Slashdot Mirror
10 Percent of UK Sites Incompatible with Firefox
Bimo_Dude writes "The BBC News is reporting that ten percent of UK websites alienate Firefox users. From the article: 'While most people still use Microsoft's browser, Firefox is slowly making inroads. Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications. Microsoft IE's share of the market dropped to 87.23% in May, compared to 90.31% in January.'"
MS is nolonger the standard. Woohoo
If it weren't for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no songs.
I'm from the UK and my site, www.xearix.com (the XearixNET IRC network) isn't. I remeber my old schools website only worked in IE, was a real hassle working around all the glitches to get my work downloaded - quite often I just thought screw it, if they can't be arsed to design a website which is actully complys with standerds, I can't be arsed to do my homework.
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...10 percent of UK web sites are hosted at the domain http://www.msn.co.uk./
Why don't webdesigners simply use standard compliant ways to make their websites?
See pictures of tits
Perhaps what they're really trying to say is that 10% of the sites are IE-specific, as if a site does not work in FireFox, it is unlikely to work in Safari, Opera, and other browsers. It's not a FireFox specific problem.
When I see a site that don't work in Firefox, I usually don't bother open up IE for that site.
Damn, it reminds me when I told about a certain webmaster how his page wasn't working good with other browsers than IE.
He added a "Designed for IE" claim... -_-
Most casual web site designers use whatever design tool they can get their hands on, and that's usually Frontpage sinec it's bundled with Office (I think).
12:50 - press return.
This is on the BBC website, which can withstand any amount of slashdotting. There's no need to post an unformatted copy of the article here.
No matter how accurate these statistics are, there will be plenty of people arguing about them. What makes this study any more accurate than others?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Ten percent isn't bad. At one point, for about ten seconds in Internet time, you couldn't do *anything* on the web without IE and some ActiveX control.
I'm happy that I can switch clueless users to Firefox now because sites like Yahoo! know to play nice. No longer do I get calls late at night asking why Euchre doesn't work.
Get your Unix fortune now!
It turns out that on these 10%, they render just fine. It's just that the content is an insult to the intelligence of the average Firefox user.
Unknown host pong.
Idiot.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's a commercial decision. Making your site work completely with IE gets you around 90% of the market. Making your site work completely with W3C standards gets you around 10% of the market. Making your site work completely with both costs you more money. If the extra money is more than the 10% of the market is worth, you're going to go with the 90%-only option.
It sucks, but businesses don't run to make Firefox users happy, they run to make a profit. When the cost of losing the smaller market share (and the resulting negative PR etc.) outweighs the cost of making a site that works completely with both types of browser, businesses will support both types of browser.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What TFA doesn't tell you is that the UK is a tiny little island inhabited by hobbits, leprechauns and the Oasis brothers. A tiny little island where www.microsoft.co.uk makes up 9% of the accessible websites.
The other 1% is the Beckham/Adams fansite, which we all know is poorly coded.
How is it possible for so many sites to be like this? I have designed a fair number of websites but I really don't know how I'd go about making it difficult for Firefox users (not that I'd ever want to). Surely it's easier to just follow the standards? After all, there are whole shelves of books and online tutorials telling people how to follow them; there aren't many books with titles like "Creating Non-Standard Websites" or "How to Create Inaccessible Sites". It seems this 10% of sites must have been trying extra hard to break on non-IE browsers.
the layman's guide to computer science
My GF picked up a book on CSS (for dummies). The author suggested that standards didn't matter so much as the market was pretty much all internet explorer, so why bother checking with any other browser.
I couldn't beleive I was reading this. Its actually repeated in a different section of the book. But then again the book was for dummies.
For what its worth firefox plugins like webdeveloper make designing/checking web pages (especially css) so much easier, hopefully it will make traction into web development shops.
I doubt that it's anywhere near as much as 10% of sites that don't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my main browser on my work PC and my home Linux, Mac and PC. I very rarely find a site these days that doesn't work properly with Firefox, the Odeon and Jobcentreplus sites mentioned in the article being a couple of the most notable exceptions. I'd put the figure at far less than 1%.
Government sites should leed to show proper behaviour and standard compliance and work hard not to tie users to a specific brand or configuration.
How does Uk compare to other countries in Europe and around the world on that matter ?
