Platforn to design on?

[wtd]

Is it that inconceivable? IE has less than 80% of the desktop browser market, and is an also-ran when it comes to increasingly popular mobile platforms where WebKit is rapidly taking the crown.

[Okapi]

Still the majority of users use IE.

I found xampp which is great

[wtd]

Design for where the market's going to be. IE users are a rapidly shrinking market.

[gianni]

Optimistic, but I don't think we'll see IE disappear anytime soon. I'm more in favour of designing for what you need *now*, not X months down the road.

[Tony]

Okapi @ Tue Dec 09, 2008 7:44 pm wrote:

Still the majority of users use IE.

Majority of who's users?

compsci.ca/blog , for example, typically sees less than 30% IE users, 65% of which are IE7+. I've been told that such results are typical for technologically inclined websites. But then again maybe you are designing for a "how to clear my Internet Explorer history... Blog!"? That will likely see more than a typical amount of IE users.

[gianni]

Silly tony, Firefox is for kids! But SRSLY we are talking about Joe Internet-Surfer out there, not "I'm learning programming at age 5 on compsci.ca" users.

[wtd]

Surges in adoption of Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, etc. aren't coming from enthusiasts. They're coming from Joe Internet-Surfer.

[gianni]

Lets be real here wtd, there haven't been surges of converts for a while now. When Firefox 1 (and to some degree 2) were initially released there was mass exodus from IE to FF. But as of late FF/Mozilla haven't really been delivering in the quality department. Those who have been switching to Safari, Safari4Win, Chrome, &c... are mostly ex-Firefox users. From the various reports that have been compiled about site traffic, IE usage has remained more or less steady for the past year or so.

I'm definitely not supporting IE here, I just think we should recognise that: it's there, people use it, and it can't be ignored.

I've been toying with the idea of showing a message bar or graphic which encourages IE users to switch. Not that my site receives practically any traffic at all though.

[Okapi]

Lets just wait until chrome ships with OSes next year

[Destroyer661]

I run a complete test environment on my laptop on Debian. I use KDE's Quanta+ for development, and love it (Notepad++ on Windows is alright as well). To me the best tools you can get are Quanta+/GIMP/Inkscape/SSHFS(to update to your actual web server) and then locally host the exact setup that's on your web server. Usually a LAMP setup, Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP.