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.
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.
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'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.
Because, it's far more easier to write web pages for one OS, one browser and one version. Especially, if you have bells and whistles to put to the site. Dominance of IE has lead to a situation where WWW means Windows Wide Web: Even when web designers want to write standard html they are forced to check it against IE bugs. Usually this leads to poor structure, like using tables for layout. See why using tables for layout is stupid.
For example about problems html writers encounter, I dare you to find out how to write W3 standards compliant pages that work with IE and Mozilla and have a flash plugin without googling. It's not as easy as one could think.
Finally, testing is also easier when you have only one browser -- platform specific bugs are doubled with two browsers.
?SYNTAX ERROR
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
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
Perhaps they should rename that book to "CSS (for people who want to look like dummies)"
Eh?
Microsoft have recently re-done their entire MSN site in most countries to take advantage of pure xhtml and css.. with one of the main incentives being that sure people may run other browsers, but they want to use MSN.
What would happen if Microsoft stopped Hotmail from displaying properly in any other browser, there would be some very big critics giving them an ego bashing...
What the article was actually refering to was the suprising number of business sites owned by reputable companies that hire complete arsehats for web designers/developers.
I've seen it on many occasions, and even though Opera can identify as Internet Explorer, this damn website seemed to be specificly checking for 'Opera' in the useragent string..
So, 20 minutes later I'd 'fixed' opera and made the useragent string almost identical to a real IE client, and sure enough the website worked perfectly...
I did phone up their technical support number just to log a problem (it would have been stopping me from getting an insurance quote...) and the woman on the phone just didn't seem to understand and refused to pass it onto the 'technical people'.
I know it's kinda lame, but if you come across this sort of thing happening with a large company.. take time to phone or atleast e-mail, if enough people are made aware of this we'll all be generally better off.
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
No, you are selling the website to the client, not thier customers. If the client is thinking in terms of pretty pictures instead of useability and robust technology, then you give them pretty pictures.
There are still plenty of retailers that havent got a clue about the market or the technology. boo.com was the classic example, but theres plenty of retailers that are happy to give every 10th customer a sharp poke in the eye. These retailers will always be at a disadvantage and will dissappear over time.
The last one I saw was Abel and Cole selling Organic Food. Last year they were on the Google first page for 'Organic Food UK' but now thier competitors are stealing thier market. Searching for 'Able and Cole' leads to the competition, thier website lists products by code rather than product name, they used to be unusable with Mozilla. I expect they will dissappear in a few years.
Other sites I find hard to use are:
Ebay/Paypal. It took me a week to get set up to sell something. Google or Amazon will overtake them because they understand 'easy to use'.
Dabs.com Havent used them for a year, but it was so hard to find technical info that I had to go to other retailers to find out about the product.
WarehouseExpress. Horrible site, only made useable by the price, range and because they arnt as bad as Jessops.
Jessops. Already seen a dive in shareprice. Expect them to be dead by next year.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Sounds like a winner to me!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The thing I found most interesting was that they described Firefox as an open source web browser, without any explanation of whay open source means. While I would expect this from a tech site, the BBC technology section is very much mainstream press, and I find it interesting that they now believe that open source is a sufficiently well-known term that they don't need to define it for the general public.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A while back I was looking at bank/building society websites. My own bank wouldn't let me use anything other than IE on Windows for online banking, as they used ActiveX for security features (yes, they really did say that!) They've cleaned up their act since then, but as an example of the nonsense you find on MSIE only sites, it takes some beating.
Meanwhile another bank had a website obviously tested on every browser they could find, and none of that "let's be cool and have all the links as javascript" that makes sites inaccessible to visually impaired customers with text browsers. I sent them an email commenting on this, and actually got a reply from the developers, pleased that someone had noticed their efforts to make the site compatible and accessible.
So don't just complain: when you see that the developers have made the effort let them know that someone appreciates it.
You might try that link you gave in Firefox it works perfectly!
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.
Perhaps, but the 2005 edition still says the same thing, so that's no excuse now. The book is missing any mention or concept of semantic markup, and almost every other paragraph is some kind of apology or excuse for IE's lameness. This is a book which fails to mention XHTML other than that it exists and then only reprimands it for case-sensitivity. Learning CSS without semantic markup is just a waste of time, negating most of the things that make CSS so cool, and therefore, I have to opine that this book is a complete waste of trees. Anyone reading it in the hope of learning CSS will be worse off than not reading it at all as it seems to set out to deliberately teach you every bad habit going.
IE is the albatross around the neck of the web, pulling everyone down to its level. Hard to believe that IE 6 has not had a single feature or bugfix upgrade (plenty of security patches though) for 4 years (Spot the monopoly?). IE is perfectly entitled to have proprietary features, it's just entirely unnecessary for MS to have implemented them in a non-standard way (i.e. outside of CSS extensions, gotta love that ActiveX) so that they break in other browsers. Someone should tell MS to grow up and not pee in the pool (the MS IE7 blogs comments are quite hilarious). As if it wasn't bad enough living with what MS did wrong deliberately, there's all the bugs too.
It also makes you 5% poorer, if the job of the website is to make money. And who doesn't want to make 5% less money.
The 17" monitor is what really identifies the author as a idiot. This is a constraint that is unneccesary. I mean, do we design cars only for people 5'10". Well, in American and Japan they do, which is one reason so many people still buy from Germany. The Japanese has the sales to handle it, but the American car market continues to suffer from lack of creativity.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black