Léa Gris
TFA mentions that this is due to devs targeting IE, or testing their work under IE. I do just the opposite. I work in mozilla/firefox, THEN test in IE. If any issues arise, its alot easier coming from a "mozilla" than from "ie" build and working out the kinks.
Although it is annoying that MS tends to make their own tags, leading to situations like this...its a competitve market, so any bells, whistles or extras you can throw in makes your product stand out. Most people don't even know or care about W3C standards, valid CSS etc. Does it look cool and work for them, thats all they care about. Hell, even the latest PHPBB uses IE only tags...
In somewhat related news, British Comedy stylings alienate 10% of world population.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I continually moan at the techies at the sites that don't support Firefox (and often Safari). Like the UK National Lottery site.
I get the same response - "We don't support that browser".
When I'm building a web site, I've always thought that it was up to the *browsers* to support my open-standards *code*, not the other way round.
I'm not sure if this is just me or what, but I actully find it easier to develop websites for Firefox than I do for IE. Firefox supports transparent PNGs.. CSS2..
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Its not just firefox and safari that have problems with these sites, more folk are using pdas of even mobile phones to browse for info on the net, and Sites with fancy frontpages especially using flash or IE specific javascript are alienating customers every day.
Isn't there someway we can shame the developers into always ensuring there is a simple way into their sites.
This also applies to blind surfers who use browsers that speak the page to them. So many sites are inaccessible to them
This is probably because the lazy webmasters do not feel like learning the standards, or don't get paid enough to actually care.
Or they don't have enough technical know how to fix the page they made in FrontPage.
I'm teminally incoherent
I'm a die hard firefox user, but firefox doesnt even pass the acid test. Don't complain that "firefox is being alienated" when it doesnt even pass rudimentary web tests
I was simply pointing out that this is hardly newsworthy...
10% of sites in UK are incompatible with firefox?
Thats nice to know... Next please...
The chief executive of Opera Software claimed on Monday that the market share figures for Mozilla Firefox are inflated, due to its support for link prefetching.
m
Read more here:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39204643,00.ht
What would be good is if there was a greasemonkey script for these sites that rewrote the broken javascript into something standards compliant, then firefox users need not worry. ... or would that be a bad thing because the site owners would no longer have as much incentive to fix their sites properly?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Basically, just being productives instead of just looking at the market share figures. Like, pro-active, you know.
my danish blog page, can be viewed in any browser, except IE. He he, fight back, I do...
http://blogwars.blog.com/
From the actual study located at http://www.scivisum.co.uk/press-releases/200506_Fi refox_Web_Test_Study.htm
"Guilty websites
Odeon (http://www.odeon.co.uk/ a major cinema chain has received criticism for months for accessibility issues - even now its' opening 'splash page' seems at first glance to be working fine but click on the 'enter' button and Firefox users are offered a blank page.
On the Jobcentreplus (http://www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk/ home page, Firefox users find that the 'Job search' button opens a new page, but the user can't perform a search, because the first choice "Select a Job Group from the list" is an empty box.
Online insurance site, http://www.insurance.co.uk/ run by Lloyds TSB works, but gives the user the visual impression that it is broken - menu items have 'missing images' icons in Firefox, but not IE.
Similarly, a FTSE100 tobacco company, British American Tobacco's website (http://www.bat.com/ effectively hides most of it's pages from Firefox users - their menu system doesn't show sub-menu choices if you're not using IE."
Well, thats 4 websites...so, if thats 10%, that means that there are only 40 websites in the UK, according to my Athlon XP 3200+ Clawhammers FPU...
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Opera self-identifies as IE: Fully 3% of the sites they tested turned away non-IE users without even trying.
Another one bites the dust
The BBC article and the original SciVisum article (and of course the slashdot article) are all aimed at Firefox users. However, this survey is just pointing out that these web sites are IE-centric and don't work with most other browsers, not firefox specifically.
I guess the reason they pick on Firefox is because they're starting to become a very popular competitor to Internet Explorer for Linux and Windows users, and of course this means that we've got to make it look bad in comparison.
Nice, but the BBC site is one of the most popular in the world and gets a lot more traffic that this one hence it is impossible to slashdot.
So? One of my sites doesn't work so well on IE, a moving progress bar doesn't update if you use IE but does work if you use Firefox.
(Its just an animated GIF I set to visible before a slow page switch, for some reason it didn't work on IE).
Because I used FF for the better Javascript console to develop it with, the site works slightly better with FF and I only noticed it when I came to test it on other browsers at the end.
