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.'"
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
All the more reason for browsers to identify themselves correctly. If no one is aware of the problem, no one will complain to get it fixed.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah... I've been trying to figure out the Microsofties at my work, and I keep hearing the argument over and over: "I use logic. If everybody uses it, it must be good." And then there's the big word: "compatibility". They feel like if they stray from the Microsoft way of life in any way, they'll have trouble communicating with others in the field.
;)
It's sad, but I totally stumped a professional programmer at work when I said something about running a binary. How can you run a binary file? Maybe they're right... I've got communication problems now
If you want to contribute to an existing project rather than start off on your own, there's a whole section of the Opera forums devoted to such things. Some of the sites on their list do work in Firefox, and there are others that work in Opera but not FF and others, but it's a good place to start from at least.
Reminds me of a banking website that didn't work in Firefox due to non-standard Javascript. I sent them a fix, they put it online a few weeks later. From then on I could use their site for online banking.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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.