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.'"

Comments

Other browsers too then, I guess

[Peter Cooper]

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.

Re:Books suggest designing for IE only

[jrumney]

Perhaps they should rename that book to "CSS (for people who want to look like dummies)"

ActiveX

[Szaman2]

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:

1. What is that firething you talk about?
2. Who uses it except you and the other computer nerds?
3. Why should we care if it works fine for all of us except you Mr. "I'm to good to use IE"?

Needles to say I work with technically retaded people - but they make the decissions, not me...

Re:It's just business

[rpjs]

Except that if you code to W3C standards it will work in IE and Firefox and a whole lot more besides, so how does it cost more money?

On the site I work on, a major UK mobileco, we code to XHTML 1.0 now and browser compatiblity is usually a non-issue - in fact I find it easier to code using Firefox (with the utterly wonderful Web Developer extension) and then cross-check in IE.

We used to have far more headaches back when we had to provide backwards-compatibility with NS4.0, but now that the numbers of such users have dropped to single-digit numbers per month, we're XHTML all the way.

Re:Standard

[ErroneousBee]

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.

Re:standards compliance

[masklinn]

That thing is fricking stupid, UA sniffing is sheer bullshit 99% of the time (part of which is cause modern browsers can camouflage themselves with 2 clicks, or you can create custom UAs, or block UA alltogether).

How about using sensible detections for a change?
For example, MS provided us the wonderful thing called Conditional Comments.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
your code
<![endif]>

Your code will only be read by MSIE browsers under version 7 (aka up to and including IE6), presenting them with unique content without tracking tricky or dumb things.

Same thing in Javascript, don't use User Agent sniffing, use Object sniffing for exemple. Aka if your script uses document.createElement, precede the script with

if(!document.createElement)
return;

Which will only try to feed the script to browsers which can actually handle it (those who have implemented document.createElement)

Then, if you're a really good and tricky web designer, you can do it Malarkey Style, presenting both different presentation and suggestion to switch to a better browser to crappy browsers users... using CSS advanced functions (one design uses CSS1, the other one uses CSS2, CSS2 non compliant browsers will only get v1 black&white, and as soon as a CSS2 compliant MSIE is born it should be allowed to see v2 design). Try it out with MSIE, then with any CSS2 (somewhat) compliant browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, ...)

Incompatible? Go to a competitor.

[Animats]

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.