It has come to my attention as a Webmaster that a lot of the visitors to my site
are using old and outdated Internet Browsers.

It is always a good idea to keep your brwoser up to date so that pages are displayed as the author intended!

It's also a good idea to ensure that your resolution on your monitor is set to a minimum of 800 x 600 (1024 x 768 is probably more preferable!) and ensure where possible you are using the greatest number of colours.

If you are not sure how to do this, right click on your desktop and select properties then settings.

I have friends and colleagues that check my site under different operating systems and different browsers but, it would be impossible for me to test all the browsers!!

If you check your settings and they are wrong, please change them and you will probably find that many of the sites you visit look a million times better!

Just to add to Simon's list of variable which affect the viewing quality of the sites you visit, I recently came across a site where some of the text on menu bars remained hidden. (I could see the top half of a line of text.) This is usually the result of "incorrect" screen resolution, but in this case it turned out to be controlled by the Windows "font settings" (again, controlled throught he desktop "Settings"). I had my laptop set for Large Fonts and the webmaster had anticipated that users would only use Small Fonts.
I don't know what the moral of this story is. As a webmaster, you certainly can't check everything; sometimes it can be useful to get user feedback...

using IE6.

If we're swopping stories I once wrote an app for a (nameless) client who complained they couldn't find the "go" button.

"but it's huge, and has "go" on it in big letters" I said.

cut a long story they were running a custom desktop so lurid it knocked me queasy and the button backgrounds were red (go figure) so the big red GO! was invisible.

ah clients.......

I always test my pages with Netscape 4.7 and IE5.5.

They seem to be the "over all" ok ones.

Any version newier than that (i.e. IE6) should be able to handle HTML just like the other 2, it's just an other version with a new look and some new knobs and bells.

As for a preference? Hmmmm I always was a Netscape person (just hating IE because it was Microsoft) but lately I must say I have less "issues" with IE than Netscape. SO IE 5.5 gets my vote for being most stable.

Frankly I always thougt that Netscape lost the plot with the 4.x series, they seemed to have regained it with 6.x.

One of our considerations is disabled access - we've (well ok, I've) been looking at the WAI very closely, which has inhibited me from getting too ambitious with the technology.

I use IE 5.5 as my main browser as it's stable and reasonably easy to control. I had a brief liaison with IE 6 and it screwed all my browser settings and I found the security very difficult to work, particularly cookies control.

I also have Netscape 4.7 and Opera 5 installed on my machine for testing although I'm not religious about making either work perfectly.

Visitors will get the most from my site on 1024x768 but it should work fine for users on 800x600. My site stats tell me less than 5% of my visitors use anything less than 800x600.

i guess 99% IE and 1% everyone else is with us for the foreseeable future. Does anyone know if AOL is planning to shift to a Netscape / Gozilla core in the near future? that'd change things...