Browser Compatibility Reading This Blog

This week one of my readers posted on Tek-Tips how much he enjoyed my post on Doing whatever it takes post, but he had a problem reading the blog in Internet Explorer 5.0. In particular he was getting what appears to be carriage returns after each single word. Unfortunately I do not have any old machines hanging out with IE 5.0 (or even 5.5 for that matter) so I am not able to test it out. I have tested it with all the current versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, and Mozilla and they all work fine.

So out of curiosity I fired up an old copy of Netscape 4.7 to see if it works and sure enough it makes a mess out of the HTML. I tested this out on a number of Blogger blogs and other blogs posted on different sites to see how they fared. Most of the Blogger sites get messy to various degrees. Some of the other sites on Foxite and ASP.NET work okay, but are not exact.

So I investigated the Browser states on my sites. Netscape is not even at 1%, Mozilla shows up at 4%, FoxFire is 20%, and IE at 50% for the last couple of months. The other 25% is spread across several bots and browsers like Opera, Safari and Konqueror.

Drilling down into IE, just a little more than 1% are using 5.0.

So the question begs, how much time should I spend trying to fix this issue? I hate ticking off readers because of accessibility, but we are talking two percent of all hits on my Web site, not just the blog. I understand not all developers have access to the latest machinesand operating systems, but there are other resources like libraries, cyber cafes, and even family computers. For what it is worth, I have posted a question to Blogger support on this issue. They only maintain a list of browser compatibility for the posting functionality. Fingers crossed.