Trends come and go, and the same saying holds good for the internet. Back in early days of the internet, flashing and colorful text were design standards, then came flash based websites. Few years back, nearly all websites were fully flash based; luckily nowadays web designers prefer usability and try avoiding flash elements. In today’s web 2.0 age, all websites are CSS and Javascript (AJAX) based. For web designers like me, making a web page render perfectly in all the major browsers like IE, Firefox and Opera is a hard thing to accomplish.
Even though organizations like W3C were pushing hard for web standards, it was only recently that browser makers started caring about web standard. Opera was the first to pass the Acid2 web standard compliance test. Safaris, Firefox 3 took Opera’s lead and have made their browser web standards complaint. Very recently, even Internet Explorer 8 passed the compliance test. That makes all four biggies web standard complaint, but that doesn’t solve our problem yet.
If you take a peek at the browser market share, 74% of people user internet explorer (majority of them use IE6 
). Over the past couple of years, several web designers have turned into purely blog designers. Blog and design are two different words, but they are much related. As a blog designer, it’s very essential that you design a blog that works well in all major browsers.
To conclude, I think it will take several years for people to ditch their current browsers and upgrade to the new generation browsers. Until then, designing blog or any other website for that matter is going to be really painful.
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