Did I ever mention that I hate web browsers?

[perlmonger]

I discovered yesterday that IE/Mac copes not at all with javascript resources encoded as UTF-8+BOM; it encounters the BOM, thinks "you're havin' a larf" and buggers off back to its grave in Redmond. No warnings or errors; it just ignores the file altogether.

So. I thought that maybe it's time to finally consign the thing to the zombie browser bin: Netscape 4 is there for all but one site we host, and IE/Win 5.0 is teetering on its brink.

I've just analysed June's Mac stats to date on our busiest and most generally representative site, and the answer is... Not Yet.

Damnit.

browser	visits	views
Safari	49.34%	52.85%
IE/Mac	34.99%	31.47%
Gecko (Firefox/NS7)	15.67%	15.67%

Those figures exclude the real long tail of browser accesses: there are a few visits from Opera, Camino and MozillaSeaMonkey, even some from Netscape 4 and (goddess help me) five visits from something claiming to be "Mozilla/3.04Gold (Macintosh; I; PPC)"

For completeness, Mac hits were 4.9% of total visits, 5.7% of total views for the first 20 days of June.

[EDIT] having browsed further through the tail, there are hits from MSIE 4.01 and MSIE 4.5 in there too: who are these people? ;)

Comments

[dkmnow.livejournal.com]

"Friends don't let friends use Explorer." :-p

But while we're on the subject, can you tell me what the best Mac OS 9 browser is (other than Exploiter and Nutscrape, I mean), or maybe toss out a rec or two?

I'm currently using the Mozilla 1.2 rebuild by WaMCom (they call it Mozilla 1.3.1, but it's not to be confused with its namesake, which doesn't run on OS 9). I can't do OS X right now, and this is the best browser I could find for OS 9, but it has major problems with some newer species of javascript. No more java updates to be had for me and my OS-saurus. We suck.

"No guarantees, express or implied." Just thought I'd ask, just in case. Thanks. :-)

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

I would if I could...

We don't have any OS/9 Macs here any more; my feeling is that, lacking an up-to-date Gecko browser, you're best off with IE/Mac, your early Moz and Opera 6 as alternatives. They'll each have different bugsets and missing features, so you may have to use trial and error to find the least bad for any particular web site (for all I bitched, IE/Mac is still more standards compliant than IE/Win in some respects: the biggest problem as a web developer is that some of its bugs have workarounds that are orthogonal to those for IE/Win).

My gut feeling is that Opera 6 is probably the least bad option - YMMV.

[dkmnow.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I tried Opera years ago, but it hadn't occurred to me to try it again.

Will do. Thanks for the rec.

:-)