The way I figure it, Firefox is increasingly being used by the tech savvy people and so we'll see lots of things like this, sites that work slightly better on Firefox because thats what they were developed on, and no so well on Internet Explorer.
I can't ignore IE, but its a pain to cope with its quirks and 'good enough' is 'good enough'.
IE users won't miss the little animated bar.
However, the Odeon site is completely inaccessible. It's not a case of stuff not looking or formatting correctly, but once you followed the "entire site" link it was more a case of nothing actually being displayed to the user - no listings, no cinemas, nothing.
Even worse, if you emailed them to complain, they told you the site was undergoing a re-design. To my mind that has had to be at least a couple of years ago all because they couldn't be arsed to change some IE only javascript.
Anyway, if you've got GreaseMonkey this script will make the site accessable again.
ps. Whilst we're at it, if you have a phone or PDA then you might be interested in Movie Guide which provides you with you with detailed listings of all films showing in UK Cinema's.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
And in other news, 99% of all website don't comply to any standard... jeez
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
As someone who uses Firefox and also is a novice at making websites, I find it is difficult to create a dynamic site without extending it beyond someone's standard.
However, many times when I am faced with a site with which I must do business (i.e. insurance, commerce, etc...) and they are not accessible via Firefox, I call and complain. Otherwise they will not know. If I can, I will let them know I have chosen a competitor.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Some companies simply do not care about this. I'll give you an example:
My company has a web based time tracking system where you enter your hours. It is the most horrible piece of garbage I have seen in my life! It requires ActiveX to display stupid menus which could have been done in javascript, and the layout is nested frames. If you view that thing in antything but IE you get empty frames all over the place - half of the content is somewhere off screen and you can't navigate the site at all
When I brought it to their attention they had three questions:
Needles to say I work with technically retaded people - but they make the decissions, not me...
I'm teminally incoherent
I'm from the UK and I have to say theres next to nothing I care about here website wise. Other then the BBC and a Tv guide I couldn't carless if it's hosted in the UK or else where, if it doesn'twork with my browser I'll google what I want and find it that way.
I like muppets.
All big sites now support Firefox (which means they're somewhat standards compliant). The 10% of all websites will consist of a lot of obscure, badly maintained and small sites that nearly noone cares for (of course exeptions proves the rule).
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
In the later case, of developing in IE, and not checking with Firefox, does anybody know what the most common things that break are?
In the IE features category, I have seen one thing that IE does really well that Firefox does not do: Image transition filters such as the fade in/out effect when you switch photos. Are there other things the you as a developer want, but are only implemented in IE?
I know on the other side, that I want rounded corners on divs and alpha transparency in pngs to be properly implemented in IE.
Firefox is incompatible with 10% of UK websites. In the mind of the end user, if it worked with A and doesn't work with B then the problem lies with B.
A lot of mass-market, public facing sites are horribly built and designed, and have clearly been built without any consideration to other browsers at all.
For instance, I (unfortunately) bank with The Woolwich, which has possibly the most pointless online banking service in the world.
The online banking site only works in PC IE and Netscape 4. I've emailed them a few times, and have only got a response once. My initial email was inquiring as to why I couldn't gain access to my bank account in Firefox/Windows, Firefox/Mac OSX, or Safari - god knows what *nix users are supposed to do. I also pointed out that under the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act, they are clearly and flagrantly breaking the law.
They only saw fit to answer my questions about Mac support, ignoring the wider browser, accessibility, and you-might-get-sued issues, but nonetheless, their response was hilarious :
Which sounds very much like an admission of incompetence, no? "Our code was so vendor-specific and umaintainable that we'd need to bin it and start again. Sorry!"
It's worth bearing in mind that their site has been in this case for at least three years. What, that's not long enough to rewrite the clientside code of a relatively simple webapp. WTF are you people, monkeys?
Does this include JavaScript? Because in IE, you have to use document.all and in Netscape (firefox), you have to use document.layers (I think), and it is understansable for some sites not to support both, because it is a lot more work to.
Our intraweb apps (mostly SAP) are IE only. And these should be made by people who actually know something about coding. Seesh..
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Firefox is slowly making inroads. Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications.
That may be true over all, but in my world (a large site primarily attracting the 18 - 29 year old demographic within the US) we see something different: FireFox (16%) and Safari (5%).
