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Why are Websites Still Forcing People to Use IE?
DragonTHC asks: "I just visited Movielink's website for research. Their site has a nice message saying, 'Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 (or higher) or Mozilla/Firefox with an IE Tab Extension (IE installation required).' While allowing the IETab Firefox extension is somewhat progressive, why do companies still force people to use Internet Explorer? Surely the site should work just fine in Firefox? With Firefox's steady gains in market share, you would think that webmasters would get the hint. If you are a webmaster, what are your reasons for forcing IE?"
For the same reason people use IE in the first place: They are stupid and/or lazy.
I think you mean forcing people to use other sites.
Because IE is all you ever needed in a browser! I mean really do you guys just put stuff on the frontpage to incite flamewars?
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
As I understand it, IETab simply embeds Internet Explorer inside the Firefox window and allows the chrome to control it. As far as the website can tell, IETab is IE.
What's (somewhat) progressive about MovieLink isn't that they're allowing IETab... but that they're recommending it.
They have no power over you. Just go somewhere else for your research. That's what I do when I come across a stupid website like that.
But what does it do if you don't? Does it look like crap? Does if fail to load? If so, does it refuse to serve FF? What about the other alternatives? Or is it a matter of sloppy scripting by the site designer?
Someone hates these cans.
but probably so that they only have to test for one browser's compatibility. Each browser has its own quirks (incorrectness?) in dealing with things like CSS transparency, and DIVs, etc. and the lowest common denominator for the vast majority of people browsing the web is, Internet Explorer. It's bundled into Windows. Knowledgeable people seek out others like Firefox or Opera, but your average person setting up their phat myspace profile.
People just need to realize that a web browser should be used for browsing the web and the websites should be HTML compliant.
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's sister?
Just use the User Agent Switcher extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59 ) and have Firefox pretend it is IE. Nine times out of 10 the site will work just fine.
I work for a major company and externally they make a bit of effort to make the website run on Firefox and IE.
However, internally they don't give a damn and most of the apps don't work - its very very frustrating. See below for reasons:
Lack of training
Lack of funding
Lots of Apathy
Business risk
Well, however it may be, browsers still display different content differently. There is still no full consensus over how certain things should be displayed.
Now, of course, everyone has to use the latest technology in webpage design. In other words, the most incompatible technology. What looks lovely in IE looks aweful in Firefox and even worse in Opera. Ok, ok, maybe not aweful. But not JUST the same way. So you'd have to do the page two or three times to make it compatible with every browser. But that, in turn, would cost more money.
And here's where corporate design comes into play. It HAS to look exactly the way intended. The colors have to be JUST right, the placement, the spacing, everything has to match so it is immediately identified as THAT page. Since this cannot be warranted, the powers that be usually decide it's the lesser evil to "force" people to use a certain browser. Since you can assume that everyone has IE (at least everyone who uses Windows), but the amount of people who'd have Firefox is way smaller, IE is usually the browser of choice.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would guess two reasons, which are related. IE was VERY popular a few years ago. It was a relativly good browser, up to date, and thanks to Windows coming with IE by default it held a massive market share. The biggest competitors were Opera (not free) and Netscape. Even Macs had IE. If you made a website, you had to make it work in IE, and making it work in something else was a luxury, it wasn't that necessary.
I think what we are seeing is the result of that, at least in part. Web sites were designed for that and things have continued. You update your site, update your site, update your site. It's still setup for that browser. You may bother to fix it for FF and such.
Don't get me wrong, I HATE this. I especially hate sites that tell me I must use IE then work fine when I tell Safari to fake being IE. And this is becoming less of an issue as the market share of Macs goes up, and FF reaches like 20% here in the US and up to 50% in some European countries (see story from the other day).
Ignoring other browsers used to be safe. Now it can mean a big share of the market.
Also, in the (smaller) shop where I work, things MUST work on IE simply because it is such a big part of the market. That said, we all use FireFox and design for it first then go fix stuff for IE. Safari tends to work with whatever FireFox does for the most part.
PS: Installing IE tab is not a solution. Saying you are "FireFox compatible with IE tab" is like saying a paddle boat is gas compatible when you duct-tape an outboard motor on it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I'm sure this is a great way to propagate malware -- force the user to use an insecure browser so that the site can install malware on the person's PC.
"This site works best (for us, not for you) with Internet Explorer"
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
So many website devs are pwn3d by Microsoft, by virtue of habit and the platforms they've trained on.
What more can you expect when the majority of website development courses (and tertiary courses in general) run Windows workstations, and teach students with Windows applications. Get 'em young, get 'em into the groove. We all tend to be creatures of habit.
I did a tertiary certificate course last year and was told that using OpenOffice.org for in-class assessments was strictly forbidden - it was MSOffice or an F grade.
As the Jesuits used to say: Give me your child till he is 6, then you can have him after that
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Aren't South Koreans in a position where US security export laws prevented anyone from getting the best of SSL encryption so it was implemented as an ActiveX which is now used by all the banks and organizations requiring good encryption thus forcing Koreans to use IE.
Direct away from face when opening.
Find a service online that supports Firefox and give them your money instead of the other guy.
There's no sense worrying about one site when there are usually at least 3 more to replace it.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
One browser, one look. Another browser, another look.
and I thought you slashdotters were smart.
Or is this just another really limp attempt at drumming up some traffic to get more money into CmdrDildo's pocket?
I did not click on the link but many media sites use MS drm to broadcast content. Sites like Yahoo Music require Windows and IE because they use WMV and some shitty activeX controls.
I do not know anyone besides my father who uses firefox regardless of what the statistics say. It makes sense or did a year or two ago to only target IE as its what everyone uses and what frontpage expects everyone to be using. Maybe this might be changing but there is alot of pressure to get websites down quickly and cheaply and many phbs think its a waste of time to target anyone else when the big CIO wants the page updated yesterday.
http://saveie6.com/
:) nt
The only people who require IE are the ones that purchassed some dumb HTML book by some other clueless n00b that uses IE, realised it was all too hard and went out and got frontpage to do the dirty work for them. There's a proliferation of them out there. They jumped in at the dot bomb boom thinking that calling themselves "web developers" would make them rich. It probably did, but it doesn't mean they're any good at it.
I mean c'mon it's not hard to write a brilliant page that works everywhere. Look at how Gmail works. IE, FF and Opera all render it correctly. Even Konqueror does a good job but its javascript implementation is a bit lax.
We have two "web applications" that we need to run at work. One is a time management package that used to be simply web-based using forms/java. There was nothing wrong with it except Java took a little time to start. They upgraded to the latest and greatest version that is now fantastic ActiveX. I pointed out that now us Linux users can't use it and will have to revert to the paper forms. Their first solution was "but everybody has 'The Internet'". It took over a week to demonstrate the Linux doesn't come with that (Internet Explorer) installed by default. They then reverted to "just borrow someone else's PC when you need to use it".
The other is an employee workflow manager. It works in FF but only barely. The HTML is that crap that you can hardly figure out what it's doing. Funnily IE renders the poo just fine, and is the only browser that does.
The people who recommend, install and run these services know nothing about Linux and wouldn't know what a web browser was if you showed them. They actually think "The Internet" is the Internet Explorer icon on their desktop.
I drink to make other people interesting!
I just tried it and the site freezes on the loading clock? Oh well...
If you are a webmaster, what are your reasons for forcing IE?
/. webmaster who would require IE?
Do you honestly believe there exists a
And if such a monster exists, do you honestly believe he'd admit it?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
We occasionally deal with a local business so, when we found that the website was a disaster in Firefox, we took the trouble to inform them of that fact. Unfortunately, we were directed to the idiot who designed the web site. What we got wasn't concern that the site wasn't displaying properly, it was excuses. The idea was that IE was the standard browser and they needen't design for anything else.
Idiots only know how to use one tool and, if there's a problem, they're powerless to fix it.
Never attribute to malace that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Konqueror is an Open Source web browser with HTML 4.01 compliance, supporting Java applets, JavaScript, CSS 1, CSS 2.1, as well as Netscape plugins (for example, Flash or RealVideo plugins).
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Never mind IE, the idiots I'd like to kick the shit out of are the ones who do a website entirely in Flash!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Semi off-topic, but I'm angry when sites don't work if you have scripting disabled on your browser. The vast majority of web-based attacks are vectored through scripting (javascript, activex). Until scripting is a secure thing, it should be done away with on all sites except for those that absolutely require it (like Google Maps - though it does work like a cheap version of Mapquest when you use it with scripting disabled).
[/rant not over]
My websites on my web-host were hacked today (not my fault, theirs), and the attackers placed exploit javascript code in all of my index.htm/html files (looked like buffer overflow code, but I didn't research it). Any browsers pointed to my sites with scripting enabled likely got hit.
[/rant over]
As a regular Slashdot reader you may find it hard to believe, but many in the computer industry - including even web design people - are incredibly arrogant and presume that they, and they alone, know exactly what you should use for hardware and software.
Why just this week Yahoo sent me three e-mails in a row telling me how to make their mail service more compatible with the Internet Explorer that they were convinced I am using on my Mac.
Followed by three requests that I tell them "How They Did" in solving my problem...
Three Squirrels
by a tech support person, "because Linux and free software are hacker tools".
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Bullshit.
I'm currently working a VERY large site for a VERY large company that happens to be largest manufacturer of their product in the world. This is site has to be deployed in 7+ languages in 20+ countries on 4 continents. It has more AJAX (and other Web 2.0 buzzwords) than you can shake a stick at, it genereates *zero* script errors on any brower, EVERY page validates, and, apart from the innate differences in the way Macs and PCs render fonts, it looks EXACTLY the same in IE6, IE7, FF, and Safari (Still working on Opera).
There's no reason you can't make your site look and function great across all platforms. You just have to be willing to pay the big bucks for the kind of people who can build it for you.
Case in point: every time you type "awful," my browser renders it as "aweful."
Firefox does not allow you to clear the Authentication cache (Basic or NTLM) unless you create a signed component. This forces us to close the browser to clear authentication data (We have kiosks where more than one user is viewing private healthcare information and this behavior is VERY undesirable)
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
Such as? What necessary piece of functionality does IE have that Mozilla (or Opera, or others) don't have?
The GP is absolutely correct most of the time: In the vast majority of cases there is no justifiable reason, and the only explanation is a lazy and/or dumb development team that couldn't be bothered to support another browser. Many of these projects were developed or began back when such a lazy choice wouldn't impede them much, but nowadays it can be deadly (if I encounter an IE-only site, I presume the operators are just grossly incompetent and go elsewhere).
Certainly, it's easier to write one-platform one-browser code. I guess as long as the extra effort would cost more than you're losing in users, it makes sense...
There's no other reason. IE comes with Windows, which is a overwhelming majority of the market, and it's easier than learning something new.
The answer is about the same as asking why most Windows programs require you to be admin: because they're too lazy to learn how to deal with not having access to every last corner of the computer (this is probably even easier than learning to write for multiple browsers).
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
A browser displays a mark-up language. It was never designed to be a page layout language.
If you want that kind of control over presentation, use GIFs, PDF or Flash to do your presentations.
Of course, if you're too lazy to do all that work go ahead and assume that all IE users have their system set up exactly like you do--same screen resolution, same color depth, same fonts, no changes to default browser settings--and, by all means, use IE. Every once in a while someone gets it but I think, as another poster mentioned, they're too lazy to bother.
Well, one site I use quite often has a popup saying that you must use IE. Since I have popups disabled, I don't see the message. Problem solved! Actually, the only site that I haven't figured out how to access in some way with FF is the windows update site. Other than that, most of the pages FF can't load are mentally marked as 'crap' and I move on.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
What really drives me mad are sites that say you need "IE X or more recent, or Netscape 6 or more recent" but don't let Firefox or Opera in because they didn't exist when they wrote the script and no one bothers to update it, even though these "more recent" browsers would do fine.
I'm on some Microsoft developer mailing lists, and I'm struck by the way that they spend so much time and effort on pushing proprietary solutions for every problem. There is never any recognition of a world outside Microsoft. I suspect that it is easy for young and naïve developers to buy into the idea that all problems can be solved with a Microsoft solution.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Aprox 80% of web traffic is IE. You hope and pray that Firefox and Safari work on your site, but they represent a smaller demographic than what the mainstream population uses right now.
Backdoor exploits into your OS? Ha! Try doing *that* on Firefox or Opera.
Seriously, I'm guessing that's simply an unwillingness to code for more than one browser, either because of laziness or lack of resources or they don't care about the growing market share or firefox.
I don't know if that site is good enough to make people open an IE window or tab just to visit it, so I don't know if their arrogance (if that's what it is) is justified.
I guess I'll never know.
No sig
...I use an XHTML mime-type on all my pages.
I know! Firefox doesn't even run ActiveX controls, and those awesome search bars that give you free stuff don't even install into it!
Speak before you think
People. People who are lazy fuckers more particularly.
What pisses me of is websites that use JavaScript and/or cookies and don't tell you that they are needed. I have both turned off my default (NoScript and CookieCuller), and I often come across sites that require one or the other to use basic functionality. And then don't tell me.
There are very few sites that actually need these things. And if they do, they should tell me so that I can turn it on. Rather then fuck around wondering why it won't work.
Personally I code my websites to be compliant XHTML and CSS (unless they are quick and dirty ones). I don't use JavaScript. I don't use Flash or similar.
I also have a message that comes up when the browser doesn't support CSS (or at least the NOCSS part). And if I used JavaScript, would also have a message come up (hidden if JavaScript was used). The same with cookies, if they are needed, the person gets told (at the time). Unless cookies are essential (such as for login information) they shouldn't be used.
Take a site that is for an airline. They have it available in heaps of languages. So I click English, and then click something else, and it takes me back to the front page. Why the fuck cant' it use server side sessions?
I wank in the shower.
"There is still no full consensus over how certain things should be displayed."
The heck with it. Of course there's a consensus; there's a consensus from the very first day of HTML!
"All things will be displayed the way the f* client finds proper". That's the one and only consensus, and that's the way things should be. HTML is about semantics, not presentation, and even things like CSS should do no more than *propose* a way to present the information ("oh, this new style sheet looks wonderful, doesn't it?" "Maybe, but I'm blind, you insensitive clod!"). If a CSS layer (or the absence of it) makes the information unreacheable or unusable then you are doing something utterly wrong.
My company is very near releasing an update to our web application that will provide 100% support of both IE and Firefox (our next major revision will be out next month). There are a number of reasons why we are only just now adding support for Firefox. Though my company is only 6 years old, as far as browser development goes, a lot has changed. When version 1.0 of our application was written, mozilla based browsers lacked a lot of the functionality they have now. For instance, a central part of our application is a rich text editor that creates text and html formatted email content. Up until Firefox 1.3 with the introduction of Midas, only IE supported editable regions in web pages. This was a major hurdle for us.
