Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

Yes, but that is from a technical website, here are the actual statistics:
2006 IE7 IE6 IE5 Ffox Moz N O
March 0.6% 58.8% 5.3% 24.5% 2.4% 0.5% 1.5%
February0.5% 59.5% 5.7% 25.1% 2.9% 0.4% 1.5%
January 0.2% 60.3% 5.5% 25.0% 3.1% 0.5% 1.6%

And as you can see, Most everybody DOES use internet explorer... XP is the most popular operating system, and because of that, every computer-illiterate person who gets a computer uses it's default browser: Internet Explorer. There is absolutely no reason for people not to use IE, especially when vista comes out with 7.


EDIT Rats... the table didn't show up... It shows about 63% who use some form of IE and 25% who use FF.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

That might not be the fairest data to use. I'd imagine a FIRST team's site would draw a more technically-savvy audience, one more inclined to use Firefox. (As great as Firefox is, I still have to educate folks around me about it.)

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

But is it a representative sample?

It should be pretty clear that the target audience for a good FIRST-related site (as in, website award material) is the general public, seeing as section 9.7 definitively articulates the need for features that serve to promote FIRST and the team to outsiders. So I ask, if you're catering to outsiders, why are you primarily concerned with the recent traffic on your site? That reflects the people who have already been reached, not the people to whom you are reaching.

Additionally, I have a few questions about your methodology. Are you counting page loads, unique hits, or something else? Of these, are a large proportion due to the developers themselves—such as when you reload a page to test a code change? Do you use Firefox in this manner? I hope that you can appreciate how this sort of thing can easily bias your data.

In general, FIRST teams must design their sites to support recent versions of IE, because among the general public, that is still the most popular choice. Supporting Firefox, Safari, etc. are of course good ideas as well, but any site which is not fully operable under IE is not worthy of recognition by FIRST, because its inoperability negates any merits that it might have under the various categories of assessment. The team's site isn't the place to be making a political statement regarding your opinion of Microsoft, or of the Mozilla Foundation, or any other entity—at least not if you value winning a website award.

And with regard to the linked image from robot180, that certificate error (whatever the reason—maybe your certificate provider isn't on Microsoft's most up-to-date list, maybe you issued it yourself, maybe there's something wrong with my browser) surely isn't a good omen. These are the little things that annoy users, and judges; fix them!

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

Like Andrew Blair, BandChick, Jonathan Lall (especially), dk5sm5luigi -- in other words, most everyone -- wrote: Like it or not, you have to embrace IE.

Ahh, to be young and righteous, to rail against the machine. It was fun, but then I grew up. The machine is large - note that more people use IE than ALL the others COMBINED - and there is a reason for that, and it isn't necessarily that it is the worst product on the market, or that MS has illegally conspired to force us to use it.

Go ahead and hate MS, but the real challenge here is to make a website that works with everything. Do you think a large corporation would even dream of building a site that cuts out 55% or more of the potential viewers? Of course not, so they hire coders who are skilled enough to make it cool & flashy, AND work with everything.

Give me a compelling argument to "move on to something better" and I might consider it. For now, I'll stick with IE, thanks.
Don

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

There's no two ways about it, IE holds more than two thirds of the market share (depending on your definintion). Of course, we're not counting number of users that positively choose to use IE, because I suspect that number is rather low. But we must remember that the average IE demographic is much older and drastically less technically-inclined. This means that they not only use the Web less, but are less likely to go to one of the websites that counts market share when they do in fact use the Web (I'm pretty sure WebMD and the American Geriatrics Society don't contribute to the count). Remember also that unmodified IE6 and lower do not use tabbed browsing (like Mozilla and most others) or MDI (like Opera), and thus IE users' browsing habits and methods are both less efficient and use less bandwidth; the simple fact that we have tabs on our browsers makes us compuslively middle-click every other link and load it in parallel (hit), even if we don't read it at all, whereas IE users load in series and have linear histories that take them wherever the pages lead them. While most market share counters aren't counting individual page views at all, this still means that more unique tabbed browser visitors will set them off.

Now, I'm not going to dispute the high numbers from Firefox you're all getting in your website's stats, because it's clear that technically-savvy FIRST students are more likely use Firefox. You can make both a sociological correlation here, and also note that it's actively promoted here on CD and indeed among teams. But if you look closely at your stats, I bet you'll notice that there are a lot of hits from Firefox, but that a) many of them are actually you, and b) there is a much lower hits to unique visitor ratio from IE users.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

When building my team's website, we encountered differences with things working/showing and not showing in IE, FF, Opera, and Safari.

FF dominates as usual, showing everything correctly, displaying the favicon, and the clickable image map.

My suggestion to you: Make it be a visibly functional website in all browsers. When building, constantly check this and work with it. End result- "so what? little extra things don't show/work." But what you have is an operational website that gives useful and aesthetically 'nice' information about your team.

One thing that I have seen teams do is put a graphic or something that says "Best viewed in ________" Still-- your main goal should be to get something functional up in all browser types.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

If your CSS is not displaying correctly, why not use a PHP-generated CSS file? Your PHP file can detect the operating system and the browser that the client is using, and generate the correct CSS accordingly. If you then use mod_rewrite to mask the URL to a .css ending, it will be cached by the browsers. Also, put all your non-browser dependent CSS into a CSS file, and use the PHP one to only generate the CSS that is browser specific to reduce the amount of server-side parsing that needs to be done.

