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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.'"
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%.
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...
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.
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That's bullshit. I design all pages using firefox, then validate them. They always look fine in IE and all the other browsers.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
I use Safari, the development branch of which does pass ACID2 (although the version I'm using does not, and I can't be bothered to roll my own version of WebKit), but saying a browser is no good because it doesn't properly display ACID2 is ludicrous. As far as I know, the only browser where the release version correctly renders ACID2 is Konqueror.
Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror (not in that order) all come much closer to correctly displaying CSS2 than IE.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
However, those features can be implemented using standard javascript and CSS, people just choose not to: http://nocturne.net.nz/webdev/imgfade.php
michael greene
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?
A bigger (and more real) problem than you think. Accessibility should have ALT tags and how can a screenscraper turn your flash page into text for ingestion into text-to-speech?
You should be able to get all reasonable content from a text-only browser for your site.
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
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.