"There's a customer base of some 65 million potential porn surfers clicking their back buttons because of sites that look shitty in Mozilla."

Oh sweet memories. Hard to believe but once upon a time almost ninety percent of web surfers used Netscape as their browser. Then came Windows 95 -with it’s bundled version of Internet Explorer- and Netscape fell from grace and was eventually sold to AOL.

As per recent statistics, there are approximately 950 million web surfers worldwide. That’s a hell of a lot of surfers even when you eliminate the underage traffic. Say that maybe half of that number are adults. That makes 450 million, give or take. Now take 14.5% of that and you get roughly 65 million.

14.5%? Where does this figure come from? According to W3schools, that’s the percentage of surfers currently surfing with Mozilla as their browser of choice. While the majority of Internet traffic is still viewed through IE the use of Mozilla is on the rise. Just this last January only 8.2% percent were browsing with Mozilla. This rise in Mozilla usage is due ­in part- to a recommendation by THE United States Emergency Computer Readiness Team (US-CERT) that users drop Internet Explorer as their browser.

Granted, the chance that Mozilla could overtake IE as the dominant web browser is a thin one. Yet more and more people are turning to Mozilla/Firefox because they’re sick and tired of Internet Explorer’s seemingly limitless vulnerabilities. Trojans, worms and spyware. They’re mostly aiming for IE enable surfers and those surfers are beginning to jump the Microsoft ship. Perhaps it’s time for adult webmasters to create pages that render properly in Mozilla.

Mind you, many adult webmasters already do this. But so many more don’t even bother. In the meantime there’s a customer base of some 65 million potential porn surfers clicking their back buttons because of sites that look shitty in Mozilla. What if the percentages rise? How high will those percentages have to be before site builders start making pages for Mozilla? 15 percent? 25 percent? 50 percent? More importantly, where do you ­as a site builder- go to learn to create pages that are Mozilla compliant?

The unfortunate reality is that Internet Explorer and Mozilla render pages differently. What may look swell in IE might look like crap in Mozilla. IE debugs scripts by default so even bad code looks right. Mozilla on the other hand is fully compliant with standards set down by the World Wide Web Consortium.

In other words, if you want to create pages that render properly in Mozilla you need only to follow W3C standards.

Here are some helpful places you can go to learn how to make your websites for Mozilla:

The World Wide Web Consortium
(http://w3c.org/)
These are the folks who set the standards for most web technologies and formats. Their purpose is to make the Internet work for every surfer. Founded by Tim Berners Lee, the W3C is the foremost authority on determining what is and what is not standard HTML.

W3 Schools
(http://www.w3schools.com/)
This is a very cool site. It’s chock full of tutorials and info concerning HTML, XHTML, XML and CSS. The best part is that (like Cozy Frog and Cozy Academy) all this great knowledge is absolutely free!

Mozilla Web Standards Page
(http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/)
This page explains how to bring your pages up to W3C standards and therefore, Mozilla compliant. What better place to learn than from the source!

W3C Markup Validation Service
(http://validator.w3.org/)
This handy tool will check a URL for W3C compliance and also tell you exactly where the flaws are.

I’m a biased dreamer. I admit it. I have always loved Netscape. I cried when AOL bought them out. I jumped for joy when I heard word that Netscape was being reborn as Mozilla. I downloaded Firebird the very day it came out. Now I use Firefox. Each new version of the browser just gets better and better. I enjoy surfing again. I’m pretty damned positive that at least 65 million surfers agree with me.

The choice is up to you. You can continue to make your pages for IE users and blow off the growing numbers using alternative browsers. Maybe you’re right. Maybe IE will always be the top browser. Then again, what if it doesn’t stay on top? What if one day the number of surfers on Mozilla exceeds the number of those on IE? Will your site be ready for Mozilla?