Firefox or Internet Explorer?
There are many articles concerning the subject, but I would like to have the approach of a developer.
It is always a riddle to try to make the website compliant with all the browsers. But what are the constraints at the moment?
The ratio between the main browsers is roughly the following:
| IE6 | IE7 | Firefox |
| 45% | 35% | 15% |
Source: www.thecounter.com
These three browsers count for around 95%, the rest being Opera, Safari and IE5.
IE7 is a better IE6, and IE7 would hardly fail on a layout where IE6 succeeds. Internet Explorer 6 has a poor compliance with web standards, but as it is broadly used, developers and designers will have to cope with it for still some time.
The good news is that Microsoft is putting a lot of efforts making Internet Explorer compatible with standards. Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test as explained in this post of the IE blog.
My approach is to develop under Firefox, using very useful add-ons like Firebug and Web Developer, and then to fix all the glitches under IE6 using a second style sheet called with conditional comments.
It is possible to obtain that way a layout compatible with 95% of the browsers.