Loath, despise, hate, infuriate, rage inducing catalyst of death and destruction ... these words come to mind when I think of the time I've spent creating this site. How people do this for a living, I will never know. Wondering why this site only "officially" supports Firefox? I'll tell you why.

This site only officially supports Firefox because it was my main browser while I was on Windows XP and I still use it occasionally on Windows Vista. Now, IE has the most market share, Firefox comes in second, Opera has ... some people using it, and then there are Mac users with Safari; let's not forget the few hundred other browsers out there with a pinch of market share. Basically, that's a whole lot of configurations to support.

I didn't start off the website development thinking, "I'm going to be cool and make a statement!" I happened to be using Firefox when I started working on the site, tweaking the theme and features, and so on. Shortly after I smoothed things out to my liking, I showed the team and that's where problems first showed up. A few team members use IE 6 and they reported that the website looked "like crap" and wanted to know what drugs I had taken for the past week. Those on Firefox, however, liked the site.

Long story short, after showing the guys on IE 6 what I intended the site to look like, they liked it, too. So, armed with the knowledge that the site looked bad on IE 6, I fired up my copy and started working through the numerous bugs. Another long story short, I cleared out critical issues and still had a few minor changes to make. Hoping back into Firefox, the site no longer looked exactly how I wanted it, fury ensues. A little more back and forth went on before I finally decided it was time to make the site "perfect" in Firefox and "good enough" in IE and other browsers.

IE 7 actually does a really good job of getting it almost right and IE 6 isn't half bad anymore, either. You can still certainly use the site with IE, probably those other browsers too, and you're free to do so. Just know that if you see any bugs in those browsers, they're probably never going to be fixed unless they're an issue in Firefox as well.

I much prefer application development to web development. With applications, you get to write almost all of the rules, no standards compliance to (usually) worry about. I think the site came out pretty good for me not being a web developer in any way, shape, or form. What do you guys (constructively) think?