In the mean time, we continued to add features and pages to the application which was only targeting IE, so most of the application was not 100% standards compliant. We've wanted to do Firefox support for a long time, but sometimes the need to add new features for existing customers outweighs the need to provide support for a very small number of people who complained. Additionally, web developers who are trained in cross-browser coding are a rare commodity (much rarer than the number of people who complain about the lack of firefox support).
Also, adding firefox/mozilla support isn't just code and forget it. Even though the code for firefox on PC and firefox for mac may be similar (I haven't looked, sorry), they still have slightly different rendering practices. Just to name one, a file upload input box with a size attribute set to 50 will be much longer and take up more screen than on a PC. So you have to do a platform check in javascript to set the size differently on a mac or a PC so the screen looks the same. Nope, the CSS width attribute is completely ignored in both platforms.
These are just a few reasons, and your mileage may vary. We have a very complex application with a lot of complex scripting, so our effort is likely more than most would have to do. A firefox user simply impersonating an IE user agent would not have had any luck in making our app work.
today is spelling optional day.
Exactly! how can you spread your malware if people were not using IE!
Only losers that believe in standards and a "safe internet" want you to use anything other than IE.
Now come on people how are us webmasters supposed to survive if we dont install spam software, keyloggers and screen scrapers on your computers?? IE give us the tools to do just that!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I mean really do you guys just put stuff on the frontpage to incite flamewars?
I don't know, there might be a reason for requiring IE. Sometimes you can take a question for what it's worth. Chances are, there's no real reason.
Hey look! a flying pig that's viewing a website that could only work with IE. Amazing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Plenty of reasons.
* company out of money - don't want to fund the extra development.
* heavy use of COM objects
* outdated development (or web support) team that lacks the expertise.
* intranet (not Internet) often have no need to having to support different types of browsers since they control office deployment anyway. There's no reason to spend $15,000 when you can get away with $10,000 (and telling people that it only works on IE).
At the end of the day, projects are funded by business. If there are not enough returns for a project it is my personal believe that the project should not go ahead.
jliu
I'm pretty sure the reason why IE is required is because Movielink (and Cinemanow and GUBA) uses Microsoft's DRM. Movies are delivered in WMV format, and a license is issued to the user (24 hour playback for rentals, or limited sync license for purchases) when the download their flick. I think this license delivery requires IE.
Blame DRM for this one kids, not laziness or poor site design.
I think the reason is that we are too lazy to test multiple browsers when we create the sites, and that we don't have any firm policies about standards adherance.
I use Avant Browser, which is based on IE. I've tried Firefox, and I use it when in linux, but i can't stand gecko. It messes up Yahoo! for goodness sake. I find it frustrating when i find, however rarely, the firefox only sites. They are growing in numbers, and are annoying as hell for people that use IE. The only reason to create Firefox only sites is just to piss people off.
You DO realize browsers have different features, right? Midas wasn't always a part of Firefox, SVG support still isn't in IE (that I know of), IE just got transparent PNG, etc, etc, etc. It is the differences in browsers that sometimes make someone HAVE to choose one over the other.
today is spelling optional day.
It's because of the horse-sh** implementation of JavaScript, DOM, and CSS. I have to deal with this crap all day long at my job. If I had a say in it, I would only support gecko and say to the hell with the rest of the rabble. Probably, though, corporations see that x% of people use IE, so that's the one they choose.
More fuel on the fire.
I'm the Lead Web Developer for a company and I hate IE. I had held out some hope that the fn morons that are developing it would get a clue but they didn't. Just have a look at:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css
I'd really like to ditch all the crappy tables but IE is so screwed up I'm stuck in the 90's with page design.
CSS 3 is so cool I can't wait to use the print capabilities but at the rate Microslow is developing IE I'll be retired before they even get freak'n css 2.1 working. How many Billions of dollars? And this is all we get?
I'm a Lead Web Dev and I hate IE.
Is the ability to pretend to be using Firefox or IE, and set this for a specific site. Of course sometimes it still doesn't work cause they coded lazilly, but often it's just fine.
What I think is really fun is to put in a sorry we don't support IE page. I would do this all the time, but then I loose to many people. But it's fine for geek websites!
I think if you actually researched how browsers worked "from the very first day of HTML" you'd find that the client's ability to control the appearence of content was minimal and the web designers control wasn't all that great either.
So I'm stupid and/or lazy because I prefer IE to Firefox. Hmm...and how telling this gets moderated insightful. I'll be generous and presume it is because one can in fact contend that a developer who only supports IE these days is a bit out of touch with what's happening with Firefox.
But because I do take exception to being so categorized, I'll comment that I have IE, Firefox, and Netscape Navigator installed on my current laptop and use IE about 80% of the time. Firefox is usually quicker, but IE gives a browsing experience that, in general, I prefer. I've articulated some of the reasons in past posts, so I won't go into it here. Just wanted to inform you that there are one or two intelligent, hard-working geeks about who actually happen to prefer IE.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Isn't it, ultimately, about choice? Right?
Well, you do read Gamespot...
Canadian customers are sent to zip.ca, so stop your bitching.
A few buddies and I have a website with a forum, whenever I tried to admin it on my mac with firefox, it will tell me they don't support firefox and will only work with IE, then they go as far as telling me "IE is superior" and includes some links to "firefox myths". I just love how the lazy developers completely ignore other platforms and open standards while blaming their lazy asses on someone else.
I work support for an ISP; our billing page is IE-only. How many complaints do you think we have on file regarding not being able to use Firefox or Safari or another alternative? 2 complaints for the last year. The vast, VAST majority of users, when told that the Ebill function is IE only, just shrug and say, "OK" and click on IE. Even if Firefox is their primary browser. What the heck incentive is there to recode the page when there's just no demand for it? IE's already on 90%+ machines, and most people just plain don't care which browser they're using, even the ones who switched to Firefox.
#2 because IE dominates (as a browser) over Firefox .001%, it is insignificant.
#3 because IE has 99.999% market share and Firefox only has
"For the same reason people use IE in the first place: They are stupid and/or lazy."
Or...there are people who simply do not know about Firefox. Yes, believe it. There are users on the internet not as knowledgeable as your average Slashdot reader. Maybe a copy of OpenCD, then those less-learned folk can brought into the 21st century.
But, instead of calling 'them' stupid and/or lazy, MisterCookie, you could be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Insulting the people you want to convert to your side makes you no better than the enemy you condemn.
My brother had be rebuild his PC for his kids. I loaded it up with all sorts of open-source goodies. I am about to set up a second PC for them with similar goodies.
Bearded Dragon
The thing that amazes me even more is that some of the biggest eCommerce sites are broken without IE.
Recently, I needed to open an account on eTRADE in order to access a stock grant given to me by one of my clients.
Well, it turns out that it is impossible to open an account without IE.
I then called tech support to complain. Well, the rep said that I had no choice but to use IE. I then said that I don't use IE because of security issues and that I was surprised that the leading eCommerce financial services company requires users to exclusively use buggy and insecure Micro$oft software. He kept insisting that I couldn't open an account and access my stock grants without IE. In fact, he couldn't even access my account until I used IE to first open the account.
I then suggested that maybe he could open it for me but he said that too was impossible. Finally, I got him to go to a supervisor to ask whether there is any way for me to get access to my money (i.e. stocks) without being required to use IE. After a long time on hold, he said that if I was willing to wait for 3-4 weeks they could snail mail out a written form that I could then fill out and return by snail me -- he warned that even after I returned it, manual processing would delay opening of the account. He was not even able to fax or email the form.
Even I was not willing to take that much time and effort to stand on principle. So, after haranguing the poor rep a little longer and finally getting him to file a complaint and bug report, I had no choice but to break down and launch my dusty copy of IE on my laptop.
IE Only Website to Firefox: We don't need to see your browser. This is not the information you are looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.
Using a proxy (hydemyass.com) and explorer, I STILL CAN'T GET IT! "Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service your browser scripting must be enabled."
Not only must you be using explorer, but ALSO make it as weak as possible.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
What gives me the shits, is I have yet to find a bank that supports any Linux browser.
Some banks do at least support browsers other than IE, but you would think a company that needs security that much would embrace the more secure operating systems.
Instead, they go Windows and mostly IE. The worst combination available.
>Typical slshdot arrogance. How about IE has functionality that your sacred cow doesn't?
Even if that were true, IE is not even an option for Linux users. It would be one thing if Micro$oft really had a superior product that it offered impartially across all major platforms. Then if some users persisted on using an inferior product, perhaps you could blame them.
The reality is that Micro$oft *intentionally* develops incompatible browser implementation with proprietary extensions in order to gain advantage in the browser wars.
Micro$oft also *refuses* to develop versions for Linux so as to gain (unfair) competitive advantage in the platform wars. Even MacOS is only supported grudgingly (and often belatedly or incompletely) so that Micro$oft can claim that they are not a 100% monopolist.
Now that IE7 has tabs, I actually prefer it to Firefox. There's nothing wrong with that, and I'm not stupid and I'm certainly not lazy. I actually use Safari most of the time, as I'm a Mac user at home, but at work I prefer IE 7 to Firefox.
I thought the whole Slashdot vibe was that it's good to have a lot of choices. Now apparently the highest moderated post says you're stupid and lazy if you happen to choose something other than Firefox. (Out of curiosity, are Opera users stupid and lazy, also? Opera isn't open source.)
Comment of the year
People don't have to install it.
Geeks and power users can download and install and configure a new web browser and manage to answer most of the "wizards" questions to get everything working. Most end users have no idea what download actually means let alone the advanced task of installation.
Here is an answer... Make a linux desktop that is better than windows. Then you can choose what browser comes with most of the comptuers. In doing so you will dictate what the websites are compatible with.
So shut up and do something about it.
Why don't more people create websites that refuse to work with IE? I mean, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, no? Point them to a nice informative webpage that explains that you will not allow IE until Microsoft stops using its monopoly power to displace open web standards with their proprietary technologies.
.*MSIE.* .* /noie.html [L]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}
RewriteRule
Amazingly, the suggestion link at the bottom of the page seems to work just fine on this mac with safari.
...the fact that they're running Apache on a Unix platform.
Why is this any worse the countless number of sites that require Flash - another proprietary, single source, application? I'd say the number of sites that are useless without Flash is far larger than the number of sites that require IE.
/. and Adobe not being Microsoft that's okay.
I guess this being
...our boss said to. Every techie on my dev team uses firefox at home and has it installed at work as well. We are keenly aware of its advantages and market support.
Our boss, however, doesn't care. He likes some of the fancy IE frills, and also doesn't want to spend any dev time at all resolving javascript or CSS conflicts between the two browsers. He believes that IE has a strong enough presence that forcing our users to use it is acceptable...the deciding factor for our users is in system functionality, not browser choice.
So, that's why. Nobody here is dumb or lazy. The boss wants to cut costs and doesn't see the choice driving away clients.
You can get the My Web Search toolbar for Firefox now. :D
I usually use Firefox because of it's live bookmarks. However when push comes to shove, if I could only have one browser it would be Seamonkey. Not only is it the most complete internet suite (it includes .html editor, irc, email, etc), but seems to render websites a bit more reliably and it crashes a bit less frequently than anything else I've tried recently (To be fair, I'm not including IE since I don't use Windows)
The primary reason why a company can only support IE is a lack of IT expertise.
With my employer, they hired contract staff to do a lot of web programming for internal use. And IE was our corporate standard. After a while, both the internal staff and the contract staff only knew about IE - my local management and the contract staff wasn't too on top of the reasons why you wouldn't want to build IE-only software.
Then my company was doing more on-line retailing, so they used the same flawed principles to build the retail site. It was basically broken on anything other than our "internal standard" browser. Corporate management was kept in the dark regarding compatability issues - sales are sales, and there was no loss of customers - we simply ignored a subset of the population.
Finally, last fall, a new IT chief was hired (the former one left on his on accord), and the new IT guy was interested in the numbers. And within about 30 seconds he saw that 0% of sales were to Safari and Mozilla users.
The 2nd in command (within IT) claimed that nothing but IE was a popular browser. He was fired in, quite literally, five minutes. Three developers (including me) were then tasked to fix the issue with the site, and within a couple days we had a well-tested site that worked with any modern standards based browser. And it was accessable too (unlike the old site). Happily, we did all this just in time for IE7.
Now, non-IE browsers account for about 15% of our on-line sales, and the new IT guy is considered by all (remaining) to be a hero.
PS - you've heard of my employer.
...you have to use some of their software to "manage" your account there. And it is windows based, so they assume you have windows IE(guess, never used the place before-or heard of it for that matter). This is from their terms of service page ->"9. SOFTWARE. Movielink will make available to you on its Website and on certain third party websites with which it does business a downloadable version of the Movielink Manager Software and any available updates which it generally releases (collectively, "Software")."
Well, my program uses a commercial product that shall remain nameless. A previous version exploited a bug in IE, where HTML code/Javascript was interpreted by IE, although the HTML standard said that such content was not legal HTML. The amount of $$$ we're spending on this product is outrageous (but that's another problem...)
I publicly embarrassed a manager saying, "Geez, can't you at least require [the product] to use standard HTML, considering what we are paying for it? Doesn't it bother you this product requires a specific version of Internet Explorer, so it can exploit a bug in that version?" My supervisor got his butt chewed for my remarks.
About 3 months later they submitted their HTML for W3C testing, and the site started working with FireFox...
dave
I have dropped services, left banks, changed insurance providers, etc. any
time I encounter this. Do you really want to do business with an
organization that puts that kind of trust in horseshit infrastructure
like that?
DRM and activex. Simple as that. The worst is when a site tells you to get firefox and won't display with IE, despite the fact that the site works perfectly in IE and if it doesn't that is only because of ignorant coding.
But only IE. I mean come on Disney. I heard that Steve Jobs now has something to do with your company.... How about at least Safari?
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
"Since you can assume that everyone has IE (at least everyone who uses Windows), but the amount of people who'd have Firefox is way smaller, IE is usually the browser of choice."
Psst, 67% of slashdot users are FF. And here IE only shows 78% with a consistent downward trend. 22% is very significant user base in my book and if the trend continues it will be larger next year. When its 55% IE, 45% other I sure you will still say, "see, everyone is using IE", no doubt.
A wise person told me years ago that anything that said, "Best when viewed in [insert browser here] at [insert screen resolution here] was a very visible sign of laziness, incompetence, arrogance, and lack of interest in the ultimate "customer," the end-user. That advice was given when the browsers of the moment were IE and Netscape. It was good advice then, and with a modification or two, it's good advice now. So I'd have to say they are some combination of (a) lazy; (b) incompetent; (c) arrogant; and (d) not interested in their visitors. I always view such shenanigans as a sort of badge of shame, and it occasionally causes me to mistrust the content of such sites.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I run a forum with about 450 users. I get average 2 million hits per month.
Firefox has 47.9% of my site's access attributed to it. IE is second with 43.3%, followed by opera with 4.6%.
