A variety of Web browsers are available, with the two most widely used being Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Even though the Web is the best method, so far, of keeping a consistent presentation to information across different computer systems and different browsers, the display and function of a given Web page may vary considerably from one browser or system to another.
MIT recommends and supports Netscape 4.7x because of Netscape's support of Web certificates which MIT requires for its secure web services and other customizations. The current Netscape version is 4.78 for the MAC, PC, and Athena platforms. Lynx is MIT's recommended browser for text-only display of Web pages. Text-only browsers are important for providing accessibility to those with certain disabilities, and are often used by people reading Web pages through a dial-up connection.
Although MIT recommends Netscape, as a Web page creator you generally cannot control which browser your readers will use. Different browsers can cause pages to display differently, depending on varying degrees of support for Web and HTML specifications, as well as plain old bugs. Even the same version of a browser on different platforms may produce differences.
You need to take all of these factors into consideration when creating Web pages. This means adhering strictly to the current HTML recommended specifications (at least HTML 4.01, or XHTML), which is supported by Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 5, and validating and testing your pages. To ensure that your pages look the way you intend them to for most of your audience, test the pages with different browsers on different systems, including text-only browsers such as Lynx.
If you are considering using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) with your HTML to control the layout and design of your pages you should know that neither Netscape 4.7x nor Internet Explorer 5.x fully support CSS. IE 5 has the most extensive CSS support at this time. Once again, testing using different browsers and platforms is the only way to be sure your pages are displaying as you intended.
The following browsers (with the commands to run them) are available on Athena for testing, but are not officially supported at MIT.
Information, demonstrations, and recommendations of, screen readers, audio browsers, and other adaptive technologies are available from MIT's ATIC Lab.
The MIT New Media Centers, with Macintosh systems dedicated to multimedia and Web publishing applications, can be reserved for use by Web publishers in the MIT community. The New Media Center systems have the most recent versions of an assortment of browsers installed for testing.