We have a small development shop (5 developers), but we find it extremely easy to build and deploy a sophisticated web user interface that is compatible with IE, Mozilla + varients, Safari, Opera, Konqueor, and more.
The "trick", if you want to call it that, is to reuse good UI code. Such a strategy saves us time and money, and keeps us lean and keeps us (at least usability-wise) well ahead of the competition. Oh, and we also support accessibility standards.
I have a feeling that we do it well because most all of our developers are professionals - they didn't just "stumble into the webmaster job by creating a webpage".
Anyhow, just as well - our competitors' sites look and work like crap.
I remember when a competitor's site crapped out was broken for weeks when a new version of IE was released... they had many versions of their UI code splattered throughout their site - I feel bad for the people that have to deal with all that crap.
I really think a lot of people here have forgotten (or never experienced) what it's like to be a non-technical savy individual. As far as most people are concerned, IE has been the only browser that they've ever known, probably even heard of, for as long as they've been introduced to the internet. IE is the standard. So when this new broswer, Firefox, doesn't work with 10% or so of the webpages, for the vast majority of the people out there it's not a 'lazy web-developer' issue, it's a 'Firefox is broken' issue. Not a great way to gain marketshare. Right or wrong, Firefox absolutely must work with the standards that IE has set.
What I want is a button at the top of Firefox that automatically sends an email to webmaster@whateversiteI'mlookingatnow.com that complains about viewability and notifies them that they just lost my business/eyeballs.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
When I find a site that doesn't recognise my non-IE browser (usually Firefox), I like to return to it later and tell the owner which of his competitors received my business. I don't how often the message gets through but it makes me feel better!
Sounds like a winner to me!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
www.slashdot.org.uk
I'm using the regulation "slashdot.org", but I just tried that URL - all I got was a listing, suggesting the existence of a cgi-bin - but I didn't have permission to enter. So... what is this slashdot.org.uk business all about? They're not going to monkey with my 'fox, like Google, are they?
Back on topic: the Gallaghers and Leprechauns in the same sentence? Sir, I salute you!
This is where the serious fun begins.
The whole thread comes down to usability versus standards compliance. I
understand the logic for standards compliance. However, this is such a glaring
issue to Mozilla newbies that it is a MAJOR factor inhibiting its general
acceptance.
I have put several clients on Firefox and frequently I get requests to shift
back to MSIE because the web pages don't look right under Firefox (or Mozilla).
I hear "It looks right in MSIE. Why doesn't it in Mozilla (Firefox)?" End
clients are more concerned about the operation of a business than a whole
explanation of why it wont work right because of a technical standard. At their
request I shift them back to MSIE. Future clients, I have to give them a verbal
disclaimer telling them that things might not look/work "perfectly", which is
pretty tough to "sell" a "broken" product to a business owner. I bet I could get
25% more of my clients to continue to run Firefox/Mozilla IF I HAD THE OPTION to
set the scroll bar to the permanent "on" position.
Everybody would be happy if we had an option to manually turn on/off the scroll
bar at the browser. Those that want strict browser compliance can leave it off.
Those that deal in the world of asthetics can turn it on. It would be an
EXCELLENT solution instead of just walking away at the expense of the Mozilla
project.
We have a campus pipeline here at school used for email, news, signing up for classes, that sort of thing...it gets a bit pissy when you try to talk to it with anything but IE. This is a tech school, supposedly at the forefront of modern technology and standards. Why do they insist on implementing tools that only work in one browser?
I'm sorry, but it's not. What about those few sites you actually need? MSIE is compatible with 100%, and that is what people think they need.
I use firefox myself. Msft anti-competitive practises piss me off. But I must admit, they do work.
But Slashdot is the site for all things hardly newsworthy...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
You might try that link you gave in Firefox it works perfectly!
This incompatibility would not be a surprise if Microsoft's default settings for Visual Studio .NET are the same as last time I used it. It has been a while since I worked on a .NET project, so I don't if Microsoft has "fixed" this, but I'm guessing not.
It's an effective approach by Microsoft.... We discovered almost immediately incompatibilities with .NET code/projects and Mozilla, but even after admonishing team members to ensure their settings were appropriate to create Mozilla compatible code, we would find settings not set appropriately, and features in our application not working in Mozilla. Finally, higher management (already a bit Microsoft-centric) waved their hands (funny how they get that kind of power) and deemed by fiat it no longer necessary to have a Mozilla compatible app. Wow!
