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| 2010 Browser Usage |
Primarily I would be looking for layout changes between the different browsers, small changes in spacing or page breaks. As a rule the pages were always working between the different programs. But all that was a long time ago, I stopped checking page issues half a dozen years ago. Back then I would load all the different web browsers on the PC and check pages for compatibility.
Now I just run the three major browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. However I don't run them looking for problems, I run them with each one opening different windows and or passwords.
Anyway over the last few months I've noticed page layout issues with my unique 404 page [the page that displays on a mistyped web address]. I sort of looked at it but never really did any thing about it because I couldn't find the problem. Now I realize that the layout problem was only showing up in Google Chrome, which I hadn't noticed before. With three different browsers it's kind of random which pages show up in which browser depending on what I'm working on.
So I have three different style of pages, and two of those styles use the HTML 'DIV' tag which puts a column on either the right or left side of the page. The pages that use the DIV tag to put a column on the right side of the page seems to work in all three browsers. However the pages that use a DIV to add a left hand column don't seem to work in Google Chrome. Any text or graphic that uses a 'center' tag is forced out of the column and below the content of the main section. So left margin text remains in the div column while a 'center' graphic is pushed out into the adjacent column.
Lucky for me, the pages with the issue only account for 1% of the page-views or around 37,000 pageviews. Ten percent of that are people using Google Chrome viewing only 370 pages in these sections. The 14 pages that account for most of the issue [0.67%] were just fixed as well as some of the others. The thing is, if you never scrolled down to the bottom of the page, the layout problem might not have even been noticed.
Oh, the fix is to just remove the center tag around the graphics in the left column. That was the quick fix, there must be an html coding issue with the div tags, but the point is to get them working right now....
So the advice would be to check you pages in all the browsers.
The pie chart represent 4,221,889 pageviews year-to-date for the web site.
239,690 of those page views were from people using Google Chrome.
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3 comments:
12-14-2010 At first I was just fixing pages in order as they appeared in my list. Then I figured I should be fixing the pages that get the most page views first.
In addition to changing some of the page graphics, I should finish up in a few days
12-15-10 There's a previous blog post regarding Google ranking and page loading time.
A few years ago I started loading graphic files up to Google Picasa to save on server bandwidth. However beginning this year Google indicated that they would start rating web pages base on the amount of time the page took to load. They also indicated [at least in my report] that they see a DNS look-up as a negative. Saving a file out on another server [Picasa] causes a DNS look-up.
Anyway several months ago I stopped posting new pics out to Piscasa, and slowly started to remove the ones that were already out there.
Now I have hundreds of picture files stored with Picasa, so it's not a simple task to move them. Just because I need to up-date what ever page was pointing to the other server, move the graphic, and hope it was being used on some other page too.
The two benefits here are the pages being up-dated here don't have a DNS look-up, any other web site using those pics [without my permission] gets a broken link, and the removal of the 'center' tag from the pages saves a few dozen bytes of download bandwidth ~ all making my page appear faster to load.
I'll have to wait a few months to see what happen to my server bandwidth.
12-19-10 I guess I should note that this blog receives 61% of its pageviews from MS IE and 22% from MS IE, followed by 6% from Google Chrome. So in this case IE is doing better here than on the web site, but the web site pie chart covers many more page-views. The data for the blog only covers several thousand views, as it only started recording data a few months ago. So it may appear that a different group of people view this blog than the web page.
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