The latest development in the design of websites is standards compliance. This means the use of coding which comforms with the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards relate to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and the separation of content from style.
Conforming to these standards results in compact code and small file sizes. This helps with fast downloads and accessibility issues. It also makes future maintenance easier and can make upgrading and redesigning of sites a relatively simple task.
While the standards have been around for some years there has been considerable inertia in browser design with the implementation of support for them. Typically, many aspects of CSS had only patchy support and web pages would render in a totally different way in different browsers. At worst, a page might become completely broken.
The situation has changed rapidly recently, with new versions of existing browsers and new browsers appearing with much improved support and websites can now be viewed more or less as the designer intended. Unfortunately, one of the worst browsers in this respect is Microsoft's Internet Explorer in virtually all it's versions.
Microsoft Windows - Generally speaking any version of Internet Explorer before 6 will not display a standards compliant site properly and even 6 may be problematic. Websites can be coded to be acceptable in IE but the browsing experience will be less ideal. For Windows users the best solution is to change to the Firefox browser which can be downloaded for free from www.getfirefox.com and is one of the most compliant browsers available.
Macintosh OS 9 - development on virtually all Macintosh browsers on operating systems prior to Mac OS X has ceased including IE 5.x. The exception is iCab, and this remains your best hope for a modern browser on older systems. iCab 3.0, www.icab.de/download.html, has recently been released as a public beta.
Contrary to info published elsewhere on the Internet, MS Internet Explorer for the Macintosh remains one of the best choices for Mac OS 9, especially version 5.x. It is certainly still usable although no longer supported - and many times the only practical alternative to accessing web content from an older Macintosh or from within the Classic Environment of Mac OS X.
In no particular order, here are some browsers that work well on Mac OS 9: Opera, iCab, MS Internet Explorer, WannaBe (text only), MacLynx (text only) Mozilla, WaMCom Mozilla, Wazilla, Netscape 6/7 (not version 4!).
Macintosh OS X - most users of this operating system will probably be using the Safari browser. Standards compliance is good.
Linux/Unix - a wide selection of standards compliant browsers are available for Linux. Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror. Users will probably be fully conversant with non-Microsoft software packages.
