pendanticist - 3:52 pm on Sep 27, 2003 (gmt 0)

>But surely if you block popups, it won't matter anyway?

Matter to whom? The feedback I've gotten from my viewers is overwhelmingly in favor of finding a website where they are safe from ads, banners and pops. I happen to agree.

The only way I can tell if the site throws them is to experience them myself and I use IE to do that. Truth be told, most of the reasons (from the posts I've read here at WebmasterWorld), folks like 'tailorable' browsers as much as they dislike anything MS and that's ok.

As for me, I'm more the utilitarian user of browsers. If it fits my scheme at the moment, I'll use it. If not, I'll use something else.

Take text size for example. IE (6.0.2800.1106IC), NS (7.1) and Opera's newest all render text sizes differently now. Up until these latest browser variants came out, all text sizes were very much similar which met my criteria for multi-browser viewability. This also meant leaving my viewers to make the minor text size adjustments themselves.

Those adjustments now are more than I feel comfortable with. So much so, that I'm considering placing a statement to that effect somewhere in my 'about' section so folks can adjust the size.

Anyway, when I heard about the new version of Opera I installed it and found some very disturbing differences. To whit: I have a javascript Public Service Announcement belonging to http*//codeamber.org/ on my front page. In IE and NS the PSA looks great! However, in Opera there is a huge red (about 3/8") border around the link and it looks like crap!

I use the free version of Opera and the banner ad takes up too much viewable space for my liking.

In NS, I have to reduce the text size to 75% and the tables text is aligned left. In the other browsers it defaults to align center. With 160+ categories and over 5,000 sites listed, the table looks terrible without the size adjustments. All truncated don'tcha know.

MSIE
MSIE/6
MSIE/5
MSIE/4
Netscape
Mozilla/1
Netscape (compatible)
Netscape
Netscape/4
Netscape/6
WebTV

As you can see, IE is the dominant browser of folks visiting me. Oh, and rarely do I even see an Opera browser in my stats.

Clearly, more folks use IE's newer versions while the majority of NS users are using NS's older versions and I get far more MSNTV/WebTV visitors than Opera of any variant.

Hope this clarifies more than it confuses. :)

Pendanticist.