport lounge computer in London Heathrow, I saw Netscape 4.x, and decided to view my page out of curiosity. It was then that I realized that a.) exclusive IE features like scrolling marquee tags (and later colored scrollbars) weren't rendering properly, and b.) Netscape was much stricter about markup, from usage of quotes to closing of tags. However, I left it as it was because I had a philosophy about using as little extra markup as possible, and because I figured Netscape had a negligible marketshare.
My testing remained sparse and informal, up until I started cranking up testing on Netscape 4.7 and 6.x in 2002 and 2003 when I found it loaded on various computers at high school, as well as on an ad-based version of Opera introduced to me by my friend Charmaine.
In 2003, my friend Griffin introduced me to Firebird 0.6, a lightweight browser from Mozilla later rebranded as Firefox in 2004 and my new default personal browser. In 2005, I discovered the CSS Zen Garden, which showcased the possibilities of what you could do separating the content from the presentation, the HTML from the CSS, and it got me all excited about everything from web standards to tableless layouts to accessibility to typography to more advanced CSS techniques. It was during this time that the range of quirks in IE 6's and IE 5.x's rendering was such a headache to us web developers and designers. Towards the end of the year, I declared that I was in the progress of redoing nearly all the pages of my site in this manner, with the exception of keeping inline styles on my legacy pages because of the intentional non-template nature of the site.
In early 2006, I began taking on requests to redesign sites for student organizations and nonprofit organizations as a fun volunteering challenge. Since I had the chance to write or rewrite these from the ground up, I got to opportunity to truly create gracefully degrading pages that utilize good semantics, div layouts, and swappable stylesheets with W3C-compliant CSS and XHTML. By this time, I was testing in Firefox on Windows and Linux, IE 6, Camino, and occasionally Mozilla Seamonkey, Opera, Firefox Mac, Firefox Solaris, and Safari.
By late 2006, I found seeking access to a machine with Mac OS X too much of a hassle, and I tried workarounds such as browser snapshot services that could help me test more frequently in Safari, Camino, and Firefox Mac. In early 2007, I set up a hacked version of OS X on my PC Intel-based box, and used that for testing, while trying NX Client to remotely test on Linux whenever I didn't have access to one physically. In October 2007, after several years of using Mac OS X on other machines, I decided to make my next computer purchase a MacBook Pro, and my frequent testing expanded to Firefox Mac+Windows+Linux, Safari, Camino, Opera Mac+Windows+Linux, and IE 6 and 7.
And naturally, with Google Chrome being based on the WebKit rendering engine like Safari, it automatically fell under that umbrella of cross-platform cross-browser compatibility.
My next focus in this arena is more exploration of the DOM (Document Object Model), as well as better support for mobile device browsers.