Sure, maybe if you measured sites like AOL.com and Microsoft.com you would see that firefox has little use. But, in reality, it controls a very large portion of the market.
(I mentioned this a few weeks ago on something similar here on /.)
/login/login.asp /catalog/
To summarize previous post:
Site used cookies for login.
Cookie set in headers from server has "Path=;" in it, so basically no path.
Login pages in like
Catalog (needing to be logged in to view prices (wholesale only catalog)) is in like
RFC(Spec from elsewhere, I don't remember) says if no path specified, then set to path of page, so FF, and Opera (2 I tested), seemed to set Path on the cookie to "/login/"
IE didn't seem to care, seemed to set path to "/".
So of course you go to "/catalog/" and IE would send the cookie, FF and Opera wouldn't.
Tested with IE 5.5 and 6 (no computers with IE7 installed).
Of course it was a RFC, but still, the path in the cookie should be set.
I didn't have a chance to see what would happen if I omitted the path, I would think that FF and Opera would do with what they did with the above cookie. IE, I don't know.
I don't know so much if it was the company's people doing strange things, or if the canned website software was doing strange things. I just know it didn't seem to work on any browser other than IE. (The machine that my parents use in this case is an Old Win95 machine running Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox 0.7, and had something happened that borked the IE that was installed on there. It's hidden behind the firewall and since we are running MS Exchange for Email(I think the Office 97 version?) it doesn't even show HTML messages(They just appear to be an attachment to the message). )
The website in question didn't work the first time I tried it in IE, because it required ActiveX controls be turned on. AFAIK, if a website uses ActiveX, there's really no way to just support it for Firefox. On the other hand, sometimes websites are very stupid about this sort of thing. They seem so gleeful with their ability to check for the user's browser that they abuse it. For instance, Opera gets blocked out sometimes, despite not being Firefox. Also, on one website, I was told that I couldn't view it with the browser I was using. Except, they provided a link to visit anyway, and there was nothing wrong with it.
This is just pretty bizarre, like the "this site is best viewed in XXXX x XXXX resolution..." I've never understood why people did that.
Wow. So many of the comments here just assume the worst about people. The users are lazy or stupid, the developers are "n00bs" or the people that run the websites are arrogant. And, yeah, I'm sure that's the case for some.
I propose a much simpler answer: Return-on-investment.
Here's an example: When the site was created, it was around the time that building for IE was considered a must-have and getting a presence on the Internet meant untold riches coming your way. Companies hired designers based on those premises. The designers delivered. The companies sunk a chunk of money into it.
A few years later, designing for _ALL_ browsers is a must-have, but... The company didn't make the untold riches they were promised (turns out people would rather buy tube bending by phone and email). They don't see the point in sinking money into a redesign for a website that doesn't amount to much in the company's overall income.
Yeah, it annoys me when Firefox doesn't work on a site, but I have alternatives and, for the most part, some of those sites are indeed being retooled little by little. All of my bank sites support Firefox without question. Something not true a couple of years ago.
Cheers,
Mike...
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
That is why. Lucent is using the same platform for delivering TV over IP, and they are forced to use Windows Vista in their set top boxes for the same reason.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Malware jokes aside, there are a few neat things that are IE exclusive, namely proprietary CSS filters (that allow things like embossing, color inversion, rotation, etc...) These, of course, are accomplished through DirectX. CSS filters can also be animated... it's sort of cool to have an entire page pixelate/warp/dissolve/rotate/... in.
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
Perhaps they are developing cross-platform site code, and in the meantime, have adjusted their "IE only" message to recommend a temporary alternative for Firefox users.
That's my guess.
I was just asked to take over a brand new website who'se design is such that it will only work with IE. When I pointed that out, they said, "we realize that. we've decided it's too much trouble to support everything out there". I told them that when I see such a site I assume the owners attitude is "If you don't run IE on Windows, you're not worthy to do business with us, we don't need your money. If you want the privilege of buying our product, change to Windows/IE!". They replied that they can do without the small percentage of "non-conformists" out there, to which I replied that I won't be part of something that forces Microsoft on the public and harms everything else. So I still don't get it... if I were to open a web-store I'd consider a prospective customer who can't deal because of compatability issues a lost sale. I'd want to do business with anyone! (why else would I build a site visible to the world in the internet??)
Why code for a certain browser in the first place? What good are standards, if nobody sticks to them? If ALL pages were conforming to standards, there wouldn't be an issue...stop, there would be one: IE wouldn't work properly. Monopolies are something cool. You can do whatever you want and the whole effing world jumps through hoops to adapt to your dodgy software. The IE is "broken by design", so web developers have to "break" the WWW to make IE work. If all developers would stick to standards, MS would be forced to comply with standards. The only other option they'd have would be to roll out MS-WWW
Say, Cliff, I know you're all eager to post articles that will drive ad revenue... but, it didn't occur to you to think about what "DragonTHC" meant?
:)
THC, of course, is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol
Or, jumping ahead a bit: "DragonTHC" = "Killer Pot".
More or less
So, don't let your corporate overlords/bosses find out!
True, and, further, more than Z% of the market will not use your site. Even though I have IE available to me, and even though 90% of IE-only sites render just fine if I spoof the user agent, I usually don't go back to sites that are IE-only because I assume the operator will be similarly myopic in other respects.
Consider also that non-IE users are likely to be disproportionately tech-savvy, and therefore will probably have an outsize word-of-mouth impact.
I don't know how many users feel like me, but it's got to be enough to change the "extra effort > cost of lost users" equation a bit...
Same reasons that car dealers market as they do, or any other type of selling good does. You sell to the masses. I don't care if it is 95% IE out there, or 75% IE...they are the masses. Whether you think they are stupid or not, makes no difference. Be as mad as you want, it's still the market share leader. Period. End of reason.
Giving up my mod points to ask a question/add to this... Does anyone know of a firefox solution to embedded excel Office Web components?
ies4linux
I'm not sure if it'll fix our etrade and movielink problems, though.
Since Vista there is another compelling reason to force users to use IE - namely that embedded WMV doesn't work without the plugin that MS have just recently released (which isn't something listed on Windows Update as a patch, it's a manual download). I can either guarantee that the users will see the embedded video by forcing them to use IE, whereas it's pot luck whether they've installed it when they're on Firefox/non-IE browser.
(The argument about WMVs suitability for streaming media is moot imo - it's what my customers ask for, even if I remind them that it's essentially Windows/IE-only)
Another reason is ActiveX. I know the *nix cognoscenti consider ActiveX to be the spawn of Satan but we host (and have designed) a number of sites that use it extensively for various reasons. Obviously that isn't supported at all in Firefox (there is I believe a plugin of sorts available - but again plugins are no use to me when something has to "just work" on a basic Windows install)
Here (Canada) I got redirected to a place called zip.ca which works fine in Seamonkey and actually looks like not a bad site, though a bit expensive compared to the corner video rental store.
Still if they have enough rare DVDs it would most likely be worth it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The thing is, it shouldn't be harder to support multiple browsers because if they could quit comparing epeens for a moment and actually agree on published standards, they would all work with the same HTML and it would truly boil down to features and personal preference. As it is now, the browser war is about compatibility more than personality, in which case diversity is actually a detriment.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The amusing thing was when crafting my own website, I tended to find it extremely difficult to create a page that worked identically between both browsers, and that having w3 compliant code tended to break the site in IE.
These problems immediatly compound when trying to add CSS to the mix.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
This isn't really a big deal. Sites that require IE just make themselves broadly more irrelevant.
I mean is there a serious important website that is relevant that doesn't load in Firefox?
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
... you can wait from a site that blocks viewers outside USA ? Based on IP ? I'll beet the word "proxy" means nothing to them...
Funny, every time he typed "aweful", my brain rendered it as "gaaahhhh!"
Can you spell D.R.M.?
.. but you can't see it.
Stupid crap.
I also noticed that one of the entertainment movie sites will not allow you to look at movie trailers unless you use IE.. if you try to view it with Firefox, you can hear it
If your Web site is "IE only" then you are not actually on the Web. You are just using the Internet to deploy your client/server Windows application.
Sometime next month the Movielink CEO will buy an iPhone and be surprised that Movielink does not show up on it.
True, but in my mind, there's a heluva difference in quality between "looks the same in all browsers" and "fails to work in any browser besides IE", and the latter was explicitly my situation.
I've played a bit with CSS, and find it to be surprisingly awkward to use in practice, even before getting to the rendering problems...
dave
"I think if you actually researched how browsers worked "from the very first day of HTML" you'd find that the client's ability to control the appearence of content was minimal"
I'm one of those that wrote their very first HTML on vi to look at it on Mosaic (on HP-Ux to be precise) and knew that the important part was not the client's factual ability to render the content but the client's *potential* to process it in anyway the need arose. And I'm one of those old farts that know that a "browser" is more than IExplorer or Mozilla and that it can be a websearch bot indexing on HTML headers and tags or a text-to-speech app for blind people, as well as being one of those that when the "semantic web" wave came could only say "what the f*? that's what the web is from 1992 -only it has been forgotten".
True enough, I suppose ... but then again the Web designers weren't really supposed to have any control anyway. This idea that we can, if we just wish it hard enough, make HTML behave like PDF is the root of the evil. That stems from the marketeer's desire to turn the World Wide Web into a gigantic Tru-Color brochure, preserving corporate sacred-cows in all their blazing glory.
... but the urge to control what we see down to the last pixel is overpowering to some people.
Too bad. I thought the Web was all about the ebb and flow of information, not the presentation of advertising at every opportunity. But still, underneath all the sales crap it is about content
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
... they are the same people that don't allow plus signs (+) in email addresses, despite being completely and totally valid.
Bugs don't count as functionality.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Why?
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Web Developer: Fine - we can do all that and reach 90% of the market ..."
8 974
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
lynx anyone. We all know webmasters get that little chuckle when they see someone using it.
I think stupid pretty much sums it up. They are probably running Windows2000 or worse!
I think part of the problem is that too many people involved in designing websites think of them as printed material. Why treat webpages like they are coming off a printing press with mathmatically precise margins, borders, and character spacing? A lot of sites I run across like that, use a font size that's too small for my older eyes. When I try to bump up the font size in my browser it doesn't work, or the page becomes a jumbled mess.
If it is readable, looks basically the same at first glance in different browsers, why limit yourself to one browser because you have a ruler and know how to use it? You can usually get a page to render nicely in different browsers just by using good coding practices. A website should not be considered printed material. A web page is, and can be, much more than that.
FrankNIt's surprizingly nice to work with if you're building a site that you may change the layout of frequently. It also makes the code significantly more manageable in the page itself if you tend to use the same styles of text repeatedly.
In the same breath, I don't generally make sites using ajax (the source of many of these problems), and so it's hard to end up with a static page that doesn't 'work.'
In my personal belief, HTML was not designed to handle the crap that it's being used for today. All the languages that have been tacked onto it are such hacks that it's not surprizing they don't quite work the same on all browsers. Ideally, someone comes up with a good, clean standard that allows for the creation of dynamic components in the native language. Sure, it's 'Just another language,' but if it solves the issues associated with ajax, non-compliance, etc, then it's worth it.
Plus, it's a hell of a lot nicer than having to know dozens of languages just to make a simple website.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
IETab, isnt a good way to test in IE though, the Eolas bug wont show up in IETab and you might forget to fix that. You should test for IE in IE. I'm sure there are other little glitches that wont show up in IETab as well. Get IE View Lite which sends the URL you are on to your IE browser and launches it.
Actually I guess that would be three words, Digital Rights Management.
The most pervasive DRM in use is the Windows Media DRM. While Firefox and Safari can play unprotected Windows Media, it does not have the DRM plugin. Hence Movielink, Netflix, and many others do not support anything other than IE. Perhaps with the new DRM for Flash Video this will change. Only time will tell.
RIM forces you to use IE so that you can automatically download a BlackBerry application to your device when it's connected to your PC. It's an alternative to downloading over the air.
For example, visiting the download page for the BlackBerry version of Google Talk will prompt you to use IE: http://blackberry.com/googletalk
Funny, I build my sites to look good in Opera/Firefox and then fire up MSIE to fix just enough to make it functional.
Good news is I'm seeing nearly 20% of the people use MSIE 7 which isn't too bad. About 20% use Firefox. So that is a good solid 40% of my viewers seeing the site the way I intended (Looks fine in MSIE7). It's slighly borked in IE6 which makes up 59% of my traffic and it is pretty crappy looking in Safari which accounts for about 1/4%. The rest is bots running around indexing things or strange people using Linux.
See this is the part I am just dumbstruck by. . . . I'm a web developer and for me, getting my layouts to look great in Firefox is cake. Getting them to still look great in IE is almost always a herculean, nearly sysiphean (how many times have you seen THAT word on slashdot?) effort. If I were lazy, I'd just get everything to render okay in Firefox, maybe in Safari too.
A little under a year ago I took a position as the sole webmaster with one of the largest public school districts in Texas. When I took this job, they used Dreamweaver and IE for everything, browser be damned. Within 3 months, I had rolled out a new design that was at least usable in IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Netscape. I am constantly encouraging the usage of Firefox and doing everything I can to point out how flawed the concept is to expect the entire world to use IE.
According to our stats, 90% of our users are on IE with 40% of those being IE7, 7% on Firefox, and 2% on Safari. We serve upwards of 10,000 visitors per day with more than 30,000 pageviews. We don't have to support anyone or anything but we (as in I) choose to do so because not doing so reflects stupidity and arrogance. Being in the business of education, I find it is very necessary to educate the general public (your typical IE / windows user) that they are using an insecure and non-standard browser while still offering to support them until they are comfortable making the change to something better.
If you plan to use any web technology created this millennium, and you want it to work properly in IE 6, prepare to tear your hair out repeatedly. Speaking from experience, supporting Konqueror, Firefox and Opera simultaneously is substantially easier than supporting IE 6 at all.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
This is ridiculous. If me, a lone developer, can do it for a reasonable price than ANYONE should be able to, particularly the well paid (probably overpriced) groups that work on big name, big business websites.
I run virtualization software on my laptop and can check dozens of browsers in multiple OSes from anywhere. It's not hard and it's not rocket science. If you understand and code to web standards and understand your IE quirks as well as do some basic study on web accessibility, you're good to go. If you're already coding to make sure your whole damn site works in Lynx or some other text based browser (which gives you a good idea of how it's going to work in some kind of text reader or other accessibility program) without fancy scripts then you know that older browsers will work and newer browsers can used enhanced features.
Read a couple fucking books, learn how to virtualize and BE A GEEK for crying out loud.
And seriously, test Firefox, IE6 and IE7 mainly and just make sure the others work. The nice thing about Opera, Safari, etc. is that 95% of the time (if not more) things that work in FF work in other good browsers.
I actually hoped life would get easier with the introduction of IE7, but it turns out that while it fixed a lot of IE6 issues, it introduced plenty of its own lame quirks which have increased testing time. With IE you spend more time tricking the browser into doing its job than you do actually doing work. I fucking hate Microsoft.