Any other developers out there have any similar experiences?
Actually the official UK lottery site has allowed Firefox/Mozilla into its online registration/play for a few months now, but this is after *years* of only supporting a weird set of browsers (IE, AOL and, er, Netscape 7?), despite numerous phone call and e-mail complaints from me and other users. Luckily, their latest design has finally allowed the Bugzilla bug (226258) on this issue to be closed.
I write the companies website & intranet for firefox, then force my users to only use IE.
Next, I'll force them into IMAP and make them use OE.
it is the 10% that I don't care about. I can live with only being able to use 90% of the InterWeb.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
So someone did a survey of 100 websites and ten didn't work with Firefox. That doesn't mean that 10% of all UK websites don't work in Firefox does it? If I look out the window and see 3 blue cars and 2 red cars does that mean that 60% of cars are blue?
I couldn't believe that, but look at this exerpt of the book (pdf).
On page 19, the author actually says:
In my view, you should design Web pages for Internet
Explorer (IE) version 6 running on a typical 17'' monitor. Why? Here are the reasons:
-more than 95 percent of the people visiting your Web site use IE 6.
-You can take advantage of lots of cool effects that work only in IE or IE 6. Your job is much easier if you're designing for a predictable, stable canvas.
It's extremely stupid to give such an advice. I suggest that people email either the author, Richard Mansfield or the publisher, Wiley.
Look out for all the opera users! Internet Explorer actually has only 10%...
I'll bet these sites contain 100 different scripts, languages, Java applets and flash and shockwave advertisements, utilizing every ML language ever invented and getting it all to work on one page! Enough crap to slow down your computer and cause the router at your ISP to melt. In other words, CORPORATE WEB JUNK! No thanks, I'll stick with the other 90%.
If I Remember Correctly, the new flavour of the month on the Internet, XMLHttpRequest, was an Internet Explorer only feature, until it was copied by the other browsers for eventual integration with their own codebases. And, as you brought up, there are differences in rendering and transitions between the browser types, so I dare say that the browser unique features would account for a fair portion.
The remainder, I would guess, are sites that require an Active X control, have poor DOM checking / browser sniffing in place, rely upon non-standard coding, or are dead sites that are no longer being maintained, and are a fallback to the late 90s.
Personally, I feel that a 10% failure rate is pretty good, actually, that was the level that the UK Government was aiming for with their recent EDS / Pension debacle (where they encountered around 20% failure).
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
Even though he sais he is a die hard firefox user, he is a troll. The link he has provided is a link to the ACID 2 test. Which is recent, not rudimentary at all, and when it was released a couple months ago, no browser was capable to pass.
Now, Safari and Konqueror are able to pass that test, but it has taken a month to port Safari patches to Konqueror.
Imprementing the ACID2 bugfixes for Firefox from scratch is bound to take more than a month. The question is: How much is going to take IE6 to be ACID2 compliant?
<? .....
if (preg_match("/msie/i", ($browser = $_ENV["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]))
&& !preg_match("/opera/i", $browser)) {
# MSIE-specific code
}
elseif (preg_match("/opera/i", $browser)) {
# Opera-specific code
}
elseif (preg_match("/lynx/i", $browser)) {
# Lynx-specific code
}
elseif (preg_match("/links/i", $browser)) {
# Links-specific code
}
elseif (preg_match("/konqueror/i", $browser)) {
# Konqueror-specific code
}
elseif (preg_match("/googlebot/i", $browser)) {
# whatever you want to see listed for your site on Google
}
else {
# standards-compliant code
};
?>
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
A recent survey has indicated a staggering conspiracy afoot to oust the Lynx browser as a contender in the browser wars. "They web site designers add all kinds of non standard things like pictures, tables, sounds. It's an obvious ploy to unseat us as the rightful heirs to the internet."
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
ten percent of UK websites alienate Firefox users.
Damnit, first a huge tax on tea, and now this.
Arg! The original post was supposed to be funny!! I got a good laugh out of seeing it get mod'ed as informative.
But seriously...the point was...how can you say 10% of consumer websites are not firefox friendly if you only test 100 websites??? I am sure the UK has more than 100 consumer websites. And for the record...100 is a piss poor sample size for any study. Do they even define what a consumer website is?
