An interesting post at MacSlash has a poor Safari user highlighting his holiday online shopping woes with Apple’s Web browser. He found site after site that just didn’t work in Safari and it led him to not having a very jolly Web surfing experience. Now we’ve all been there as Mac users and know that Safari just ain’t the best browser that it could be. It’s got a lot of work ahead of it and that’s why most Mac users will use Firefox for OS X. BUT, it’s what the first commenter left on this guy’s poor post that leads me to pose the question that I think all Mac users need to ask themselves. Is it the Web site’s fault that it doesn’t work with a small percentage of browsers or the browsers’ manufacturers’ fault?

I can remember using Mosaic and then Netscape in the early nineties. Back in those days, there really wasn’t any browser specific code, other then the BLINK tag, that set the browsers apart from each other. But as JavaScript and Netscape Gold 3.x released, things did change. When Internet Explorer re-coded itself in 4.0, everything changed. I don’t have to re-establish history for you but that’s basically when the IE only or NS only sites started popping up. It was a hot debate back then to which one should get the support. But now, it doesn’t really matter. Microsoft is where Netscape was with 3.0. So, again, should the site be coding to IE or W3C?

This is a tough question. As a Web developer myself, I try to code to W3C standards but I always get a request to do this or do that which is just impossible to get to work in all the browsers… using W3C standards. Even Opera, the one that claims to be the most W3C compliant browser, doesn’t always hold up. So what is one to do? Tweak to make it work. That’s what I do and sometimes it requires some PHP agent sniffing and then coding some CSS for three different browsers or just saying, “Screw it! I’ll just make one for the majority.” I think that’s where most of these sites are: making for the majority.

Back to that first commenter at MacSlash. His suggestion was to stop whining and find sites that support his browser. Change banks, shop elsewhere for books, and dump OldNavy.com. In a way, he’s right. But in a way he’s wrong. It doesn’t give Mac users much choice if they do this and it still doesn’t send a message to these sites. In fact, it sends the wrong one as they view their logs and see Mac users declining from the history of hits and then have no reason to fix the Mac problems.

At this point, Apple needs to fix Safari. Firefox does a pretty good job on most sites I visit and I rarely have issues with it as I do Safari. In fact, I use Safari for spell checking and that’s it. I think if Apple dumped the KHTML engine and, heck, used Mozilla as its engine, it could do better. Much better.

Tags: firefox, safari, mozilla, oldnavy.com, khtml, w3c