Why Does Espn Website Look Funny
98.4% of our audience uses a standards-compliant web browser, but you appear not to be using one. We want to help you remedy this situation and improve your experience on ESPN.com and the rest of the internet. Click one of the download links on the left to freely upgrade your browser, or read on for more information on why you got to this page. 
* Or if you'd like to view ESPN's lite site for older browsers and WebTV, click here.
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Why am I here?
The Long Answer:
When web browsing became popular in the mid 90s, several companies began battling to develop the most dominant web browser on the market. Since there was no standard on what a browser should really look and act like, these companies all released their own browsers using proprietary methods, and the end result was a slew of browsers which were barely compatible with each other. As a result, anyone who wanted to run a web site often had to write 5 or 6 different versions of each page on their site, just to make sure it worked in all of these proprietary browsers. As a user, you may not realize this is going on, but the end result is a page which is not necessarily presented as it *should* be but rather as a "lowest common denominator" for all the browsers it must be viewed on.
For the last several years, companies (including ESPN) have supported all of these older browsers because large percentages of their audience still used them. The results were heavier pages which took longer to load, longer lead-times on developing and publishing new content, and all sorts of complicated JavaScript to send different people different versions of each page.
Finally, along came a set of open web standards for everyone to use. For the past couple of years, every major web browser released has been built around a set of open standards designated by the World Wide Web Consortium, a non-profit organization charged with overseeing the continuing development of the web. What this means is that one piece of code now looks the same on every modern browser, whether it be Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, or others. The only catch is, the majority of users actually have to *use* these modern browsers before sites like ESPN can present content which is optimized for them.
So when we began talking about redesigning the ESPN.com front page, the first thing we did was look at our audience. Our numbers show that about 1.6% of our audience still uses non standards-compliant browsers, and most of that 1.6% uses Netscape 4, which is a non standards-compliant 5-year old browser and is easily, and freely, upgradeable to Netscape 7 (a very nice browser).
So we said to ourselves, "If we can produce twice the amount of content, create faster loading pages, and offer more features to 98.4% of our audience at a cost of having to tell less than 2% of our audience to freely upgrade their browser, then well, that's a pretty easy decision." If it was more like 10%, then perhaps we wouldn't have made the same decision, but the fact is, most people have already upgraded and most of the remaining 1.6% simply don't realize they are using an outdated browser.
We'd like to make perfectly clear that we are not trying to get you to use Microsoft browsers, Netscape browsers, Apple browsers, or Opera browsers. This is not about telling you what brand of browser to use. It is only about alerting you to the fact that each of the companies above, plus a few more, makes a modern, standards-compliant browser which you can easily (and freely) switch to using the links on the upper left side of this page.
Over the next year or so, you will begin to notice more and more sites concentrating their efforts on supporting open standards and dropping support for older non-compliant browsers. You are free to consider us one of the first, and you may also consider this an invitation from your friends at ESPN to get on board. If your systems administrator has you locked into using a non standards-compliant browser like Netscape 4, then feel free to send him or her to this page. They already know about this issue and we feel strongly that it is in their best interest to get you upgraded.
As an influential site on the internet, ESPN is proud to help further the cause of open standards on the web. Since you are eventually going to upgrade your browser anyway, why not use this as your opportunity? We're sure you'll enjoy the new ESPN, as well as every other site on the web a lot more because of it.
If you prefer a simpler explanation, click here for the Short Answer (a less technical explanation of why you should upgrade).
Source: http://www.espn.com/browserupgrade_long.html
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