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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.'"
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... -_-
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.
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.
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!
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
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
(Aside: web standards seems to be replacing SEO as the new web buzzword). We've got a client who runs his own web development house, focusing on standards. His methodolgy is: (1) we develop an accessible, validating site. (2) since he's the boss, and also an *expert*, he tweaks everything in Frontpage. (3) some sarcastic barstard actually validates the site, and discovers it no longer validates. They email our client. (4) our client contacts us to complain that the site "isn't valid HTML and CSS!" Et voila, instant pile of non-validating, Firefox-hating poo.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.
This is where the serious fun begins.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Sounds like a winner to me!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
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
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?
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.
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.
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.