I worked for one of their clients (one of the largest retailers in the world) and despite repeated requests, Citi would not code new functionality to anything but IE. My client tested in various browsers including Firefox and invariably would find multiple errors. Citi simply refused to correct any errors that would not replicate in IE. Some of the errors were profound (from an end user perspective) but Citi would not budge.
Now that Citi has slashed their IT group and is ramping up outsourcing efforts I don't imagine that this situation will be improving any time soon.
I think IE7 is really gonna bite MSFT ins the ass. IE6 was functional, and that is all most people want. IE7 is obnoxious, and the only thing it seems to offer is tabbed browsing, which mozilla does much better. If you are running a windows OS, IE 6 is very stable, but 7 isn't and it always seems to bloat up the memory usage more than mozilla (from my experience). IE 6 of course has all the rendering issues for dhtml, but other than that, it was stable. Forcing their user base to goto 7 in my opinion isn't going to help MSFT win the browser market, I wasn't a regular mozilla user (opera and ie mostly) on windows, until IE7 came along. Now I only use IE when i have no choice, which is becoming less frequently.
You forgot your [/sarcasm] tags there. ;)
I'm living in South Korea at the moment, and Windows/IE is pretty much 100% here because a certain ActiveX control is used by most sites for encryption (they use their own SEED encryption or something, here are some links...
9 62,39154849,00.htm ...)
"The key reason ActiveX is mandated by financial institutions is that Korea has its own national encryption scheme called SEED that is used in place of SSL. The reason this came to be stemmed from the fact that US export law in the late 1990s didn't permit the export of web browsers with more than 40 bit encryption. This meant that an ActiveX SEED plug-in was used in place of browser SSL. While there are Java and Netscape implementations of SEED, it was almost never implemented. ActiveX is so dominant that KFTC (Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute) won't even assign users security certificates unless they're using Internet Explorer with ActiveX."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=412
http://www.zdnet.co.kr/etc/eyeon/internet/0,39036
"if i'd known it was harmless, i'd have killed it myself"
My guess is just a commision from the anti-virus companies to make sure that the most number of computers virii spread easily is maintaind , thus keeping the anti-virus guys in business.
Requires lots of testing after a change is made. Not that it's a bad thing to support multiple browsers it's just there are reasons behind why sites don't support multiple browsers. It's only until recently that usage has grown on other browsers besides IE so there's lots of software around that was written only for IE. To change it to work on other browsers is a big job as everything needs to be tested on multiple browsers and alternative ways of doing things needs to be established and implemented. For example lots of software on the web uses active-x controls. At my work some of our software only works on IE as it's a huge change to get it to work on other browsers and the company isn't willing to pay for it.
ActiveX. It may not be all that secure, but it's generally one of the fastest options. Not saying that Java or Ajax wouldn't necessarily be a better choice, but there are trade-offs for all of them.
There are essentially two kinds of webmasters today Those that use FF and hate IE, and consequentially develop bugs fixes for it after it is working properly FF. Those that use IE and test for it because change is hard and difficult. more than that though, the second category is frequently upper management. They look at a stats chart and see that 70% of the internet uses IE, so they ask their coders to design for IE. FF becomes collateral damage for MS specific programs that the coders use as modules. There is only so much time to work on any given project and the decision gets made to save time by rolling with these packages. There does appear to be a silver lining this cloud though. I've been working at videosift for a while, and our FF base is at around 45% of 20,000 unique ip's a day. We actually offer features for ff that are not available to IE users because of problems with the IE browser. I see this a lot with newer sites. OSS has dropped the barrier to entry in the web market and consequently lots of new widgets are optimized for firefox. Sure there are lots of sprockets for IE, but we all know a widget is almost as good as a self sealing stem bolt.
MovieLink's business model requires DRM. Linux doesn't support DRM, and Apple only supports incompatible DRM schemes... Firefox apparently doesn't support DRM. (Microsoft just released a windows media player plugin for Firefox, so who knows...maybe it does now.)
Personally, I'm happy they hang a "GO AWAY; WE CAN'T DO BUSINESS WITH YOU" sign out front. It saves me from wasting time browsing their catalog, only to figure out that I can't play their stuff under Linux, or under Windows without ActiveX/DRM junk...
Of course, if you know your ass from a hole in the ground and actually study your profession, you know how to work around these problems. Transparent PNGs are doable in IE6 IF you apply a little bit of JavaScript (and even better, use an .htc fix). Yes, there ARE differences which, I must say, is one of the most challenging and fun parts of web design.
The ONLY time you "have" to pick a certain browser is when you ABSOLUTELY MUST have some advanced feature. And in that case, odds are it's for some complex intranet application anyway.
Standards compliancy and working with FF aren't necessarily the same thing, especially if you consider previous versions of FF. Whenever I develope sites according to standard Opera was usually the one to get it right. FF was off in its own world because it didn't render to standard and it didn't render the IE way. Thats was one of the reasons why I used FF. It was a non-IE browser that still managed to be usable on many non-standard sites that favored IE. Opera and Safari were totally different. Even many google sites are FF and IE only when they come out. Look at Google Calender, it wouldn't even run under Opera when it came out and they only supported FF and IE. Was that laziness or comprimise? It sucks that many sites render differently under each browser but IE is not the only one doing things its own way. Opera, Safari and FF all render websites differently and adhere to different standards regardless of their lip service. Throw browser features into the mix and FF isn't that different from IE. It steals features from Opera, though not enough to make it as feature rich, and it's less compliant than the underdog. As far as reason for developing for IE goes there are many. Back when I used to use html editors even Dreamweaver's crappy code favored IE. So tools play a part. And yes, many people are behind the times. Not just developers but users. Last time I checked my site logs most users were still on IE 6. I know you guys are cutting edge but you have to realize not everyone moves as fast as you and many of them just don't care.
Movielink is forcing me to immigrate in USA:
Thanks for your interest in Movielink, the leading movie download service. Sorry, but Movielink is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States.
If you are a current customer of Movielink and believe you have reached this page in error, please access Live Chat with Customer Service under Help in your Movielink Manager.
Your IP address is --.--.--.--
And what's with the "Your IP address is"? Is the message "we got our eye on you, terrorist!" or what? Am I supposed to feel guilty I'm outside USA?
Or maybe they're just friendly and want me to make sure I know what my IP is.
"This site only works with Lynx. If you are using another broser, go [Cheney] yourself."
Table-ized A.I.
I've been trying to get my website to view correctly in both IE AND Firefox... and I gotta tell you, it's hard as hell. There's STILL one aspect of it which absolutely REFUSES to work correctly in IE, but perfectly in any other browser.
Damn IE.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I agree that you should take your business somewhere else, but that doesn't correct bad behavior. Customers also need to call these companies and be vocal about their complaints. I've talked to tech support and logged official requests with many banking institutions to get rid of their IE/ActiveX dependencies and embrace open standards. Most places have a forum for users to request a feature or address an issue. If someone doesn't tell you that they are logging your request, then ask to speak to a manager until you get someone who will.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
"There is still no full consensus over how certain things should be displayed."
:-)
www.w3c.org
I think you may be wrong?
"So you'd have to do the page two or three times to make it compatible with every browser. But that, in turn, would cost more money."
In my world, I call that "doing my job." That is to say, not half assing it. When I design something I concurrently test it in both browsers. Being a web developer in the polybrowser world means testing your product as you develop it, anything less is unprofessional.
As a personal anecdote, which I'm sure we all can attest to: I've seen plenty of pages that render properly in IE and Firefox. Corporate ones at that. Even http://www.microsoft.com/ renders properly in both.
Cause big Bill gives the best wet kisses!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I work at a company that licenses an SAP front end to its benefits program.
not only does it require IE6 (not 7) but also winXP. I can't even access my health benefits from Vista. Fortunately my job requires me to have one of each, (mac with tiger and leopard, and windows xp and vista) but there's no way that I can access anything from home...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Flash has the very obtrusive lack of end user control that makes many webpage advertisements in your face, noisy, and cover up the content. I found the easy solution on Linux is to set up a couple user accounts. Flash does not install to all accounts by default. It has to be installed per account.
When I visit Yahoo, I do so with the flash not installed account. When I want to catch the latest Google Videos such as as the cell phone videos of the Sadam Hanging or the Virgina Tech shootings, I use the Flash enabled account.
I don't think you have that luxury in a Windows machine. Getting Flash removed was a major pain in the backside. They didn't make it easy. Keeping it off was even harder since the kids had an account. After moving to Linux, the problem has been solved.
The truth shall set you free!
FEMA did the same thing. After a disaster you must use Internet Explorer to file. Forget the fact that just get a PC working in a disaster area is usually a challenge and may require something like a free distribution boot CD to get running legally. This severely limits the ability to assist the masses in filing claims.
Since OS X was released everyone has known the /. community embraced Macs more so than in years past, but this poll tells us that at least 20% have. Knowing that technically savvy Mac folks tend to be split down the middle when it comes to Firefox / Safari usage, you might be able to add another 10-20% to that number. Very interesting to see what an effect OS X has had on the average geek's perception of Apple.
Maybe the original author didn't actually get the point, but MovieLink is designed for IE because their service integrates Microsoft's DRM into the browser so it is easy to use their service for Windows users. While this may suck, it has nothing to do with what 99% of the comments are referring too (design incompetence). Maybe a better site should of been used for this rant.
And then IEn+1 comes out and you find out your
IE only site doesn't work on it...
Because it's a hair more seamless that's why... It's one of the things I missed when I moved to firefox and openoffice... I now always had to download office documents even if I just wanted to view them just like a webpage... just to extract the info I needed.
Gravity Sucks
Can any of you web-designer guys explain why anyone would code fixed size text on a site (by fixed size I mean text that doesn't change when I use the "Text Size" control on my browser)? What is decently readable on my 14" laptop at 800 x 600 becomes unreadably minute on the 24" wide screen at 1920x1200.
Inevitably these same sites are coded to display a fixed page width, so again at 800 x 600 they fill the screen from edge to edge, but at 1920x1200 there is 6 inches of blank white screen either side of the content.
You'll generally see figures like: "In Europe, non IE browsers are approaching 25% market share." or "Non IE browsers now account for 15% of web traffic."
How many of that 15-25% (depending on figures) truly don't have the option to open IE if they need to?
Don't get me wrong, I accept that it's still bad form to force your users to switch to an app they don't want to use and you'll certainly not win any friends that way...
But are you truly excluding Firefox and Opera users if they have IE bundled with their OS (which is still true for, what, 95%? of home users) but simply choose not to open it?
If a restaurant in a racist area decides to serve people regardless of race, are they truly excluding the racists who have elitist views, think the other race harbour viruses, etc. and therefore won't eat there? Or are the racists, who absolutely have the option to eat there, excluding themselves because of their elitism?
Sure, a few users truly don't have the option to use IE and it's certainly bad form to force people to use something they don't want to, even if they do already have it... But are you necessarily excluding them when they do still have the option?
Nothing bothers me more, being a hardcore Opera user, than going to a webpage and getting the message "Sorry, you must use IE, Firefox, or Safari to browse this page".
Theres nothing wrong with Opera - its just as good (of course, in my opinion, far superior) to the other browsers, and i find that almost all webpages work.
And if i get another "Your browser must be java compatible in order to view this webpage" error, ill scream.
That doesnt even makes sense.
-Red
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
Our company decided to use Sharepoint to share information and files throughout our offices in different locations. I dislike it for the simple fact that I am forced to use IE to use any of the functionality that Sharepoint offers (such as editing the document in it's location without saving locally and re-uploading).
Try getting a rental car quote from Hotwire in Firefox. Then try the same in IE and Safari. Note that the Firefox price is $1 more for every class of car. Remember that Hotwire is owned by Expedia which is an M$ shop. Guess there's still a M$ tax out there....
"The boss wants to cut costs and doesn't see the choice driving away clients."
..."???? Come ON!
And then you say "Nobody here is dumb
About three comments further up, someone posts a story about trying to use an IE only site to open an account. The poster in that comment went through a long, fruitless call to the companies tech support, complained bitterly to them that they did'nt support firefox, and then caved in and used IE.
The simple fact is that Windows has over 90% of the OS market, (Probably over 99% of certain demographics) and every single windows user has a copy of IE. If a firefox user tries to access a site and gets an "IE only" message, he will just click the blue E and get on with it. Both my desktop and my laptop run ubuntu, but if I really needed to access an IE only site, I'd just boot into windows.
It's not a question of how many people use firefox. It's a question of how many people will boycott your site rather than use IE.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
I worked under a boss like that for one week before I left. It's not that I'm so attached to a browser that I'd quit a job over it, but he demonstrated such a blatant lack of foresight (such as attention to FF's rising market share) and moral compass (further supporting a monopoly despite the minimal resources required to make the app browser agnostic) that I couldn't see myself wanting to work for him for long.
ActiveX. It's great for internal corporate web sites where "getting things done" is more important then 100% standards compliance. (ActiveX components are easier to install then standard applications.) Besides, when something comes around that's better at "getting things done", it'll replace IE.
No, I will not work for your startup
I want the audience to read this thread because it proves my point. MS says "You have a problem? I have a solution". The OSS community starts you off with a "you don't have problem". The poster didn't even suggest OpenOffice or any other OSS software that might give the needed solution (assuming it can). That's why some sites code to IE, and if they're "stupid and lazy" for solving problems instead of denying them? Then so be it. IE will still be there to take up the OSS slack.
Ok this never has to be the case, for the cost of ... well just a good programmer ... css/html/(sever script ?? do you even need this to do this correctly ?) programmer, scripter ... we use programmers, you can do this. any how if you know what you are doing it does not take an extravagant amount of time to make every web application cross browser / cross platform capable. In our development times we use our general css, javascript, and flash materials and at the last 2-3 days we clean up everything we have done, in our basic squash time, and script the crap out of our site for all platforms ... its not that hard ... seriously.
... wow is this real or do only people who make real web sites say this.
If we can't get something to look right or work right in all browsers its scrapped till our next update
suck it IE only sites
go hug a penguin
Also, aren't Bank of America the gasbags that are giving credit cards to illegal immigrants?
"Allowing" the IETab Firefox extension is not "somewhat progressive"
It's MS-Windows only, and can be exploited by nearly all of the security flaws that plague IE.
My bicyles
But: this is Movielink, a service that is renting and selling movies over the internet. In other words, they are selling something that you cannot get by fax or phone - you need an internet connection, a computer, and a reasonable amount of knowledge to be their customer in the first place.
So: by restricting their customer base to IE only, they are artificially limiting their customer base. They could target 100% of people on the Internet, but they choose voluntarily to limit themselves to only selling to people who are able to (and want to) run a recent copy of IE.
In short: they are artificially limiting themselves to maybe 50% (and falling) of their potential customer base. What a grand business model that is.
