Design With Windows ⇥ thenextweb.com

Ted Goas, The Next Web:

For reasons like these, I keep Windows close throughout my process. It has positive side effects in my everyday workflow, even if I’m developing on a Mac. I design and code defensively. I automatically write CSS that works in old versions Internet Explorer.

This entire article is based on the notion that you’re a web developer creating a website which will be seen by an audience with a browser share mix broadly similar to the worldwide averages.

I can tell you that this assumption is a complete joke.

I know the mix of visitors to this website; for new development projects, I like to find out what their browser share mix is as well. Less than 3% of the visitors to this site in the past week have visited it using IE 6 or 7. More people visited the site with Linux. It simply isn’t worth my time to ensure that this website works fine across every browser, because my audience doesn’t use old-ass versions of Internet Explorer.

Design for the priorities of your audience. Say you were part of the development team behind Quartz, and you were targeting mobile businesspeople (like they were). Would you prioritize testing it in the order of Chrome for desktop, then IE, and then Firefox? No — you’d test first on Safari for iOS and Chrome for Android.

Design and test with the priorities of your audience.