From my own anecdotal experience, I only have problems with about 1 webpage not displaying properly every week that I visit while using firefox. That website is usually Slate, a Microsoft site.
Any company that writes code to specifically cater to only one browser is shortsighted and not business savy. As the study suggests, companies should wake up and smell the coffee. (no, that was not a Java joke...)
For an example of ignorance and laziness at work, see the post titled "It's just business" by Anonymous Brave Guy, above.
His argument, that it's just business, has been used to justify immoral and lazy actions by weak, incompetent, and/or greedy followers, throughout history.
And in this case, his argument isn't even true, as shown by the many excellent and successful standards-compliant websites on the Net.
Those sites which require Flash alienate me also. They make me flash over to the next site which provides the same service.
I always check their web site first before making
that vital million dollar govt purchase decision
so keep it up ie assholes.....
I use only Firefox....
Can't buy what you can't order.....LOL
Even when I still used IE and Windows, I always went straight for the "text-only film times" page on the Odeon site. So much quicker to load, and I don't have to select where my cinema on a map, just scroll down to O(xford). I don't care about pretty pictures. 90% of the content I want should be found in one click. Oh yeah, and in the words of the W3C tips, don't say click, cos not everyone will be clicking. I use lynx when I get sick of the web.
Having never developed sites for IE, I'm not sure what active X can do. What features can you implement using active X that are so much harder, or impossible to implement using javascript?
because whoever made the page didn't know what in the hell they were doing.
You're ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Check out this daily WTF:
The great pyramids of DIV
Warning: Don't scroll too fast. Might cause motion sickness.
1. Every CSS box needs to be duplicated, to fix IE's flawed box rendering model.2. IE can't handle objects close to a floatmust becomeso the cut image doesn't come close to the edge.
3. If you ever adjust the width of a div tag which has floats either left or right, you will have a world of hurt.
4. If any object inside a CSS is bigger than the CSS, IE will override your settings unexplainably overriding even a fixed pixel width.
That is just some of the major annoyances I've had in recent weeks. I could go on and on. IE6 is so flawed, everything needs to be tweaked. On the bright side, the solution almost never breaks Opera/Firefox. But making a modern site that renders well in IE is a huge PITA.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I encounter incompatible sites now and then. But so far, I haven't found an incompatible site that didn't have a compatible competitor. So what if "Weather.com" goes into an infinite redirect loop? There's Yahoo Weather.
Web sites that fail to conform to w3 standards should be kicked off the 'net. You can't have a car that doesn't meet highway traffic standards, and there are similar public standards for aircraft and rail. If a web site fails to follow w3 standards, they should be kicked off the 'net. It's shape up or ship out time. Similarly, if Microsoft decides that they don't want to conform to w3 standards, they can sell their product on their own internet, and leave the world wide one alone. Shape up or ship out!
They can be done under Mozilla/Firefox with a bit of Javascript, I beleive.
And personally, I think style issues like these are better handled by scripts or other non-browser-specific systems. Styles change, and it would be just as well to avoid changing the browser for every little whim of fashion.
"10 Percent of UK Sites Incompatible with Firefox"
/rant
as opposed to....
"Firefox incompatible with 10 Percent of UK Sites"
The first thing I think of is "Those UK webmasters had better fix their sites to work with Firefox, because Firefox can't have any bugs in it!"
will *only* work with Firefox if you're running Mac OS X - they've dropped support for the (now defunct) IE 5.x for Mac and they don't support Safari. https://www.nwolb.com/secure/denial.asp?reason=v4 Service Denied: Reason: Unsupported Browser The version of the internet browser you are using is not supported by NatWest OnLine Banking. Please use one of the following browsers: Internet Explorer Version 5.00 and up (Windows only) Netscape Navigator 7.1 and 7.2 Firefox 1.0 Mozilla 1.5 and up AOL 6.0 and up (Windows only/AOL subscribers only) Apple Macintosh users who currently have OS v 8.0 or OS v 9.0 installed will require IE v 5.1.7 or Mozilla v 1.2.1
However, they were just fine with Firefoux.
You really can use any browser for these sites.
It's just depends on what your dfinition os "use" is.
Getting dead link even counts as use. You're just limited to their 404 page.
Firefox has been at v1 for only a few months, and there were rendering/standards issues with earlier versions - you were much more trying to hit a moving target.
So, what we are really saying is that within about 6 months of Firefox release, 90% of sites have been updated to work with it.
