Should designers use IE instead?

[Davidh]

First of all I hate Internet Explorer!

Although I design sites on the side for clients and 99.9% of them use IE over Firefox. It comes as standard on windows pc's, click the icon and there away. Most everyday internet users wouldnt have a clue what Firefox is.

When designing sites I use Firefox although theres always slight alignment problems in IE even with valid HTML & CSS sites. The site always feels different
in a strange way in IE.

Should designers give up trying to push users to using Firefox and go back to designing on IE? deep inside we all know IE will always be the most used browser.

[kingaman]

if you get your coding right it almost always the only differences will be minor and can only be noticed when viewing the pages side by side.

[McCarthySites]

No, no, no, no..

As mentioned by kingaman - the diffs are subtle. I don't do too many fancy things but search the net for problems have shown lots of rather simple work arounds to issues that do show up (the 'holy hack' for example). Mouseover and padding vs margin issues have lots of articles on how to make it work for both.

Brian

[csup_admin]

Another reason not to go IE for designing is that IE is only available for Windows machines; with percentages in the double digits of non-Windows users hitting the web you are ignoring a sizable chunk which tend to have issues with sites designed for IE only.

The more that we stick together and write to standards instead of Microsoft's hacks the more chance there is of IE 8 actually being standards-compliant for once.

[kobra]

As a designer you should always, always design with the most standards compliant browser for your platform and then fix the things that the MS "quirks" mode does not comprehend

[DaveyC]

I think I read somewhere that IE is being developed to be fully standards compliant. Finally! haha

[jdrobinson]

Internet Explorer 8, when released, will be more standards compliant, and thus correct most issues with the previous versions of IE. This may be a little ways away, but I wouldn't bother if I were you. In some cases, I create a secondary CSS file that only works on IE to correct alignment issues.

[somecustomer]

I don't really care about standards.
The thing that I do care about when I'm creating a website is to make sure that the website will work properly at least in the following web browsers:
IE 6,7,8
Firefox 1.5,2,3
Opera 9
Safari (To a lesser degree)

I really don't like Firefox, Opera and Safari, But I'm just unable to tell my visitors to switch the browser, Because then they just won't enter my website...