Or it should be rightly titled as, 'I Ought To Shoot Myself!'

I am thankful, yet ashamed to be listed on "BloggerBusters's 50 More Fabulous Blogs To Inspire You", given that my blogger template is rather sloppily hacked up, and not tested for compatibility for all browsers, besides Firefox, which is what I use.

If you're not sure why cross-compatibility between browsers are important, a little history lesson will help in understanding its significance. In the late 1990s, Microsoft started what is called the 'browser wars' against Netscape Communications, pitting their Internet Explorer with Netscape Navigator. Both companies, with the version 4.0 of their browsers, set the stage for what had become the biggest battle of browser market share of all time - Netscape eventually lost out, and subsequently got bought over by AOL.

Unfortunately, the ultimate casualty of the 'war', are us, the end users, given the two software offerings had quite different rendering incompatibilities that made web pages from one browser look wrong on the other. This has caused a major headache for websites trying to serve content with ubiquity across the Internet.

While web browsers have since moved from on from the 'fractured' de-facto browser standards to reconcile into a common standard governed by the W3C today, minor quirks still exist between all of the offerings between different browsers today - unsurprisingly so, given that the standard is huge, and often undergoing revision changes, it's hard not to still have quirks between different softwares.

It means that the onus of providing a good web experience to the users still lie in the hands of the developer (in this case, the blog template designer) - he has to check that the presentation is correct, or that it degrades gracefully without causing any ugly visual artifacts when rendered across an 'incompatible' browser.

My page layout was only updated recently, and I'm not really keen on spending more effort in testing and hunting down incompatibilities - if you're an Internet Explorer user, you may find that my pages are running off the screen, or the RSS symbol being rendered off place or without transparency (which may be caused by me running ie4linux rather than a problem with IE itself). If my blog doesn't look right to you, my deepest apologies, and if helps, you may want to consider installing Firefox in this case.

I consciously avoid proselytising, so do take it only as an opinion - my small scale personal blog is littered with mostly my personal, and maybe irrelevant musings (hopefully not!), and probably doesn't warrant that extra urgency to fix up all browser incompatibles any time soon. Using a compatible browser simply makes it easier reading - or subscribe to my RSS feed - this way, you won't have to suffer from the tyranny of browser incompatibilities that I've inflicted on you.

Shameless plug: But I'll really appreciate if you do subscribe to my feed, I am trying to build up readership - let me know what you want to read here!

But in any case, a big appreciation to thanks to Amanda who thinks that my blog design is worthy of mention - many love, namaste!