During the design element of my webpage, I test it through IE8, Safari, Chrome and Opera – all work fine and display well. However, Mozilla Firefox is my firm favourite due to its stability and predictability. Is it perfect? Perhaps not, but its standards-compliance is robust and its huge open-source knowledge base ensures rapid revisions and subsequent bug-fixing – very welcome additions to any software.

I believe "Best viewed with (Browser X)" comments on a webpage are innocuous, despite the indignation of some web developers crying foul over such comments undermining the unification of cross-browsing compatibility. Good web developers recognise the need for all popular browser platforms to view their site irrespective of what label of allegiance they place on the header or footer of their site, and they will only be shooting themselves in the foot if they stray from this rudimentary principle.

I hold reverence for Mozilla due to the *standards-compliance* that it routinely abides by. I unashamedly credit it with a good web-browsing experience and wish to advertise this fact to all my visitors. But they do not need it to view my webapge properly as it will display in the other popular browsers too. I do believe that continually providing work-arounds, hacks, conditional comments and other flippant exclusivities for sub-standard browsers (read: earlier versions of Internet Explorer) is much more *counter-productive* to web-browsing integration than what any encouragement towards using a certain browser could ever be.

If strong, well-designed browsers are allowed to lead the way to more friendly browsing experiences while simultaneously catering for all those who are unprepared to upgrade their older browsers for whatever reason, then we resist the natural dynamism that is the world-wide web and needlessly suffer the poor implementation of the obsolete. Ignore the outdated so that web-developers can better spend their time creating rich, meaningful and (above all) accessible websites that behave predictably in all the latest browser incarnations. If there is a recommendation to use a certain type of browser, then that's all it should be – a recommendation. Just as long as it isn't the *only* browser that can interpret the website properly.

Weak, poorly-executed web-browsers belong in the rubbish bin of history – Early Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer feature commonly in many blogs and forums about how they frustratingly butcher otherwise well-designed sites, so why continue bothering with them when other, better alternatives exist?

If you code webpages that are semantically correct, then all the latest releases of the major browsers should display it without problems. Updating to the latest browser is free and takes but just a moment of one's time to install.

If someone is unlucky enough to be using a computer in their workplace with no administrative privileges and cannot upgrade to the latest browser, then talking to their system administrator about updating is a good start. If this still results in an impasse, then I would seriously question their merit in being employed to maintain the computer systems to begin with, unless their insistence on keeping the dodgy browser is to purposefully hamper one's web-browsing experience or it is absolutely essential to that company's operations.

Here's a basic analogy – Australia did away with it's CDMA phone network a little while back and there were howls of protest, especially from those out in the country where GPRS and 3G networks aren't always as reliable. But the Australian government went ahead and stopped it anyway. Technology evolves. People adapt. Web browsers are no different.

To me, delaying the inevitable by pleasing everyone is the real issue, not some suggestion on a page.