Website Usage Requirements and Recommendations
Screen Resolution
Bonilla-Chapalaw.com was designed for optimum viewing with a screen resolution of at a minimum of 800x600 pixels. Use of anything lower will result in the viewer needing to scroll side-to-side as well as up and down on the longer pages within the site. However, it should be noted that resolutions of 1024x768 or higher are best for viewing most websites.
To adjust this setting in the Windows® operating systems, right-click on your desktop, move down the the properties selection of the pop-up menu and click. Go to the settings tab at the top of the resulting window and you will find your resolution slider at the bottom.
To adjust your screen resolution in Mac OS X®, go to your Apple Menu (upper left of the screen) and go down to your system preferences. Select displays from the main preference pane and then pick display to see available resolutions.
In Linux®, this setting varies greatly depending on the distribution and desktop environment used. Good luck with that. (Depending on the distro's support for the many different video chipsets out there, it is likely that you will not find many resolutions available-something that can be problematic for people trying to set their screens for 'native resolution' of LCD's flat panel monitors.) However, it should be noted that this situation is improving with each release of Linux. Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse are all sporting monitor res. utilities that can match resolutions to screens much better than previous versions.
Browsers
First off: Microsoft's Internet Explorer in a Windows environment is never recommended for regular web browsing. NEVER. IE6 and 7 both have webpage rendering issues which make formatting and content control more difficult due to some code tags they use which are specific to their web-design program FrontPage. Since it is not W3C (web compliance organization standards) compliant in that and other regards, it is not up for recommendation. These errors are considered bugs by everyone but Microsoft. Note that when this website was being designed and built, there were some rendering issues that affected only IE 6 & 7 on Windows. Every other browser on Windows, Macintosh (X and Classic) and Linux (several distributions) rendered the pages as designed by Dreamweaver. The problematic pages were checked for W3C compliance and they passed. The problems were with IE's non-compliance with open standards.
With Linux and Macintosh operating systems, Firefox from Mozilla.com has gained a great deal of popularity in the past couple of years. Firefox is also taking nearly 20% of the Windows browser maketshare as well. While Internet Explorer (IE) has a great lead in market share, it went nearly five years without development or improvement. Additionally, IE for the Macintosh was discontinued in 2003 and support ceased in 2005.
The only circumstance under which IE for Windows can be recommended is to run Windows Update which is deep rooted in the system. If it were truly possible to run Windows without IE, that would be the recommendation. The reason being is that the vast majority of security issues which have plagued Windows in the past several years are based in Active X and Internet Explorer.
For the security of your browsing, IE should not be your primary browser. Firefox, recently updated to version 2, is much more secure and faster. Firefox is also much more customizable with extensions being available to add features which IE does not have. And the integrated search feature has only recently been adopted into IE, but not as well.
Other browsers recommended over IE include:
Browser |
Operating Systems |
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Windows, Mac, Linux |
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Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris |
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Windows, Mac, Linux, OS/2, Solaris |
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Windows, Mac (v.8 Win Only, Mac v.7.2) |
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Apple Macintosh OS X |
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Apple Macintosh OS X |
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Linux (KDE Desktop Environment) |
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Apple Macintosh OS X |
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Apple Macintosh OS X, OS 8.6-9.2 (Classic) |
E-Mail
Though the use of email is not related to using the website per se, it should be recognized that a great deal of the problems related to internet security include the use of e-mail. And just as Internet Explorer is vulnerable to security intrusions, its companion application Outlook Express has created a great deal of problems because of the fact that the IE rendering engine is used in Outlook Express. And integrated technologies in Windows, IE and OE create the virus/spyware/malware nightmare with which most Windows users are familiar.
There are not as many choices in e-mail as there are in browsers, but an excellent one for Windows, Mac and Linux is Mozilla's Thunderbird. Junk filtering built in and it too is extensible. Give it a look and see why so many emailers are using Thunderbird to get the Windows "monkey off their back."
Other recommendations would include Eudora, Apple's Mail and SeaMonkey's built-in mail program, Opera's built-in email and IncrediMail (Windows.)
Please see the information on trademarked brands used on this page |