Seems to me that is a pretty good record.
[ and yes I do know you can design you sites to "standards" rather than browsers, I also know how much still goes wrong, in even the most recent browsers, when you do ]
There are some "features" on Travelocity I can not get to work, such as booking a flight. Since I am such a lsave to travelocity, I log in to Windows just to search for flights. So sad.
I think it would be much more worthwhile and relevant for BBC to cite a study on the percentage of websites which alienates individuals with disabilities. I am guessing that number would be a bit larger than 10%.
Firefox users tend to be the more tech-savvy and tech-aware members of our society. We are the people that other Internet users come to for advice. If Firefox users can't get to your site, we can't give good (or bad) advice on it and will send someone to another, Firefox-compatable, site instead. You may have the best product and price anywhere, but if we can't see it we can't recommend it. I wonder how much business is lost due to incompatable sites?
then those 10 percent of websites would be forced to switch, as the number would shift from 8 percent of all web browsers to 15 percent of all web browsers in the UK.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
10% of UK businesses don't want my business.
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
Businesses make a profit by keeping their customers happy. There are literally millions of potential customers out there that are not using IE. Implementing new web sites that work in most browsers isn't rocket science. And most companies end up redoing their websites every couple of years anyway. So why bother hacking up Firefox when a little advocacy could take care of the problem?
10% of the websites out there are inaccessable to 10% of the browsers? Even assuming that every website is visited equally, that still leaves us with a problem that only affects 10% * 10% = 1% of the people out there.
Odds are, the sites that are incompatible with Firefox aren't heavily visited, anyway.
Make that 99% incompatable web for South Korea.
They often have established news sites and large portals and banks installing Korean version of gator with utility install which is must in order to do online banking reading news and checking free mails...
It's a true example of security by obsecurity.
()()
(@@)
oktokie
"Websites that proved difficult for Firefox users to navigate included the government website Jobcentreplus.gov.uk ..."
It's buried away in the FAQ, but "you can also search the Jobcentre Plus jobs database by visiting http://www.worktrain.gov.uk/", which does work with FireFox.
It's not perfect. There are too many pages before you get to results, they don't make logging in very easy and it doesn't handle having multiple tabs open well, but it's better than the Jobcentreplus.gov.uk site and seems to find more relevant results.
Having said that I still seem to find more jobs I want to apply for on http://www.jobsite.co.uk/ than any other site.
"They just use your mind and they never give you credit"
If you make a website with pictures of your cat intended to show to your grandmother who only uses IE. Not a real issue.
If it is a site to do your online banking, then the problem is huge as they shut out a lot of their customers.
Sometimes just removing the test of what browser you have is enough to get it working.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I see that my parent post has been modded down to "-1".
I consider that to be an abuse of the moderation system.
Of course, I have gotten used to such abuses on Slashdot recently. There are too many astroturfers on the site, manipulating the moderation system. As a result, it has become very difficult to point out the truth about Microsoft without having your post hidden from view.
The honest moderators, unlike the astroturfers, know that posts like the parent do not belong down with the GNAAs and First Posts.
The parent post is not rude, nor is it a troll. It is on topic, it is making a valid point, and it is stating the truth. Furthermore, it provides links and quotes to back up the points made.
I guess the truth no longer counts on Slashdot.
I just tried it in Opera. Looks like it works. I only mention this because of the recent Opera story in which a bunch of posters said "Who cares about Opera. FF is free and good enough!"
My stupid web site
There was some Opera bashing in a recent story. But all of these problem sites render fine in Opera.
That doesn't excuse them from being non-compliant, but it does illustrate why some people may like Opera over FF.
My stupid web site
As firefox is closing in on 10% now, this is good news. These companies are shutting out 10% of their customer base. In any competitive environment, this is gonna be too big a disadvantage to compete successfully, and the companies will die. It is amazing how the free market economy and Darwin's theory of evolution correlate.
It's all a matter of perspective, and mine isn't an MS only one.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Everytime I code a web application or website I always follow the w3c webstandards and make sure my website validates to valid HTML or XHTML.
Sometimes if I see a website that dont follow standards (you can easy see if no doctype) then I email them and inform them.
I think that it is important that we all follow the webstandards and not just code and hope that it works.
I have begin to use XHTML alot lately and in conjuction with CSS and it works great and looks lovely. I never use JavaScript, Java, Shockwave or Flash!