The only real time I use this appoach is because of IE (most notably because of its lack of min-width/max-width support).

Edit: I hit Submit before I was done by mistake...

Anyway, whenever I work on something, I want it to display correctly in all browsers without loss of content or functionality. I will continue to tweak the code until it works. (Right now I am reworking most of the HTML pages on my team's website into PHP ones with better graphics and better browser support). This is a major plus to using PHP instead of HTML to generate your pages: you can generate different code depending on the OS and browser of the clients to ensure that your page looks (and works) equally well in all browsers.

Be considerate to those who use Firefox, Opera, or Safari. Make your website one-hundred percent compatible in any browser.

I like to create websites that work great in any browser and any screen size - I hate using fixed screen resolution sites. Because when ever you make fixed-res sites to 800px side, they look horrible at higher resolutions, and whenever someone creates a website to work perfectly at 1024px resolution, I hate scrolling sideways if I'm using an 800px screen. (My high school won't turn the screen resolutions above 800x600 on all its monitors and it drives me crazy, especially having to constantly scroll sideways every single line to read stuff.)

I usually use 800x600 as a starting point - everything should be viewable in 800x600 screens without needing to scroll sideways. From there, I like to use a automatic resizing layout that will match the width of your browser screen up to a point (such as 1280px wide). This way, people in any screen resolution between 800px and 1280px widths (this will normally be about 95% of all traffic to your website) will be able to view your website. And by having the content max out at 1280px width, it makes the site still readible in those incredibly high resolution screens.

Yes, it does take more work to get everything to display correctly as it automagically resizes itself to match the browser window width, but in the end it behaves more "fluid" and displays like the user would want. (If a user has a browser window maximized with a 1024px resolution screen, they want to view the websites at a 1024px resolution.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

I would guess IE. I have seen sites which render properly ONLY in IE win the website award.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

I was a website judges and used Firefox; I can tell you though after looking at your site, you would loose some points as the FIRST logo is not to specs. It has obviously been resized and has "jagged" edges on it.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

Build your site for your users and not for the award. The criteria for the award is spelled on on page 32 of the awards documentation. It's more about content then technique.

You need to understand your users. Your website goes beyond your team, it reaches your families, your sponsors, your potential sponsors, random surfers, search engines and more. You have no control over how your website is being viewed.

• How many of your users don't have or want to have flash installed?
• How many don't have speakers or have their sound turned off?
• How many surf at 800 x 600?
• How many for security reasons, have java and ActiveX turned off?
• How many have pop-up blockers?
• How many are on corporate systems that will not install the latest and greatest versions of browsers?

That's a short list of what you need to consider when you code for the general public. There is a lot you cannot control. If you code websites for profit, then you must render is all browsers.

FIRST is about teaching you how to succeed beyond FIRST. It is not meant to be easy. If it were, it would not be so much fun.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

About the IE thing.. they really sux because if u will build a website who follow the web standards u should do some hacks to be ok in firefox(and another good browsers) and IE.. and at IE it will be some bugs.. like my team site..

At new jersey regional.. I don't understand till now why team 1089 won.. if someone know a reason please tell me!!

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

Perhaps because they have a good website?

My guess is that the answer lies on the rubric found in the rulebook; presumably, their site scored a bit higher than your site. A good thing to do would be to go over your site and theirs side by side and compare their features against your site and the rubric. This is always a good thing to do when you're in the running for an award, preferrably before the regional (as long as you don't copy every site feature blatantly like what happened at the GTR, you all know who you are :)).

... Incidentally, this has very little to do with the thread.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

One answer: browser specific dynamic CSS.

There are many solutions to create "any browser" websites that don't involve hacks; search around on the Internet and you will find more than you can shake a stick at. These solutions will almost always be more efficient than hacks. And besides, Firefox and web-standards browsers should not need hacks - only IE-based browsers need them.

Further more, creating websites that will work in any browser takes time, effort, knowledge, and patience. If you want to win the award, you need to be willing to shell out a lot of these.

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

I know that.. when I said hacks I mean that u have to do a specific css for IE and another to the good browsers.. u can see at my team site that we did
this do the same thing... but it's easier to manipulate..

Re: what browser do the judges use.
 

I'd say make one code as cross platform as possible. The website I made for our team has no content, so we didn't enter it, and I haven't had a chance to add any. (Or even update the version that FIRST links to, its like version 0.7, I'm at 0.9) Anyway, it doesn't have DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, just straight HTML with frames. (Sorry Lynx users...) If the stupid Tripod ads didn't load (Yes, we're trying to find better hosting) it'd have a load speed that is short on a 26k connection. It also should be viewable in any non text-based browser form something like IE 2-4ish (I can't remember exactly) onward. I've tested it in Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Safari, IE, and Opera. Under Windows, OS X and Linux. (Fedora core 3) Never a problem. So, if I ever get enough content in it and update it I'll never have to worry about browser compatibility. (Unless someone is running IE 1 or Lynx, if they're using IE 1 they should be shot)