The team at thestar.com worked hard to make the recent refresh of the site work with as many platform and browser combinations as possible, but in this day and age of complex content management systems, adservers, CSS and dynamic pages thestar.com performs better on some set-ups than others.
For thestar.com that means that we build to windows XP/IE 6.0 first, because it is the platform and browser of choice for the majority of our users based on our log files. We also know that it is impossible to satisfy every one of our online readers because of the vast range of system configurations and platforms our readers use.
So what did we do?
We went through the entire set of browser and platform combinations, which include XP and Firefox, OSX and Safari/Firefox, and prioritized which ones were essential to support. We know that our AOL 9, MAC Internet Explorer users and WebTV surfers have a slightly less than optimal experience on our site. Please bear with us as we continue to work on some of the bugs emailed to us from our readers.
While Safari was a recommended browser when the new design was launched, your site does not render correctly.
I reported this to the webmaster, complete with pictures highlighting some probelms but received no reply and I notice the problems remain unresolved
Posted by: James Sedgwick | December 13, 2005 at 08:26 PM
It's great that the layout is now centered on the screen, that makes the fixed-width reading a bit easier for us users running high resolutions (1600x1200 in my case). I can't help but think that the page could be optimized for 1024x768 instead of 800x600, though -- I believe most people are now running above 800x600 these days.
Posted by: Kevin | December 13, 2005 at 09:39 PM
My own experience is that it is easier to design first for standards-compliant browsers, then tweak for IE.
Posted by: mark | December 14, 2005 at 12:26 PM