New Site - Cross Browser Issues

How worried should I be?

[Dr_West]

Designing a new site and have made the leap from table based layout to CSS, thus getting used to issues of collapsing margins, clearing floats and ie quirks like dotted (or should that be dashed borders)!

I have ran a browsercam test on the page and to my horror have a variety of issues....

IE 5.0 and 5.5 right floating div does not hang right properly, it butts up to the middle div's right hand margin.

IE 6.0 and 7.0 looks perfect.

FF Looks great in every version (god bless Mozilla)

NN Looks horrible in all versions up to 6.2 where it looks ok apart from background image not repeating.

SAFARI Yeap, no problems here.

BIG QUESTION... Do I need to worry about IE 5.0 and 5.5 (and for that matter earlier) and do I need to worry about Netscape?

In all current browsers the page works great. Does anyone have 5.0 or 5.5 and would be kind enough to sticky me for url to take a look, really would appreciate it.

I am very committed to CSS working on this site but every corner turned presents a whole set of different challenges.

Thanks all

Dr

[DrDoc]

They are still out there, in large enough numbers to at least ensure that there are no fatal problems with the page.

You can always have multiple IE on your computer.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

;)

[Dr_West]

Thanks Doc, have downloaded IE 5 and 5.5 following your advice and can no see the problems for myself locally rather than just getting screendumps.

Browsing for 'browser stats' its difficult to know who or what to believe in terms of usage. As I new site I have no logs to back-up specific usage.

Usage stats vary from;

IE 6: From 55% to 95%

FF (Moz): From 6% to 25%

SF: From 1% to 6%

Reading between the lines and averaging out the numbers it looks like IE 5.0 and 5.5 accounts for probably 5% max (but of course that is still 1 in 20 users looking at your site).

Can anyone provide a more reliable source of browser stats or from there own experience validate some of the figures....please.

There is no doubt that FF is on the up and that can only be a good thing!

Thanks

Dr

[DrDoc]

I think 4-8% is not unlikely for IE5.x, depending on site and audience.