The site, www.sunswandesigns.com, was created to allow her to sell her unique creations, Re-Jeans, a collection of purses and handbags created from gently used jeans.

She’s been making the purses for many months now and has sold quite a few.  They’re quite popular among the ladies.

So go check it out! And remember, she accepts PayPal!

It’s always been true and, unless something drastic changes at Microsoft, it will continue to suck.

I’ve been busy making a website for SunSwan for her Re-Jeans Purses.  She makes the purses out of ‘gently used’ (and not-so gently used) jeans.  She’s been busy at it and has made many purses already.  To her credit, they’re pretty funky.  The only public page is the home page for now @ www.sunswandesigns.com. But we’re getting off topic here…

I’ve been working on the site for about a week now.  I’ve created a template and have created several pages, all dynamically driven from the database.  Progress has been a bit slow since I haven’t coded in awhile and had to resort to digging in the PHP manual and such, but all-in-all, we’re getting there.

The whole time I’ve been coding I have been viewing the pages in Firefox.  When viewing the same page in IE, a freaky bug appears (at least in some IE6.0 versions, others not).  WTF?  I’ve tried it on a couple different machines with IE6 and on some machines it breaks while others it is fine.  You know something is wrong with a browser when you get different results on different computers.

Now Firefox is a free, open source, web standards compliant browser while IE is not.

Now the most important part of the above statement are the words ‘web standards compliant’.  For those not well educated in the ways of web development, I’ll explain…

These days, the vast majority of websites are being designed using ‘standards’ provided by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and others.  These standards provide guidance for both web developers as well as browser developers so the code the web developers create will function and display properly in the web browser.  That’s the short description of what the W3C does.

Browsers such as Firefox and Opera (just for example) are written to be compliant with these standards.  Now a company such as Microsoft, with it’s ‘all knowing, all powerful’ attitude, don’t really seem to give two shits about web standards.  Their browser does not interpret many of the standards guiding the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).  Thus, when you view a web page designed using CSS (which the majority of web design is headed these days), Internet Explorer will ‘break’ the page… in some cases completely destroying the page layout and intended design.  This leads to countless hours for the web developer to try and ‘hack’ the code to trick IE into displaying the code the way it should.  It’s extremely frustrating.

But what can you do?  While browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari, work very well and seem to comply with CSS coding standards without major issues (at least in my experience but I’ve not used Opera or Safari enough to really form an educated opinion of them).

So what, as a web surfer, can I do?
Well, you can cast your vote and make your voice heard with minimal effort.  By downloading and installing an alternative to IE, and by using your new browser whenever you surf, you will say to Microsoft and web developers everywhere you prefer to use a browser that works.  You see, every time you browse a website, your browser information is sent with the request for the page.  You never see it… and it isn’t a privacy issue or something you should fear.  The browser type is simply sent with the page request and those statistics are logged.  These statistics help web developers better take advantage of newer technologies available to newer, web compliant browsers so the user experience is better for you!

Ina nutshell, if more and more people move away from IE to a web compliant browser, Microsoft will have to comply with web standards or move away from browser development and leave it to the professionals who know what they’re doing.

Sounds good!  So how do I get started?
Visit any of these sites and download a new browser.  You’ll be glad you did.  Oh, and if you’ve got another great browser to add to the list, please comment me or email me and I’ll add it to the list.

• Firefox – very good browser.  Appears to follow web standards with little or no major issues.
• Opera – appears to be a good browser but I don’t have alot of experience with it.  Appears to follow web standards with little or no major issues.
• Safari – developed by Apple, initially for their Macs but now available for Windows users.  Mac users swear by it.  Appears to follow web standards with little or no major issues.
• Flock – based on Mozilla, the same codebase as Firefox.  I don’t have any experience with this browser but have heard some good things.

I don’t know… maybe you’re just anti-Microsoft.  How do I know you’re just not slagging the big guy?
Don’t take my word for it.  See what others say below:

• http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/internet_explor.html
• http://www.crashie.com/
• http://whyiesucks.blogspot.com/
• http://www.lockergnome.com/news/2004/06/15/why-you-should-dump-internet-explorer/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/11/22/in-all-fairness-%E2%80%A6-internet-explorer-still-stinks/
• and my personal favourite: http://iesucks.net/IE_VS._Fire_Fox.html (watch the video) 

If you’ve got any comments or stories about your favourite/least favourite browser or if you’ve got a browser for submission that I’ve missed, I encourage you to comment.