Something is very common between all web developers. Hating Microsoft Internet Explorer!

It's a long time web developers are frustrated of Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer. In the time I have been a web developer, I have seen browsers after IE6, and including IE6. I wished bugs of IE6 to no more exist in IE7. Unfortunately not only the number of bugs removed were not considerable, but other bugs were found in IE7. I had to make my designs compatible with another non-standard browser.

I still remember when I was searching for a version of clearfix hack compatible with IE7, I wished there would not be any IE installed in any computer. Many web developers and I when heard web users who use IE were transitin to other browsers felt happy and wished for more transition to Firefox and other browsers.

IE8, the next browser, still not a bad browser, but it had nothing new. It was just striving to provide what others were providing for years, and was still back. I still recommeneded Firefox to anyone who used any version of Internet Explorer.

Surprisingly it seems as if microsoft wants to change this. When I saw IE9 Test Drive I was surprised by new features of IE9. Microsoft unlike the past that was only making market for itself and was moving not on the same path of standardization, now seems is trying to make it's browser standards compliant. Not only that, but also is trying some new features to make it stand out in browsers.

Features like using GPU to make loading pages and images faster, including nice features we had in firefox using addons in the core of IE, trying to make the browser compatible with SVG, etc.

I recommond following IEBlog. My negative view of IE has changed after reading articles of this blog, and am really curious to see the final Internet Explorer 9. Is IE going to return to the war of browsers? Will we as web experts use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox? Well the new features of IE9 are not much important, but the dream of web users that have the best browser already installed in the computers makes me really really feel calm! Though we need to wait people to change their windows XPs, because IE9 can't be installed on windows xp.

To test your websites against IE9, try downloading Internet Explorer Platform Preview, and report bugs using Feedback.

For a long time, there has been implementations of MVC design pattern for web in many languages like java. But it's not long microsoft has given out it's implementation of MVC for web, named ASP.NET MVC.

Let's know more about asp.net mvc.

What is ASP.NET Web Forms?

ASP.NET was created to make developing web applications like desktop applications, creating applications easier, something that once VB did for desktop applications. In ASP.NET the programmer doesn't need to know about the inners of the web. He uses events, and there is no event on web, he has access to session and viewstate, and web is stateless. Well, ASP.NET web forms is great, but sometimes we need other models for developing web applications.

What is MVC?

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To make web pages load faster, one of the main things we should do is to optimize images. Optimizing is using methods to make images in gif, jpg and png formats have less size, without loss in quality.

The first thing to do is to select the correct format for saving images in. Pictures usually have better quality and less size in jpg format, while web graphics should be saved in png or gif format.

Then we need to optimize the image before saving. That is what quality of image is good enough, and of course less quality means less size. This is usually done in save for web & devices in photoshop.Then it's time for optimizing tools. After saving images, we can use tools to lower the size of images without loss in quality.
There are many tools for this, but I've selected the tools that I use myself and feel more comfortable with, and do good optimizaton.

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One of the bigest challenges of doing web design is not related to web design at all. that's the IE6 browser. Just because a plenties of web users still use this browser, web designers can't fully benefit features available in CSS. Of course many designers like me think IE6 is obsolete by now. Maybe sometimes telling IE6 users that their browser is least compatible with the site, or even not showing the site to them and telling them to upgrade, or maybe sometimes redirecting them to breakIE6.com are the most favourite and easiest to do.

But sometimes you really have to make your site compatible with IE6, maybe your client wants this!

Here are some solutions to some of the most common problems of IE6.

Code just for IE6

Fortunately with all the fundamental problems of IE6 and microsofts selfishness for not making IE6 web standards compliant, there is a way to write codes that just IE6 sees them and it's a great chance for fixing problems with IE6. It's done with Conditional Comments.

code example:

<!--[if IE6]>
Oops! Looks like you're still using Internet Explorer 6!
You deserve better!
<![endif]-->

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Though browsing the web with Firefox is fun, there are many addons available for it that can improve the experience. These addons is one of reasons Firefox is so unique in browsers world.

Addons are not just for web users, as a web developer, I, myself benefit a lot from addons that are available and they are so useful that I think  I wouldn't be able to design websites without these addons.

The following is a list of 13 Firefox addons that I mostly use and benefit from them when developing websites.

1. Web Developer

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Designing web pages using tables has been replaced with pages with CSS layout in Web 2.0 sites. By using tables in specifying page layout, content and view of the page will be mixed and it won't be possible to have an abstractive view of each. there are many disadvantages in designing using tables some of which are:

• Because of not having seperate view and content, whenever there is a need for changing the design of an element, that change has to be specified with that element in it's HTML code. This will cause heavy pages compared to CSS enabled pages where by defining a CSS rule, it would be possible to apply a design specification to a class of elements. This way, bandwidth usage will be less on the server and the client will have to wait less to view the page in his browser.



• The second problem when not using CSS is that when a design feature of a class of elements needs to be changed, the change has to be set for each element separately. But if CSS is used, we can simply change the rule that is applied to the class and all elements will be shown differently in the browser.



• When using CSS, different design rules can be specified for different client platforms. So to have different designs for mobile browsers or for print or even for different browsers, providing different CSS rules is enough, without a need for any change in HTML code.



• Using CSS, we can have an absractive view of design and of content. So we can change either with least attention to the other. So for example if a page needs a change in design and not in content, changing the CSS rules with minimum or even no HTML code change will do it. So there will be a great save on maintenance.