The guys who develop those sites know a couple of JavaScript tricks that they love, but don't know how to make them work in Firefox, Safari etc... and they are too lazy to try to learn. They are idiots and the guys who hire them are clueless. Why do common people still use IE? For the same reason i don't care if my microwave oven is one brand or another or has certain functions or not, as long as i can heat a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza in it that's fine for me. BUT........ The day my second class poorly manufactured microwave oven explodes i go and get a decent one. Same thing for IE users, the day their bank account, passwords and other sensitive data gets stolen, they get spyware | adware or their data gets erased they go and get a decent browser.
"There is only a need to code to W3C standards, not to browser-specific hacks. "
Guess that explains why there wasn't a story on slashdot about HTML 5 then.
"IE's extensions to standard HTML were made specifically to Embrace, Extend, then Extinguish the free internet. Don't contribute to the trap."
That's why I don't use XUL. Wouldn't want to "extinguish" anything.
If you want to use ANYTHING other than Microsoft Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6.0, avoid banking with TD Canada Trust.
During a recent password-change mishap, I telephoned their support line, and was told that unless I was running Internet Explorer 6, they would not provide support. I found it extremely shocking that they don't support Mac (even Internet Explorer for Mac), Linux or even VISTA. Their website works fine under every browser I've tried (From Camino to Opera to Conqueror to PocketIE) but they simply won't help you figure out why you can't access their EasyWeb banking service unless you're using IE6.
Thankfully I remembered the password eventually (it was kitty)
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
Theres no reason whatsoever, for me at least. Once I've build a project management web application (just a small tool) for my clients to organize and formalize the changes and feature requests for websites I've been doing for them. At the end of the process there was a gateway to WorldPay service so they could use their credit card to pay for it :) I figured, there will be closed group using it so I can somehow enforce this group to not use MSIE and simply put a message asking to install either FF or Opera if visited with MSIE. Anyways WorldPay requires some kind of audit by their employees to enable the gateway so I had to submit a link and path of "clicks" for them to navigate successfully to gateway so they can check its not fraudulent or something. The WP representative send me message back, that my website is not loading in their MSIE and in order to pass the audit I need to do something about it... Duh! So life verifies it.
Now I'm implementing a CMS at one of Universities in Poland and the policy is simple, service must work with all major browsers, period. So there is one version of styles for normal browsers and separate for MSIE. And still majority of people there use MSIE simply because they can and they don't want to 'break' anything by installing other browsers :P
So anyway, even when trying to educate users about alternative browsers, there is sometimes no way to avoid working on solutions for MSIE.
/* Wherever you go there you are... */
Go to movielink, get the error page and go to the bottom to the 'Suggestions' link. Suggest they support something other than IE. I am sure someone will have a busy mailbox tomorrow.
Well, uh, ActiveX kinda fits into the "backdoor" thing as it lets any random bit of code run in your browser without you knowing it. Disabling ActiveX is the first thing anyone should do if they're going to use IE.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
I'm sure with Movielink it is 100% DRM. I'm sure their "download" feature is powered by an activex control that enforces the MS DRM crap from the time the time the download starts.
There might be something else out there, like an Acrobat Reader style OOo plugin, but this extension looks interesting: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Firefox_O DFReader_extension
I only glanced at it, but it seems to send the ODF file through an XSLT stylesheet, effectively turning your document into a web page. It's still in development, though.
It's got nothing to do with a "Microsoft sucks" attitude. It is a fact that this problem is solely based on Microsofts refusal to not only acknowledge standards but also comply with them. But why should they? They have the power to dictate their own pseudo standards and that's exactly what they are doing. Webdesigners have been coding around standards for years in order to enable IE to work properly. Unfortunately, this causes problems with other browsers and users of these browsers are the ones shot in the foot.
But then again, if we'd all do what MS wants us to do (buy Windows and use IE), then there wouldn't be a problem. Considering this, it is actually not the fault of MS but those of us, who don't use Windows and IE.
More likely, the developer made a schedule estimate for IE support, and an estimate for IE and FF support. Then someone decided that they didn't want to pay that much for supporting firefox.
But yeah. Posting this on slashdot is begging for torches and pitchforks, maybe a few lynchings as well.
I lost my sig.
Multiple user accounts? thats way too much work there. What you can do instead is install flashblock for firefox or use opera's built in plug-in disabler (F12 menu> uncheck enable plugins).
As it is, running full regression tests for one browser takes days.
There is no ROI for supporting firefox yet.
I use it personally.
I'm using it now.
I do personal testing of the site with firefox to make sure we are a little compatible but I'm not going to run 4,000 tests for each browser.
It's bad enough as it is now with Sarbanes Oxley.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Annoyingly the first of these reasons is why the Blackberry site won't even tell me whether Maps is supported in my country or not -- the site requires IE for the ActiveX plugin. (It'd be easier if it had a plain HTML page with a list of supported countries.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I was curious about the error message, so I tried to go to movielink, which caused Firefox to crash. Fun fun fun!
I've never ever forced users to use IE. All of my sites I've EVER designed & coded have been IE/FF compatible and more webmasters should do the same.
Have you heard of ActiveX?
When I learned how to use Frontpage, the only other web page editors I had heard of were the one built in to Netscape, and very expensive ones from Macromedia or Adobe or something. At that time, I had just ditched Netscape 4.x or so because it crashed all the time. So, I wasn't going to reinstall Netscape to see if its web page editor was any better than its unreliable browser. Lots of people I knew knew a bit about using Frontpage. Now, I use Firefox as my only browser, except for paying my bills. But I still make webpages with Frontpage, because I know how. Sometimes, those pages don't work in Firefox. But that doesn't bother me, because I know that less than 20% of my visitors will be on Firefox, and it is a lot easier to lose them than to learn a new editor. I could attract a lot more than 20% more visitors by spending time and effort on improving my pages or on working to get them linked more, etc. Is it lazy to not learn NVU or something? I don't think so, it is a choice, a decision on what is the most effective use of my time. If we Firefoxies ever get to be 50% of users, many people may feel it is worthwhile to learn how to make pages for us. But for now, it isn't worth my time. Should a business rework a lot of code to satisfy 20% of users out there? That is for them to decide. Boycott them if you like, or email them to have our voice heard, but if they feel it is not worth the expense, they are ENTITLED to make that choice. And it may be the wisest choice for their bottom line.
... uses the blue e thingy. So, you don't use the internet?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
if i forced my visitors to use IE .. i doubt i would be reading slashdot
---
i have bad karma. i dont care what i say so long as i say it truthfully
---
my sites:
http://mala3eb.in-egypt.net/
http://namima.in-egypt.net/
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
It's just thier way of saying they don't want your business. Take the hint and just shop elsewhere.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
This reminds me of a time my severely pierced ex-girlfriend and I walked into a restaurant and before we were seated, we were asked to leave because they didn't like my ex's choice in facial jewelry.
The same thing is happening here... They're only going to serve the grey-haired, crucifix-wearing, clean-shaven men because that's what they're comfortable with.
I switched to E-Trade from Scottrade because of their explicit support for Safari. Call them up, they'll tell you.
I have not been disappointed and every single one of their features has worked perfectly in Safari for the last year and a half. E-Trade is one of the good guys when it comes to cross-platform compatibility.
To me, this seems rather dumb if the website has anything to do with commerce. Only supporting IE is kind of like opening a pizza shop but only accepting phone-in orders in pig Latin. Yeah, most anyone can place an order that way if they want to, and some people might actually like the silliness, but if I were a new customer I'd probably hang up and not call that shop again. You'd think that anyone who wants to make a sale or keep existing customers would make some simple and almost trivial concessions, but I guess some folks just don't get it.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Web pages people do in MS Word look really horrible, that's one of the reasons. Why would anyone make a web page using Word - because they *have* MS Word installed and it is able to save documents in HTML format, be it hideous HTML or not.
Movielink is requiring IE because they are using an activeX control which is IE specific. Granted they could have done whatever it is they are doing just as efficiently with flash and not required users to click on 2 boxes to allow the activex to run. I personally wont do so unless I really trust the site I am visiting. The best option you have is to emaail their web developers and let them know they just lost $1m for requiring IE.
I'm a webmaster, and I write for IE because I lack the talent to program if I have to use anything more than dragging around purty components on the page. Unless there's a good example. I can ape those purty good!
No. Like it or not, IE is the standard. Firefox is like the "better, but less used" pig-latin in your story.
It would be more correct to say that they're requiring English in the U.S. to order. Note that I said "more" correct, because it's still not a good analogy -- but it's better than the one you offered.
Just because Firefox is better doesn't make it the dominate browser.
Movie link failed my first test: Sorry, but as of May 2, 2005, Movielink no longer supports Windows 98 and ME operating systems. Movielink also does not support Mac or Linux.
In order to enjoy the Movielink service, you must use Windows 2000 or XP, which support certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies.
And by technology they probably mean DRM, or what I would more accurately call anti-technology, for limiting the amount of technology which one can use with the media that they buy.
I fear the Y2038 bug
Y'know, the current version of Netscape allows you to tell it what to identify itself to servers as... Select "Internet Explorer" and an IE-only site will let you in, no questions asked.
/Mac User //Rockin' the Firefox
Now, that obviously doesn't guarantee that the site will actually work, but it's worth a shot in these situations.
The Rhapsody music subscription service relies heavily upon embedded IE to display its web interface.
.NET might be another option to keep browser upgrades from pulling the rug out from under your app.
With such a high level of integration between their application and a Microsoft product, it was no surprise that when IE7 was released, a lot of their functionality broke overnight.
So I've got some advice to offer for developers who might want to include a web browser within a larger application. One, consider Java, because it has some nice features for blending HTML with your user interface. Two, if you know for sure that your app's internal web browser will never view any pages but your own, you don't really need to worry about security upgrades. In that case you could static link in Gecko or something.
Rhapsody also has heavy hooks into services provided by Windows Media Player. Users with different versions of said player have also experienced difficulty.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
That and there is no version of greasemonkey/no scripts to bypass some of their crap in IExploder
In the example you referenced the potential customer was given assets (money) from a 3rd party that needed to be accessed through the site. That means the transaction was 100% gain for the new customer (aside from his preferred browser).
If I am coming to your site to purchase services or products and it prevents me from completing the transaction because of my browser choice, you have a big problem. Preventing me from purchasing your goods is virtually never smart for a business. If your competitors support my browser, for me as a customer it's clear that your competitors are the superior choice for my needs - hence they will get my money.
In addition to providing better service they are also demonstrating superior technical ability from the user's perspective. Fewer technical barriers (or issues) and ease of use (along with good design) will always differentiate a good user experience from a bad one.
Not supporting Firefox and Opera was semi-excusable when those customers represented less than 5% of your potential customer base. It's business suicide when those customers represent roughly 22% of your potential (US) customer base.
Once again, just too many posts to reply to individually...
First off, as it was pointed out already, it just reveals too much about who is reading and moderating posts when the first post of "For the same reason people use IE in the first place: They are stupid and/or lazy." is moderated so highly. It is a clear insult at anyone who uses IE, and just shows that MS bashing is the expected norm on Slashdot. More simply put, if you want your "peers" on Slashdot to praise you and give you mod points, make sure your post is Anti-Microsoft in some way.
As far as elitism is concerned, acting like the MAJORITY of internet users out there should be as "educated" as the above indicated Slashdot MS haters is elitism to an extreme. Time and time again, I read posts that state internet users and computer users should be required to have licenses or certification to get on the web. Again, this is just elitism. Sure, when I started running an internet cafe in New Orleans back in the 90's, I was astounded at the sheer number of customers who could not get their email on a strange computer, regardless of whether or not their accounts were POP3,AOL, or even Hotmail. At first, this generated disdain in me for them, until I realized that the problem was not theirs, but rather mine. Should everyone be able to disassemble a fuel injection system before they learn how to drive a car? Should everyone be required to learn everything about their car (I mean everything) before they are allowed to drive it? No fuckin comments from the idiots who can't deal with analogies. The fact of the matter is that the internet is there for everyone, regardless of their education level, not just a bunch of stuck up MS hating Slashdotters.
So now we come to the topic at hand. Why are web developers still making websites that only work in IE? I thought it to be a convenient response in one post about how the logs that indicate 92% of visitors use IE should be ignored, because THEY don't like how that LOOKS like most users are browsing that particular site with IE. Then the excuses rolled out, like it was a different browser spoofing IE, or that non IE users somehow KNEW ahead of time that the site was only IE friendly so they avoided going to it at all, thus skewing that 92%. What kind of justification crap is that? It is also just as likely that friggin 92% of the people visiting that site were using IE. The fact that 100% weren't using IE proves that OTHER BROWSER USERS WERE VISITING THE SITE! Or was that little fact just too much to admit to?
Now, I don't use IE. I haven't used IE in many years. I get all my friends and repair customers to switch to Firefox. Sure, I hate the fact that it takes forever for Firefox to load on my Win2k box, my XP Pro desktop, and my XP Pro laptop. Having a gig or more of ram in each and processors that are all faster than 2ghz doesn't make a difference either. It doesn't make me want to switch to IE. But it does prove that for the majority of Operating systems in use out there, IE gives the impression of being easy enough to stick with. Sure, YOU might be frequenting web sites that post issues for Firefox, but the masses are using IE, and not having any major problems. Sure, they aren't as educated as to other options out there, or they JUST DON'T CARE. Their computers work for THEM.
So get off the high horses, and try educating instead of bashing. If you know Firefox is better then help someone else see that by showing them. Don't just scream "Microsoft sucks, and you suck for using anything from them."
Or Better yet, design something better and actually PROVE you are half as smart as you claim to be.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
You're joking, right? I like the irony. If MS were the hands-down best in everything they do, one could have little argument to choose another browser - but this is far from the case. So we should bend to a half-rate bug-filled e'er-changing technological whims of single company - just because 'everyone is doing it' - just as they want us to? Please. The only reason MS is where it is today is because it shipped for free with every PC - a move targeting both on people's laziness and the ignorance of first-time users. This is their real talent - understanding how consumers buy computers - not how they use computers. One cannot ask web-developers, intent on finding a reasoned approach to web technology, to bend to a dominating company's 'market values' - especially when their product falls short of all acceptable standards.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Looks like I forgot some irony tags :)
I do use IE. And that sometimes surprises me. I am a developer, and I am an educated user. And yes, all that Firefox stands for is good, and I would support each and every stand that Firefox and the like would take.
However, Microsoft does so much more. IE is only one small little part of the Microsoft world. As a small part integrated into a huge world, I prefer IE to FF. It's just that simple.
For example, I do a lot of programming in HTA's. I think that it's just a glorious environment/platform/API that comes ready with a network engine, rendering engine, scripting engine, and interface engine ready to go. So building business applications is simply a matter of programming the business logic. It's performance and memory usage are obviously poor compared to alternatives, but for business apps, it's absolutely perfect.
