If you have any trouble with the media content on the class web site or class blog, or if either site doesn’t look on your screen the way it looks in my screencast videos, the likely culprit is your web browser. I try to design sites so that they look good in all web browsers as well as on both Macs and Windows PCs, but Internet Explorer, which is the default web browser in Windows, is a web designer’s nightmare. If you use Internet Explorer to browse the web, you might be missing out on a lot of cool designs! For that matter, you might be missing out on some content as well.
I strongly recommend that Windows users avoid Internet Explorer altogether and instead download and use a free alternative, such as Firefox or Google Chrome.
For Mac users, using the default web browser (Safari) is okay, but you might still find that you have a better experience with Firefox or Chrome.
While no web browser is perfect, these alternatives are so popular precisely because they’re so much better than the default browsers on either platform. Firefox in particular has a wide range of Add-ons that give you all kinds of nifty features (like the ability to download videos from YouTube). Plus, it’s simply a good idea to have several web browsers to choose from, since some are better than others at handling certain kinds of web content.
So here’s the digital literacy tip of the day: if you ever experience trouble reading content on the web, try launching a different web browser and viewing the page in it, to see if that solves the problem.