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Home • My Affiliates • Get Paid! • Games • Japan • Software • Programming • Misc. Links

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Browser Compatibility

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When I started this website in 1999, the latest browsers were 4.x and browser compatibility was a big thing. Now, with level 7 browsers, it's hardly an issue any more. HTML has become far more standardized. Most of my pages comply with HTML 4.01 standards, and since I don't use any too exotic stuff should look about the same in most browsers. Of course, whether you heed by the standards or not, no HTML document will ever display in all browsers equally well, and these little graphics "Best viewed with any browser" have always struck me as rather naïve.

Turning Images Off

I try to design my pages so that you should not even notice that there are any images if you have them turned off. Unfortunately, only Firefox fully supports this.

Turning Stylesheets Off

Since my pages are designed to be not only usable, but to even look fairly good without stylesheets, this should not be a problem at all.

Using a Text Browser

Not a problem either, but unless it has table support, some pages will be nearly unusable.

Tested Browsers

This is a list of browser with which I have successfully tested this site. In alphabetic order. Mind that I could as yet only test from the Windows platform.

Arachne (DOS), offline

There should be no real problems any more. What problems there might be are due to her limited stylesheet support.

• Some pages (99 Bottles of Beer, BASIC, and others with the same stylesheet) were displayed with a bright green instead of a silver background. I've fixed this by now, it turned out that Arachne accepts colors only in hex, not in RGB format.
• In the walkthroughs, navigation is still displayed white on white and thus unreadable. I'll probably fix this eventually, meanwhile you can help yourself by turning off stylesheet support.

• Occasionally, Arachne displays parts of a page that are commented out. This is in part my fault, because comments should not really contain HTML commands (actually, this is a rather silly rule, for it is in general one of the functions of comments to temporarily disable commands). Where I find it, I usually fix it.
• Definition lists, which I use liberally, are displayed as ordered lists — this is a design flaw.

Browse X

Works very well, it does not support stylesheets at all, but that is no problem, only partial stylesheet support is. Pages with jpegs sometimes load slowly.

Internet Explorer 3.0 (Windows)

This is the oldest browser I have recently tested the site with. Apart from the missing PNG support there were no problems.

Internet Explorer 4.0 (Windows)

I tried to hide my stylesheets from this version, but it didn't work. Nevertheless the pages are displayed fairly well, only the main stylesheet (the one used on this page) is occasionally rendered weirdly. I guess I'll be able to fix that.

Internet Explorer 5.0 (Windows)

The Shadowrunner Guide is not displayed quite as intended.

Internet Explorer 6.0 (Windows)

The combination of ordered list and definition lists on the Street Wars page is displayed incorrectly. The header fonts are too small making the third level header (which I rarely use) ugly.

Links

Since it supports tables, it works even better than Lynx. It has no problems with the dots on the Games page, and even does a fair job with the umlauts and c-cedilles in the foreign language texts.

Lynx for Windows

No real problems here, stay away from the pages with large tables (Games by Alphabet and Games by Year, mainly). The only other thing the Windows version does not like are the centered dots on the Games page. It displays À instead, even though this is correct HTML. It's a matter of different encoding between DOS and the rest of the computer world. From another platform you'll be fine. Be aware that the same thing goes for special characters in French and German texts.

Mosaic 3.0 (offline)

Not that I think that anybody is actually still using it, but yes, it displays my pages well. I find that it usually crashes rather fast, but that might just as well be because it doesn't like the speed of my computer. Of course it has no PNG support.

Mozilla Firefox 1 Pre-Release

In many tables text that should be centered is left-aligned. Otherwise it works perfectly and generally displays the pages best from all the tested browsers. It's the only browser that displays them as intended with images turned off. Older versions of Mozilla work just as well, but why should you use them?

Off by One

No problems here. Like Browse X, this one has no stylesheet support at all.

Opera

Well, of course. This is my standard browser. If this website is "optimized" for any browser, it is Opera. I used version 6.01 very long, meanwhile I've switched to 7.51.

Opera 3.62

On some stylesheets, links (or visited links) will be displayed in the default color and not the one specified in the stylesheet, which can make them hard to read. Tables are displayed with borders (I code them with borders in HTML, but then hide these borders via stylesheet, for better display when stylesheets are not supported or turned off), but this is merely a cosmetic thing.

Known Problem Children

There is really only one entry here: Netscape 4. I simply do not support it. The problem is its partial support of stylesheets. Turn them off completely if possible, or get another browser. Both Netscape 3 and the recent versions should work fine.

Since it's impossible to keep different versions of Internet Explorer on the same system. I could not test this, but I suspect that IE4 has similar problems.

Screen Resolutions

These pages are designed with 800×600 in mind. They might look a bit weird at very high resolutions. I couldn't care less. If you don't like it, reduce the size of your browser window.

A smaller resolution poses no real problems, but might not go very well with some of the stylesheets. You might want to reduce font size or turn off stylesheet support. On screenshot pages, the page will be a bit wider than your screen, but not really much.