And that's because the entire operating system is available. People mock activex controls, but really they simply allow a developer to access anything in the system. I have no idea where to begin if I wanted to integrate a barcode scanner into a Firefox web app. Maybe a simple application, like an inventory system. And some systems have a barcode scanner. Is FF going to let my web page access the barcode scanner? I don't know. But IE will! And with the scanner's native drivers too, or with my own, or with a generic port reader.
It seems that FF deals with security by destroying features. Instead of starting off as a client application, and having access to everything -- like every installed application -- FF seems to start off with nothing, in its own little world -- like every web page. That's a browser. I haven't browsed the web since the days when I surfed the web. As a tool, it simply needs to be more powerful.
I don't care about the FF bugs. And I'm not talking about the maybe bugs, or the security bugs. I'm talking about the rendering bugs -- like contents overflowing it's container, or hidden (display:none) objects not being centered within a non-hidden container, and then not being centered when they are later revealed.
I care about the limitation of FF as a system component. It has addons a'plenty, but it isn't an addon itself. IE is a small component -- very small. Having created my own pluggable protocols -- another thing I don't know if FF can handle -- I'm used to blurring the line between web page and client machine.
So yes, any time a web page grows to the point where it does something interesting -- more than presenting plain information -- it quickly benefits from being a system piece of client software, rather than a restricted web page. FF falls short there. IE starts there.
So, the reasons again are: system peripherals, other system components, pluggable protocols, activex controls. The idea is that IE is on a real client machine. FF is a terminal app that hides the client machine for "security purposes". I guess that means no automatic printing too. No controlling CD burners, or card swipes.
Think of every piece of software that you've seen in your consumer life labelled "employees only". Now that we live in a time where everything goes over the Internet, how many of those can be built on FF? All of them can be built on IE. And I can promise that.
I can swear, right now, that if it a real-world issue can be solved by a web site in any browser, it can be solved by an IE browser. Can you say the same of FF?
Control of peripherals like printers, scanners, readers, burners, drives, keys, locks, turnstiles, IR, RF, and any device attached to the client machine; Control of other software installed on the client machine like remote desktop, and ftp server, old DOS apps, corporate software, and anything else installed on the client machine.
The idea is that there is a client machine. It's only a security hole when a malicious individual comes along to take advantage of it. When that criminal is not around, it's a feature. Now that criminal needs to be stopped, but not by destroying all of the features.
It's sites that force FireFox for no technical reasons, but instead just detect whether you're using IE and display a banner to a Firefox download location if you are.
Making a site IE-only is incompetence.
Making a site Non-IE is malice.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm just dealing with a bug introduced in IE7. This bug makes my life harder as a web programmer, along with all the other quirks and inconsistencies in IE. So yeah, why they hell would anyone require IE?
meh
Isn't it just easier to use flashblock?
meh
By being an internet based movie rental business they're already limiting their market to "mostly geeks" - be that computer geeks or movie geeks (I on the other hand happen to fall into both categories) - they're not targetting "100% of the internet" even if they think they are ... But geeks are more likely to both know of and use browsers other than IE.
Taking all of that in they're probably pissing off a much larger potential customer base than basic math would suggest
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I recently purchased a SRW208L managed switch from Linksys. On paper, it sounds great: 1000/100/10 speed, 8 port switch with PoE and VLAN capability and a nice port mirroring feature. Unfortunately, when I unpacked it and pointed my Safari browser at it, I got only a background colour without any menus. Same for Firefox. I have only Mac and Linux machines available in the place where this switch will be used and configured so its really annoying that they cant get a simple embedded web server to work.
A search of Linksys's own forums found lots of angry owners with the same problem. Unlike Linksys's other products, this one's web interface is written by morons and somehow does not display anything on standards compliant browsers. Their engineers must have worked really hard to make it only work in IE.
I had an online chat with a Linksys rep who empathised with my dissatisfaction but kept returning to the line that 'it says on the spec it works best in IE6'. 'Best'! Ha! 'Best implies that SOMETHING would work in other browsers. After I explained that I am using a Mac, he suggested using their 'workaround' which involved installing 'IE Tabs' in Firefox. Riiiiigght, not quite sure what a Mac is, are we matey? My argument is that it claims to have a HTTP interface. My browser does HTTP, yet it does not work. I want a refund, they said 'no'. This is just total incompetence from their software developers and is totally indefensible in today's IT world.
> Backdoor exploits into your OS? Ha! Try doing *that* on Firefox or Opera.
No problem. Firefox has IE tab and ActiveX extension. They are not installed by default, but it is certainly possible with Firefox also.
Anything else?
True -- unfortunately, I expect the thinking often goes more like "well, many of those firefox/opera/etc. users are still on windows... so they have IE installed, and we don't have to worry about them!".
And counting lost customers isn't easy -- most people won't take the time to complain, they'll just move on. The company has no way to tell how many users they're turning away simply because of the browser issue, and the problem flies under their radar.
In my experience, IE7 is buggy as hell on many sites, and the security 'hardening' feature makes most of the remainder stop working or become an absolute pain. SourceForge for instance is really annoying at the moment with their requests to 'https://', which funnily enough cannot be added to either the trusted or restricted zones.
:-) What it did do was give a lot of people exposure to a single way to agree on packaging information. A really really crappy one, but a well-known one none the less.
So don't be too hard on the web devs, they're struggling with the ridiculous quirks of all browsers that result from the fact we're still trying to make HTML/HTTP do something it never could have conceived of at the time it was invented. Anyone remember how XML was going to standardise information for us all? Funny I thought information was pretty standard already.
The sad fact is that even new ideas in HTML/JS/etc. can't get a foothold against the mass of legacy support that the internet has become, and I'd even guess a fair slab of readers here make their daily bread from that fact. HTML in 10 years? Think POP3/SMTP right now. We're stuck with it, and it totally sucks ass.
So basically, the bugginess is not something new nor unique to one browser, nor is it something I see going away soon. Face it, the internet right now sucks. It'll get better over time slowly just as it has over the last 10-15 years, but it's grown too big for the sweeping sudden changes that let it become what we all saw through Netscape Navigator all those years ago. My hat goes off to the projects breaking MS's stronghold on where the protocols go, because that will accelerate the changes we *all* need.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Quote: "I now always had to download office documents even if I just wanted to view them just like a webpage... just to extract the info I needed."
See below the solution to your problem.
http://www.alcoholicsunanimous.com/odfreader/
Seems that you didn't even take the time to Google for it before complaining.
Also, all of the extra cruft that MS adds to it's product are also a very big problem when a needless feature starts failing and users are shouting out. But I guess you need to be a system admin to know that.
The worst case I've come across of forcing users to use IE is the wireless modem configuration software that comes on the Woosh install CD. You have to use IE with flash just to set your user/pass. I had to borrow a friends windoze box to get online and again every time there is a firmware upgrade. Once set up its okay since I can plug it into a router doing PPPoE.
VT250GPZ750CBR250RRZX10R
1. You do not force users to use IE.
2. You DO NOT force users to use IE.
3. Profit.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
I'll second the sibling poster - ActiveX plugins are the most enormous security hole ever.
I mean, you can mark them "Safe for Scripting" just by flipping a bit. There's a tool in the SDK to do it. Doesn't make it so, and IE can't verify that they are safe because it's compiled code.
They don't run in a sandbox. They are raw, native code, running in your browser process. They are allowed to access files. Hell, they can poke around in your BIOS - Dell has one that identifies your system service tag. Most of the exploits that used to involve hanging up your modem silently and dialling a premium rate number to replace your connection were mediated through ActiveX controls.
It sounds quite a cool idea though, it makes for a rich browser experience, it just wasn't done with any thought of the potential security implications.
Thanks for your interest in trying to slashdot Movielink, the leading movie download service (USA ONLY). Sorry, but Movielink is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States because outside USA the percentage of non-M$-IE users is high.
Instead of coding to a browser (doesn't matter if it's Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc.), what happened to coding to the W3C recommended standards? (Not to mention they're even nice enough to provide some degree of site validation service.) Isn't W3C the place that sets the rules concerning rendering that all browsers are supposed to aim for? Or has it been forgotten about completely?
As for companies being locked in with Explorer, it's either due to short-sightedness or being locked in thanks to some MS VBscript/Active-X tied up product. Which isn't too smart, because it limits cross platform compatability and your customer base.
Actually, Fx and Safari already make up for a large amount of the non-IE market. Add Opera and you have covered all major HTML renderers and OSes (Konqueror shares KHTML with Safari, Epiphany uses Gecko) - except for Win/IE, of course.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
No...that's not cool at all. I would turn that 'feature' off so fast...
Blar.
Webmasters that force IE sould be fired. in ASP.net there is such a thing as a web.config file, where you can use browsercaps to detect and render for firefox, opera, etc.. http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/ http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/browsercaps.asp if you use it, please give credit to Rob (@slingfive) Eberhardt because he did us a great service. cheers
There are no sites that force the user to use IE. It's not like a web site can hold a gun to your mother's head and demand you stop using filthy terrrrrst free software like Firefox. All there are are web site owners who are either ignorant or stupid enough to deliberately make their site browser-specific, and other people ignorant, stupid, or malicious enough to choose IE and hence provide "validation" for the web site owners' choices.
I've seen those messages on websites that offer Mp3z for sale. Which i assume is similar to movelink, whereas they would offer movies for sale (downloadable).
On a related topic, i asked Telstra why they wouldn't support downloading from firefox on linux. They're answer was no DRM.
Its likely the choice of IE is easier for developers and users and in some cases such as above, the only option.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I have been trying to set myself up in business doing the stuff I know - enterprise systems using Sun hardware and transforming systems using OSS. For my sins I have ended working as a casual consultant to a handful of small businessmen and I can confirm that as far as they are concerned, IE is 'the Internet', and it's an uphill struggle to get them to use anything else. In the end I have resorted to making sure that their defences are kept up to date and trying to keep application interfaces simple and broadly compatible in anything that I develop for them, while nagging that they could do things better.
As long as you're using a DOCTYPE, you really shouldn't have any major problems. One of the big issues if IE's 'Quirksmode' that rears its head when trying to guess the DOCTYPE. It makes a terrible mess of CSS standards. Using a DOCTYPE alongside semantic (X)HTML structure should provide a very level playing ground to add CSS to.
1. No one ever get fire for choosing Microsoft.
...and I hate the damn thing. Highly annoying. I have noticed, however, that more and more sites are becoming more "compliant" in that Firefox, et al, work better than MSIE. Of course, I also deal with way too many people who look at me as though I am completely nuts when I mention switching browsers ("What's a browser?).
2. MSIE is the only browser guaranteed to be on every MS OS box.
I suppose that Microsoft prefer to controll an esencial part of the system as the browser than having to use one which is not of the company.
Do you like WM5? Oicangius'blog
i have a suggestion. take the amount of people visiting the site with alternative browsers, multiply it by 0,9 and you can count those as lost customers.
i don't have internet explorer, so i just go to the other sites. even if that costs a bit more. ignorant attitude in one area usually indicates overall ignorance, so why would i want to experience that in case of inquiries or warranty returns ?
Rich
We've never seen that word on Slashdot because you've misspelled it. The correct spelling is 'Sisyphean'.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
At a huge uproar in local websites and discussion groups they eventually turned tail. The core of the matter was they denied access to www.skandiabanken.no if your browser reported Linux as OS.
r /browse_thread/thread/0dbf8be53f1809af/78c055355e1 7f1452
I sent them en email myself, explaining my dad was interested in Linux when he saw how light and fast the XFCE window manager was. just to give them some innsight.
A side notice, recently Skandiabanken was taken over by a bigger company, DNB NOR, I guess they where less idealistic then the original founder.
http://www.itavisen.no/php/art.php?id=361469
http://groups.google.no/group/no.samfunn.forbruke
http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?showtopic=68162
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
This whole conversation just reinforces the stereotype that "technical" people are clueless idiots about anything other then technology... they're even clueless about the basic workings of the business around which their technology is put to use and through which they are (or might be) paid.
Development is not free. Support is not free. These things cost money. Users prefer features for themselves over equality in features for everyone and so choices have to be made. In MovieLink's case they've elected to focus the majority of their development dollars on providing the the most features for the highest number of their users. The vast majority of home users have Windows installed which means the have IE. It's been suggested that they could build a plugin for Firefox... that's true they probably could. Of course they'd have to write the code, provide instructions for using the plugin, support the users who complain because the plugin doesn't work with their software (they're trying to install it into notepad?!?!), etc. If the # of users who are undeserved by their choices isn't that great then they make an economic decision to simply have one platform target and go from their. They save tens of thousand of development and support dollars and focus those dollars on providing the best experience for the majority of their users and making sure they make some profit to give back to the people who put millions at risk to run the company.
Well i am from india and have internet connection and to check our usage we had to login to website and this freakin website forced us to have IE( even changing the User agent field doesn't help ) for 2 years we had to use IE for our account usage and a lot of our users wrote a letter or complained regarding this idiosyncracy and the problem was fixed and we can use FFx or any freakin browser we want........... Moral of the story 1) The users can persuade or arm twist the erring person/company to make the change 2) It is always possible to make any web site compatible across browsers but take a little more effort to do so
We don't force our customers to use IE, but analysis of our web traffic logs show that 97% of our customers use IE.
So only a token gesture is made in QA, to ensure that the site runs well under Firefox.
And so our portal page rightfully states, our site works best under IE...
Obviously the typical answer to why some sites still only work in IE is "stupidity" and "laziness" but it boggles my mind that there are still sites out there like this. It is 2007 for crying out loud!
Just a few weeks ago I went through and updated my "Sites that Make Firefox sad" page: http://toastytech.com/good/badsitelist.html I was able to remove a large number of sites from this list as they appeared to be working in Firefox now, but I wound up ADDING almost just as many new sites to my list.
And my list still focuses mainly on sites that completely forbid Firefox, there are incredibly many sites that have various small glitches (like menus or spacing) in Firefox and no fix in site. And the WORST offenders are corporate Intranet applications. Companies are still "sold" on Microsoft. Heck, brand new "web" apps from Microsoft such as Exchange Web Access, Sharepoint, Project Server Web Access still either require IE or give other browsers a "downlevel" experience.
And the thing that really gets me is that Firefox can be a very good thing for companies - it is available for so incredibly many different platforms and works mostly the same on each - Firefox can help turn operating systems in to a true commodity! Each app that only works in IE (and arguably if it is IE only it really can't be called a true web application) just ties you down to Microsoft just that much more.
well i have loads of karma to burn but i use IE7, i like it and it loads faster than firefox and doesnt guzzle up all my laptop RAM, the font look nicer and pages render faster than firefox and to all you "this is a feature not a bug in ff" crowd, "what a brillian feature" i say! seems firefox came from small and fast to big and slow, kinda ironic
Firstly attack MS by 1) Filing an anti trust case against them, on the basis that their product ASP.net and Visual Studio, only encourages the use of IE and other browsers and hence the growth of other browsers is stifled 2) Avoid packaging the IE in windows ( anti trust case again ) 3) IE is not standard complaint and recommend the w3c to deem IE not to be a web browser at all!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Disclaimer: I am not a LAWYER and certainly don't know anything much about law but i think US law can come our rescue
...because they made the decision to lay some of their people off and outsource the project to Bangalore.
