If our website doesn’t look quite right… read on!

We design our websites to work well on browsers that follow standards set for the internet by the international standards groups set up for that purpose. Unfortunately, a certain extremely overweight software company whose founder just retired has a serious case of “not invented here” when it comes to internet standards. Our recommendations for compliant web browsers are:

• First Choice - Firefox, a free, community developed browser with an easy installer and a boatload of easy add-ons for almost anything you an imagine. Also, a great companion e-mail client, Thunderbird. Highly recommended for almost any version of Windows and MAC OS10+.  Version 3 was recently released.  If you have an upscale computer with Windows Vista or XP,  version 3 should be fine.  For older machines and less patient users, version 2 is a better choice.
• Second Choice - Opera, another free, community developed browser. Easy to install and a wide range of add-on features also. Our second choice only because it required a number of compromises and Opera specific changes to achieve results comparable to FireFox.
• Third Choice - (a distant third) Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher version. This version of IE does reasonably well on operating according to the standards, but it just never seems to be quite right. By this I mean, when FireFox and Opera agree on how a page should look, Internet Explorer will usually be just enough different to be annoying.

If you have an older version of Internet Explorer, or another browser, please consider upgrading to one of these. You may find the internet a lot easier to use when you do.

A word to the web geeks (gurus?): I know there are many other potentially great (or not so great) browsers out there, but I have to draw the line on how many interpretations of the standards I’m willing to test, adjust to, and retest. And of course, each time I adjust to one more, I have to retest everything I’ve already done! Peace!