The first bug

This is something every web developer expects, we know it's coming sooner or later and we're always disappointed when it's actually there. The first bug. The feeling of failure overwhelms you, your child is not perfect. "But who is?" You ask yourself, and after a couple of minutes you're already working on a solution, because that's what we do: We create solutions.

My first bug was, I admit, a newbie one. It was browser incompatibility. Everybody knows that before you put a website online you have to test the compatibility of at least a couple of browsers, and that's what I did. I tested with Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 3 and Safari 4 and I figured that this would cover most of the used browsers.

But today I was working on another computer with IE 6, surfed to www.nicolasdecorte.be and there it was, the horror. The layout was totally messed up, menus appeared at the wrong side of the screen and the text was somewhere underneath.

Now what will I do to solve that problem? Nothing I guess. Statistics on WiKi teached me that at this very moment 23% of all internet users uses IE 6 or lower. Three months ago this was 31%, so I expect that this share will be more or less lost within the next year.

If you happen to use IE 6, please upgrade, it's not that hard and it doesn't take a lot of time. I'll even provide you the link: IE 7 and IE 8 .
But if you want my advice, go for Firefox !

One last trick for fellow web designers: If you like to avoid the issue I had, there's a great freeware tool available for testing on different IE versions, even if you have only one installed: IETester