And then they had no choice about how Bangalore decided to code the project. Bangalore decide to use IE-specific coding, no questions are asked because the bean counters on the US side see that Bangalore will work all day and all night, for less. (eventually, more bean counters and 'process' people can get hired)
When you pay less, you get what you pay for. TANSTAAFL.
When Opera IDs itself as IE or Firefox, it still contains the word 'Opera' somewhere in the UA string. That way, if webmasters are checking the stats, they should see that it was really Opera that time. Yeah.
/anywhere/ in the UA string, Opera had to add the Mask As option. When Opera Masks As IE or Firefox, all reference to Opera vanishes from the UA and also from any JS sniffing that's done for Opera-specific items or omissions.
As browser sniffers got even sniffier and started excluding any browser that said 'Opera'
Just yesterday, I tried to get to a GIS database in my state. The site said I needed IE 6 or later. I was using Firefox. So I just opened IE 7 and tried to go to the site (which I have to use internally at my company anyway, but which I avoid using on internet sites.) It still said that I needed IE 6 OR LATER. I guess their devs don't understand the meaning of "or later?" I even tried the user agent plugin on Firefox, set it to IE 6, and tried to go to the site. It told me I was using IE 6, but that I needed IE 6 or later to use the site. Uh, thanks, guys. Way to go.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
i think you're all over-analysing the problem. it all comes down to money. developing for other browsers takes time, and time = money. simple.
sure, there are a bunch of talentless webdesigners out there who simply can't do it. but i suspect in the majority of cases it's because they don't have / aren't willing to put in the resources to develop for other browsers.
I'm not sure these qualify as "necessary" but... Seven reasons IE is better than Firefox from a developer's point of view (not my page).
I've seen many a site like these. I can't normally access them with Firefox, yet when I change my User Agent, and pretend to be visiting the site with IE, most of them work perfectly. For these it is simply a case of them not knowing their sites are compatible with Firefox, and not wanting to take the risk of it looking terrible. The only exception to this that I can remember is Windows Update. That doesn't work without IE.
It boggles my mind sometimes. At work we have to schedule time off and other HR-related things through some sort of all-in-one portal system that they bought into; it only works in IE on Windows, and the reason is that it uses an IE-only ActiveX control to parse a string of XML and transform it into an HTML navigation menu. I don't even want to know what the developers of this application were thinking when they wrote that; when we complained we were told that Firefox support (our internal web-dev department is exclusively Mac/Linux) might be added by the vendor at some point.
If I can't get into a website with firefox I go somewhere else. Within seconds. If your webiste is too garbaged-up with advertising, flash, cookies and IE specific hacks, I don't want my credit card number or personal info sitting at your establishment. If you cannot handle a simple task of coding useable, standardized HTML then I will do business elsewhere. And I do. And you should too.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
This is why.
competent developers always makes sure what they do works with at least 3-4 major browsers, at least 2 (ff, ie).
lazy, non-caring ones, amateur developers or devs who work on tight budget situations choose to skip that.
Read radical news here
I think Sisyphus would make a good poster child for plight of web developers everywhere! Daily I seek meaning in the cruel and unusual punishement of cross browser compliance...
we are all cosmic nuclear waste
> Either way, the developer deserves to be beaten to pulp.
Very rarely does anybody deserve to get 'beaten to a pulp' over technical choice issues. I am surprised and saddened that the parent was modded insightful for the above comment. Only days after 35 people are gunned down by a nutcase with petty grievances we see pre-pubescent slashdotters suggesting people should be killed because they choose to support a particular web browser. I understand that this whole M$ thingie gets people a little hot under the collar. However the whole debate gets rather dogmatic and quasi-religious. Some of the comments flying round fit better to religious extremist websites than a supposed tech geek sites. Tone it down!!
My 2c
KA
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
It doesn't, though: that's the big problem with IE.
IE7 is a lot better than IE6 in this respect, but even in 'Standards compliant' mode, it still differs from what the specs say the behaviour should be, and what real standards-compliant UAs do.
I can't stress enough how much better IE7 is, though. Our IE7-specific stylesheets are typically a few lines long, as opposed to the pages required for IE6, and our internal stats show IE7 and IE6 have about a 50/50 split on IE's marketshare for our clients' visitors, so IE6 is, thankfully, dying quite quickly.
No, they are stupid and / or lazy. The same goes for people that use AOL. There is no way to sugar coat it. They are simply dumb.
It's like the 2 main reasons to use Windows.
1: You are to cheap to buy a Mac
or
2: You are to stupid to use Linux.
Try as you might, there really is no excuse.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Obviously, 3rd party tools purchased 5+ years ago.
Secondly, non-technical people in charge of the budget who set the requirements.
Third, Testing requirements. If you don't explicitly test it, then it is considered dangerous to allow other clients (by some).
Forth, the cross-site advertising method they use isn't compatible with anything other than I.E.
fifth, IE still has 80% of the browser market and they want to target folks that just do what they are told.
Lastly, they don't like YOU.
In some cases (eg the early walmart beta movie site), the check was unnecessary... It'd say you must use IE, but setting Konqueror to report as ie loaded the page fine. Firefox should have this feature.
There actually is XPI malware, it's just not very common.
Until we see a way to embed ActiveX controls so that they work the same in IE or Firefox, most sites that use this technology (rather than Java) are going to fall down.
So far all the ActiveX embedding plugins I have for Firefox just don't work, even if you fake the browser as much as technologically possible to "be" Internet Explorer.
I don't see why it would be a big problem to implement; Mozilla staff may consider ActiveX a security risk but it is NOT up to Mozilla staff to dictate to users what add-on plugins they run. You can't have a free and open API for plugins, and a huge plugin website, and then start saying "you can do everything except this"
When I encounter a vendor that has an IE only site, I send them an email informing them that I don't do business with companies that don't endorse open standards. Then I find another place to buy the item. Many websites are done by consultants, and the folks who pay for these services don't necessarily know the difference. Sending them an email might raise a flag that they need to address the issue.
James
(this is offended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
What I hate the most is when a site requires IE, but then has that great bit of software detection built in that pops up a "You must use IE to see this site" but then doesn't even let you see the site. The best part of this behavior is when they write it for only certain IE (usually 5.5 and 6) string codes, so when IE 7 came out it was also prevented from seeing the site! That was just perfect. Bad coding meets the future. Maybe they should code it so no web browser can see their site and disappear off the web.
Webmaster of the webcomic 'Stupid and Insane Defenders Against Chaos' at http://www.onezumi.com
Not only that but it forces Canadian visitors to get lots and sends us to zip.ca. What? I'm not even allowed to look around the movielink website? Pffft. Idiots.
Question, though: How much code did you have to add to make it look identical in non-IE browsers?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And therin lies the problem.
I want information. I don't care about presentation (ok, as long as the information is not hidden behind layers and layers of junk, as it is often today), give me text. CSS, DHTML, whatever the buzzword of the week may be, I don't care. Hell, drop a Courier 10 plain text only file on me, I'm happy.
Management wants presentation. They want people to see the page the way they want them to see it. They know that more often than not, they have no information, or at least none that would grasp the reader's attention, so they have to shoot up the fireworks. And it has to look stunning in every browser, and it has to look the same in every browser, so everyone immediately associates the page with the company it came from.
Yes, I know that browsers weren't meant to be "equal", nor was the server meant to dictate what and how the client should display it. HTML was supposed to be a tool to format and cross reference information, period. People take it and blow it out of proportion.
Not the first time some technology is used for something it was never meant to be, especially when other, better suited, technologies exist that could do the job far better. Take mail and the amount of "attachments" circulating. How many mails do you get that also reach a few dozen other recepients with some file attached? Aside of the insane overhead for encrypting it to be actually mail-compatible, why didn't it become standard to upload the file to some server instead and send the link?
I think I just had the idea for the next big thing for the Web 2.0 hype...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To simplify, dominant means that the majority, i.e. >50%, are using IE. Although this is an exaggerated number, should a commercial website use this kind of logic to base their decision on?
Not in my opinion.
Consensus, at least in my dictionary, means that all parties concerned agree on something.
You wanna tell me MS agrees with W3C and IE is W3C compliant?
And yes, many, if not most, pages render fine in almost every browser with a market share > 1 percent. But not the SAME. And that's where some managers start to frown and demand that it HAS to be the same or not at all.
Yes, it's silly. I agree. But I stopped trying to understand some management decisions when my ulcer got uncomfortable with that attempts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At least at my company, we started our web app in IE back in '99 when firefox wasn't around. The app has grown so huge that the development/QA costs to allow for firefox would be prohibitive. QA, in particular would be hardest hit since they'd have to double their test load (they already test everything under different versions of windows and IE, adding different versions of firefox would be a nightmare). Basically, it's a very large sunk cost into IE and the cost of switching just is too much.
That said, most of the developers at work prefer firefox, we have to live with IE for development/testing.
Being a website developer, it really upsets me to have to program for Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE. The only reason that IE has the market is because you are forced to use it when you have Windows OS. Most people don't know enough to go and download Firefox. If Firefox was packaged with Windows OS or even Mac OS, then I think we might see some things changing. PS - IE SUCKS!
At the top of this are national chain banks. At one of them if you use FF to register for your online account it gives you a security error message saying you need to us IE for security reasons or some such garbage. Now rewind 10 minutes when I signed into my wife's account in FF which was perfectly fine. I could sign in when using FF but couldn't register. That made me worry, about my security and how little they care about it if FF isn't secure don't let me use it at all. Sure you would loose me as a customer but be consistent.
Whoops. Sorry about that. I referenced the wrong people in my response-turned-rant. I am going to go and lay back down now. This sinus infection has me hearing voices.
Bearded Dragon
The only reason I force IE use for our non-public, work-only websites is because they require smart-card authentication, and the users' card reader software is configured for IE only. My sites are all running open source, Apache, and no Microsoft, yet a Microsoft browser is required!
IE has a feature where it passes the username of an authenticated user on the network if you're in the same domain. This is a great feature for internal apps that I have not seen anyone duplicate with Firefox. Saves a ton of support calls.
Integrated spellchecker and support for all firefox plugins right out of the box, plus cuteness.
anata sekai o kakumei surush ga nai deshou? Anata no susumu michi wa yoi shite arimasu.
I work for a 45,000 employee defense contractor/technology company. At my site we are forbidden from using IE because of security issues and must use firefox or some other browser. Our corporate HR website, which we must use to do our performance evaluations, benefits changes, and other administrivia doesn't work (actually rejects, won't even try to work) with anything other than IE. WTF?
So, now MS has even given up on the Mac platform, IE is in effect a Windows-only browser.
Shouldn't that be:
1: You are to intelligent to buy a Mac
or
2: You are to stupid to use Linux.
America, Home of the Brave.
Thank You! i have always ask that my self. But you used to see that allot back in the old days. Today i don't see it as much. But i think is just because of lack of understanding. Why are you going to limit your website to one browser? There are more than one browser out there. I don't see the logic behind it.
Not A Troll!
How long ago did this happen? I signed up with E*Trade in January of this year, using Seamonkey. I've been following the progress of my portfolio every week since then using Seamonkey.
This is in Australia (etrade.com.au), but surely for costs sake, they'd be using the same back-end software worldwide. Why use a completely cross platform system in Australia and not in the US? (I'm assuming you're in the US.)
I call shenanigans. And for Christ's sake, stop saying "Micro$oft" - it just diminishes your comment's validity. +5 Interesting, my arse. You're just a karma whore.
Instead of using the IE Tab extension, try using the User agent. http://chrispederick.com/work/useragentswitcher/
It'll make Firefox tell the website that it is IE even though its still using the IE rendering engine. That'll let you know for almost sure whether or not the site would work fine with Firefox if they would just let it.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Yes, but developing for your company intranet is one thing. Developing for a broader public is another. I don't care if your company uses IE. If I work there, I'd use IE also. But AT HOME I use Firefox and would like very much if all sites I visit work with Firefox.
Hatredman
I just tried it, and it only accepts US IP addresses. So for a frontierless service, it's already broken!
No. Like it or not, the standards are what the W3C produces - and while it might surprise you, Microsoft is actually a member of the W3C as well.
Your analogy about English in the USA is flawed as well, since English is the standard language in the USA by virtue of being used by *many different* people. A better analogy would be a group of people, one of which has a very loud voice; you might say he matters more because he contributes more to the total volume of the group than all the others combined, but that doesn't automatically make whatever language *he* speaks the standard. And if you now imagine that these people (including the very loud guy) actually all got together to decide on a common language and that while everyone else started using it, this guy continues to ignore it and uses his own dialect instead... then I'm sure you can see why the current situation is so ridiculous and why IE and Microsoft are in the wrong here.
butter the donkey
I forget where, but I believe it described devs who build to the standards, then go through the "fsck it up in the ways that IE likes" process.
Class action, anyone?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The "nobody's getting fired for going MS" mentality overlooks something important:
Most of the world doesn't agree. When your bosses discover that the global market is five times bigger than the American one (I've adjusted population ratio to account for the much wider availability of the net in the US), and that those durn foreigners won't just play ball and buy Office, a lot of execs are going to have to make tough decisions.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
c - customer
p - pointy haired tech
c: I can not open an account with Firefox.
p: Use IE.
c: ok. I'm opening IE now...Hmm, I have an error message.
p: That doesn't make any sense. You should be running IE 7.
c: That is not available on the Mac.
p: Sorry, but you need to buy a PC.
c: No, you have just lost a customer.
I see your example, agree, and raise you.
Employer finds a competitor's website that looks amazing, does everything he wants ours to do, and then asks us to do something similar. We go back and look at the site on our machines, in Firefox, and the site breaks.
Their reply - "Well XYZ Company obviously isn't worried about it; does anybody really use that browser besides you?"
*sigh*
I'm an information-oriented web designer in a CSS world...it's lonely...
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
The one good thing about the mac is that it can finally reliably boot windows, and therefore if mac users need to use our site, they can boot windows on their mac and use IE. Really, theres just no need for multiple standards in the internet world, and it was a good idea for Apple to finally provide a way for mac users to boot windows and interface with the rest of the world.
Not that we ever really missed mac users, they were more expense to support than the return, so every mac user we had to support ended up being a net loss.
First I'm excited to join this forum. I've read these for over seven years, and never joined. Oh well, here comes the comments. lol
Here at work, our company standard is IE 6. Everything has to be accessible from that. But if you opened it up in Firefox (which I'm not allowed to use) it mostly looks okay, but there are some pages that will look as though they went through the blender. On my home projects, I always use Firefox. I design for FF first, then IE, then tell them it is better in FF.
So.
Well, as a webmaster, I'd be happy if I could force people out of IE. But since the vast majority of our visitors are using IE, it's impossible. I can only imagine all the troubles that would be gone in the process!
