Macromedia is drawing criticism over the relaunch of their new “All Flash” website because it doesn’t work cleanly in all browsers, specifically Apple’s Safari and Opera.
The Macromedia folks are running up against the same wall all web developers have had to deal with when browsers don’t render pages in the same way. Internet Explorer 5 and 6 make up more than 93% of the browsers in use, but many pages don’t show up at all in Netscape 4.7 (4.7 is still the most popular of the Netscape browsers as takeup of versions 6 and 7 have not been very successful). Netscape accounts for about 5% of browser users.
Opera is touted as a great, small and fast alternative to Netscape and IE, but it still makes up less than 1% of the market. Apple sent frustration through the web development community in early January when they announced the release of yet another browser that web developers would have to test their code on. Safari only works on the Macintosh OS.
