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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.'"
...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.
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.
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.
What makes this study any more accurate than others?
This study is one of the 3.75% of all studies of which the statistics are not pulled from a derriere.
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.
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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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
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.
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.
I think you missed this: "Of 100 UK leading consumer websites that SciVisum tested...".
I imagine they chose that sample size to make the percentage calculations perfectly accurate.
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.
How about using sensible detections for a change?
For example, MS provided us the wonderful thing called Conditional Comments.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 withWhich 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,
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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.