"I wonder if it’s worth some sort of cross-vendor campaign (Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, WebKit/Apple) to get users to adopt modern browsers in a much more rapid pace. IE6 is hanging around for much longer than one would like. I suspect IE 8’s adoption won’t be very quick either. Perhaps it’s necessary for it to be combined with a GoPHP5 style campaign where older browsers are unsupported as of an arbitrary date."

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While browsing some of my favorite sites looking for quirks in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) that I needed to be aware of for Web design, I came across one of the most helpful design tools I've seen in a long time. Caleb Gilbert recommended at Drupal.org a site called Browsershots. His recommendation was prompted on the need for non-IE7 users such as Mac users to actually see what their sites would look like in IE7. This is a design tool not only useful for those designing themes for Drupal, but about any other content management system or Web page you may get your hands on.

Browsershots is a "free online platform where you can test your web design in different browsers." You just submit your web address along with which browsers you would like Browsershots to view the site with and in several minutes you'll find screenshots of your requested site. Browsershots not only offers screenshots using various browsers such as IE, Firefox, and Opera but also through more than one platform. Currently the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms are being offered.

What I like about Browsershots is that not only could I render screenshots of a site as it is viewed in IE7, but also in other versions of Internet Explorer such as IE5 (which surprisingly renders CSS sites well). Several versions of Firefox are also offered but only one version of the Mac's Safari and other less used browsers (Dilo, Phoenix, Netscape Navigator 4.8, etc.) are offered.

Believe it or not, but the first time I tried the Opera Web browser was a month ago. Until recently, I was content in calling Mozilla's Firefox the alternative browser. Opera 9 is now out and contains a wide range of features. Some of the features unique to Opera and not provided by Internet Explorer and Firefox includes BitTorrent built into the browser and Site Preferences. Site preferences allows you to accept cookies and pop-ups according to specific sites you're visiting (as opposed to settings for all sites you visit with the browser).

I thought eweek did a decent review of the product. The following are some of the things they had to say about Opera 9 in their article:

In our tests, we found Opera 9 to be one of the best Web browsing tools we've used in a long time, which is why we are giving Opera 9 an eWEEK Labs Analyst's Choice award.

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Unlike Opera 8, which had significant browser interface changes, Opera 9's big changes are mainly in the areas of management and configuration options.

The usage share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer has dropped to 83 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has a global usage share of 1.49 percent and Opera has 1.00 percent."