Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Crafting Web sites since 1999

I am a Web designer passionate about creating elegant, inspiring, and usable Web experiences that connect with an audience and fulfull business objectives.

What is a Browser?

June 30, 2009

Caught My Eye · Design (Web) · User Experience

A very telling video about what the aver­age per­son is think­ing when they use the Web. I lis­tened to an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about this sub­ject on Sitepoint’s pod­cast.

I think the rea­son there is con­fu­sion about the dif­fer­ence between a browser and a search engine is the inte­gra­tion of search into the Web browser. Search is the func­tion that users do the most of. I could see why they don’t under­stand the difference.

I believe this video is evi­dence that a lot of peo­ple are not so con­cerned about which browser they use and will prob­a­bly stick with their default. Web design­ers are going to still have to con­sider IE6 for a long time and then deter­mine what strat­egy to employ with IE6.

One strat­egy that I am inves­ti­gat­ing is Andy Clarke’s Uni­ver­sal IE6 CSS. I have imple­mented it on this site. I like the idea of serv­ing up the user the basic con­tent with­out styling.

BTW, a browser is soft­ware that you use to view Web pages. The more pop­u­lar browsers include Inter­net Explorer, Fire­fox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome.

A search engine is a Web site that you use to search for things on the Inter­net. Two of the most pop­u­lar are Google and Yahoo. Many mod­ern Web browsers use Google when you use the Search box in the right hand cor­ner of the browser.

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