Heh. I found a page at freescale.com yesterday that actually just closed my IE browser window (I was in the lab at work using a lab PC). I downloaded Firefox, installed it on the lab machine, and went to the same page - and voila! - it worked perfectly. Perhaps someone at Freescale is just a tad pro-Firefox? [snicker]
I am a Microsoft developer. I have worked at 3 different fortune 500 companies building web applications. Even though IE was the only browser installed, by default, on our corporate pcs, we still created w3c standard html. Microsoft's development tools even helped validate our source. In addition, their tools check markup for accessibility and provide localization/globalization support. If some manager or web master out there says only develop to IE, then he better have a really good reason (ie its an intranet site). Nowadays, Microsoft plays well with others... take advantage of the tools available to you and everyone will be happy! Mozilla proselytizers need to stop drinking the koolaid...
At the local university (who should really know better), the housing section of their website throws up this interesting message: !STOP! You are using an unsupported version of Firefox. Only Firefox 1.0 is supported by this application. Please use Internet Explorer or the free Netscape 8.1 browser. I am using the latest FF and I really don't get this one.
I can see by the flamebait mod and the replies that ONCE again slashdot misses the point. I said that ActiveX is the most obvious thing that IE has that helps webmasters solve problems. I didn't argue security or any of that other stuff since that wasn't the point of me or the OP who asked "Such as? What necessary piece of functionality does IE have that Mozilla (or Opera, or others) don't have?". At least I read the questions before replying (or moderating). I also asked were is the OSS solution(s) to these problems? If you all are as superior as your horn tooting would like everyone to belive then there are OSS solutions to every problem that ActiveX would normally be used. The balls in your court. Moderate down uncomfortable questions? Or give some honest answers?
Why pose the question "Why are Websites Still Forcing People to Use IE?"? The header for this article should have read, "Come here if you want to gripe about Microsoft", or "Join us in Microsoft bash session". Give it a rest already.
As far as I'm concerned, forcing the use of IE is a red flag that tells me that the site wants to infect my system with something... With very few exceptions, I personally will not view any such site.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Does Firefox support it yet, or are they still sticking to the "we follow standards" motto ...
...
... thank God for Microsoft innovation, or we'd still be stuck with HTML 1.0, no scripting and websites that look lite crap.
That's all well and good, but some of the web apps I develop NEED content editable, without having to resort to java applets or ActiveX plugins
I'm not forcing anyone to use MSIE, Firefox are, by sticking to the "we will not innovate, we will follow the existing guidelines strictly to the letter"
"Level 3 - The developer realizes all the shit they added to their page when they were in Level 2 is horribly obnoxious, and removes it, in favor of more streamlined pages that load faster and convey information more easily."
There's just one problem with your canned advice. Not all websites are text-only/image-only sites. I know that's a hard fact for the web luddites to swallow.* But the web has grown up and the "green screen" view of the world is inadequate for a world that's creating information exponentially. The only people who will get "left out" are those who intentionally want to be left out, and I don't think the rest of the planet should be held back by those scared of the future.
*just witness the knee-jerk fits here when Flash is mentioned.
With my website I get a lot of flak for not making it 100% IE compatible. Sometimes I feel like I should give in, put part of me looks at it as a subtle protest against explorer, trying to blatently encourage people to use firefox or safari...
that's the absolute worst though: mac users who still use IE. i believe the correct term is, how you say, "WTF?"
and screw 'em. if they want to exclude customers, they don't get my clicks and real green money.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I HATE IE, but as a web developer I have to be practical. Many of my corporate clients still use IE. Over 50% of the world still uses IE in one form or another. As such, I am OBLIGATED to ensure that the work I am being paid for is available for all browsers. This sometimes requires some CSS hacking, but overall, it's simply my job. Like it or not.
Eventually, Firefox and other CSS compliant browsers like Opera and Safari will take over a more significant proportion of the overall marketshare and MS might be forced to finally comply with international standards.
Until then, it is my job to make sure all web traffic is welcome on my sites, regardless or browser, or platform.
Frankly, I've never understood this. It does not cost more to write W3C compliant code. It just requires understanding of what you are doing and avoiding platform-specific code. (And you can do that even if you are using nothing but MS tools on an MS platform.)
My response to this attitude is to ask, "Why are you insisting on a solution that is guaranteed to deny access to a segment of your potential market? Don't you want to reach all of your customers??"
Alas, in the Land of PHBs, that is still not going to work with total success.
I have been a web designer for 20 years. I have hated Internet Exploder for almost as long. Do you really think it is as simple as "I want to design for IE?" It all boils down to two things.
1) IE comes preloaded on most computers and many users never bother to install anything else.
2) My clients insist that everything should look right on their computer which uses IE. My clients (who are paying for the work) say "the majority of our customers use IE so make it work on IE" Then they go on to request all the ridiculous gadgets and features they saw on other IE specific websites. It doesn't seem to matter to them that even if the majority of users are still IE as their browser that by ignoring the growing percentage of other browser users, they are ignoring a huge market of potential customers. There is some kind of mental blindness going on!
Please don't suggest that Web Designers are the culprits for maintaining an obsolete browser. Becasue of IE I am forced to design every website twice, once for IE and once for everything else. It is a miserable waste of my time. I can't stand IE ! You can't even trust it to display code the same way from one version to the next.
In a nutshell, the only reason I design for IE is becasue my clients and their customers insist that I do so. Point the finger somewhere else.
Check this out..
:: sigh :: I go back to the Win 2k install and continue to try to install this mother.. (rather peved now) and learned that the reason they wanted me to use IE was so they could load crap-ware on my system. Their toolbar, and demo junk apps for services that cost up to an extra $14.99 for "verizon games" or some nonesence.
I recently got Verizon DSL and tried to set it up.
Verizon gives you a decent Linux based modem / wi-fi router. When verizon (finaly) got the DSL signal on and the modem was able to pull an IP from them they required me to "activate" my DSL. This is a registration process of sorts.
To do this they simply say go to activatemydsl.verizon.com -- I did this the site says it requires IE6. No problem I say and use user agent switcher in Firefox and set once I did this I recieved a misformed htm document that firefox could not read. I installed the new (and very nice) IEs4Linux packges that give IE6 on Linux. This worked to a point but failed on installing ActiveX extentions.
I have sevral systems at my house..
Linux on x86_64
Linux on i386
Linux on PPC
Solaris 10 on Sparc
In order to get this running I had to install Win 2k in VMware and I discovred that it downloads an application and runs it. I coppied that application back over to the Linux install (just to see if it was possible to do the install on Linux at all) and ran it under wine.. turns out the App uses IE internaly so I copied it over to the IEs4Linux install also. This mostly worked but failed saying the router password was changed from the default. (the very first thing I did) I go back and flash the router but continued to have the same problem.
I guess I could have used Mol to do it also, but I only had Mac OS X 10.2.4 on disk and not 10.3 that they say they require. (Ugg Jagurar is not that old!)
What a pain in the ass that was only to give them the option of upselling me. grr..
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Remember this?!?
s p
FEMA's IE-Only Form: Just What Katrina Victims Don't Need
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1857297,00.a
Well my moderation scores is all over the map, but as I pointed out several times ActiveX is one main reason. Something people here seem to forget is that ActiveX allows integration with other MS (and even third-party) software that gives one a richer experience. Now we could spend all day arguing the merits of such a decision, but the fact is is that's what is happening and pretenting it's not simply makes one look foolish. I'd much rather see the complainers instead of calling people "lazy and stupid" for providing such an experience, come out with their own alternative.
Because it's easier than working with Firefox. When you develop in Visual Studio, IE is the browser in which you debug. You code for IE first because it's what the workflow wants.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ Is this the only company out there that "gets it?" I work at an agency where all of the front-end developers still target browsers. They completely miss the point that HTML/CSS is a specification they should be targeting, not the end-render by some crappy browser (*cough*IE*cough*). I develop all my front-end work to spec and guess what? It's not a herculean task to make a page work in IE. It's a quirky user-agent for sure and some of my sites won't be pixel-perfect across all browsers; but they'll still visually look consistent and more importantly be accessible by all user-agents that support the spec I targeted. It also adds a little bit of future-proofing... user-agents change versions with the times, but can look back in history and support older versions of the spec. So why force people to using a particular browser? Well... either your company has some affiliation with MS in some way or your developers aren't fully educated web developers. I never use IE. Ever. I totally feel for those posters who were forced to by circumstance.
I may have given you sisyphean last night. You might want to get that looked at.
But for a 'pay-per-view' online movie site I can tell you that the word 'DRM' is definately included in the answer. They want to lock down what you can do with the movie, and the idea of allowing ANY non-closed-source code to have anything to do with their site scares the bejesus out of them (or the idea of the MPAA finding out about it does).
Could it be that the awful DRM that everyone is so upset about actually makes it possible for MovieLink to use the Internet as a distribution system. Which means that maybe Microsoft's use of DRM is to add functionality rather than because Bill Gates is trying to ruin everything?
Conversely, we've designed an intranet-only web application and required users to use Firefox 1.5+. We found that the MS Atlas AJAX library's drag/drop features slow IE to a crawl when the user has hundred of drag/drop items on a screen, but Firefox handles this with no problem.
Nearly 20% of the market does NOT use IE. These are commercial sites that expect to generate revenue from their site. Why do they think it makes good business sense to exclude 1/5 visitors?
"My break dancing days are over, but there's always the Funky Chicken" --The Full Monty
Let me break it down:
The web developer, the one actually having to code, is far, far, far down the totem pole. The very bottom.
Stage 1: Everyone at said corporation uses IE by managerial mandate. All sites must work perfectly in IE first and foremost. There are hard set deadlines with pressures to adhere to them. The deadlines are set by people who wouldn't know html or any code if it hit them in the face. Thus sites are designed to work in IE with disregard to other browsers under the perception that this saves time. Though the guys actually programming may rebelliously try to make their sites compliant, if caught doing so they're scolded for wasting time.
Stage 2: It's bad company image to put crappy web pages up. The PR department knows this. They also know that only 5% of the browsers that hit their site are non-IE and only 2% of those actually spend money on the site. Thus, the mandate is passed down to prevent non IE browsers from viewing the site under the perception that even that small percentage of users who aren't using IE are using windows and so *can* use IE. A perception that is in large part true.
Stage 3: Microsoft technology rep schedules a meeting with the guys in suits that have no deeper understanding of technology. The reps toss a demo up of the new features wiz bang .NET web 2.0 [insert string of buzz words here]. Said reps focus on those features that, although pretty cool, are specific to IE and will not work on other browsers. The mandate is handed down the chain that these features need to be implemented in all new sites and funding to "upgrade" old sites is approved. This is done out of a fear that the company's competitors will get the "cutting edge" upper hand if they do not.
Stage 4: After the memo passes through the long chain of people who have no earthly idea what "web 2.0", .NET, or html is it lands on your desk (the bottom of the pile, remember?). Now sure, you can mention to Clueless Manager #1 that the same thing can be done with free alternatives and it will work on all platforms and browsers.....and IF (big IF here) said manager gives a rat's ass he might pass it up the chain to Clueless Manager #2. You ever played that "pass a secret" game? Yeah, well that's what happens when people who have no idea what they're talking about try to pass suggestions up the chain. Somewhere along the line, Clueless Manager #X says "What the hell are you talking about? Just use the Microsoft products. We don't want cheap solutions, we want solutions that work!"
And so another IE only site is born. . .
...not Safari. And until Apple sees fit to put its browser on a Windows platform, that's the way it will stay since neither I nor my employer is willing to buy an entire Mac for the sole purpose of testing stuff in Safari. That said, the site I work on uses tons of ASP.NET and it's not particularly difficult to make it look fine in both IE and Firefox (and by extension, other standards-compliant browsers).
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
They are wicked retards that haven't been hit with the IT clue stick, probably never will be.
Yes, and point taken, but consider that that was never intended for public deployment. It was an in-house call-center app (running on a standardized machine configuration) that the staff fielding the phone calls entered data into. After the storm, there were so many more people needing to put in requests than they could handle, that they opened it up to the public for direct entry.
We (the public libraries) were in a bad situation because of this, since many people were looking to us for access. Lots of web terminals could have been whipped up quickly from donated old PCs and Linux, but this forced a need for Windows/IE on newer systems. Ultimately the solution was getting Microsoft to say "go ahead and install what you need and we'll worry about licensing later" but obviously that's a one-off event.
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
I'm a fairly advanced front-end web developer. Most of what I do is ui coding for websites, I write a lot of javascript, css and some HTML. Many of my clients have pretty unique needs and it seems like every project I end up working on has some particularly unique UI element that requires special handling. If I did not have to support IE, most of my projects would take significantly less time to complete. At one point, I was considering creating a blog wherein I would document every stupid bug and nonstandard implementation of otherwise standard technologies I ran into while developing for IE, but I quickly realized it would end eating up all my free time. I find it particularly annoying that MS has taken some half-hearted effort to make IE 7 slightly more standards compliant than IE 6, but ignored all of the really important bugs in the browser (FIX THE GODDAMNED BOX MODEL YOU RETARDED PACK OF MONGRELS!), so now you have to create workarounds for two slightly different versions of the browsers, that both share most of the same flaws but each one also has its own unique flaws to make stuff *really* interesting. My code contains a lot of comments along the lines of: try { // for standards-based browsers
statements_that_make_ie_crap_its_pants_but_work_ev erywhere_else();
} catch (e) { // for standards-challenged browsers
special_handholding_for_retarded_browsers();
}
and if (client.engine == 'msie') { if (client.engine == 'msie') { document.writeln(''); } }
I used to try and make sites work perfectly in all browsers without relying on code forking and additional CSS docs for IE, but I no longer see the point. It's a shitty hack of a browser, so I code my sites so that they work perfectly in all the other browsers, and toss in IE support as an afterthought since IE users don't really care about their web-browsing experience. I support it because I have to, but if you browse my sites on another browser, you'll have a better experience.
-JoeBoy
Like it or not, MSIE is not the standard. Like anything else MS coughs up, it has many different versions that behave very differently. So, to cover MSIE is in effect covering a half-dozen incompatible quirks.
People I know that still do web applications simple code to standard XHTML + CSS and then add CSS tweaks as needed for MSIE if there are complaints. Anyway, it's been years since I've run into a site that requires or claims to require MSIE. If there are any sites locked into MS, it would be interesting to hear what kind of rationalization is going on in the minds of the developers or their managers. While we're asking, what color is the sky on their planet and how is the beer?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Ok, i'm a little late getting to this post, but here is the deal, coming from an industry insider who knows exactly WHY Movielink forces its users to use IE.
The reason is that Firefox does not support ActiveX, and certain aspects of Movielink's business depends on Windows Media Player and especially DRM updates done through ActiveX. This is the only reason that Movielink, or CinemaNow or any other online movie distributor that relies on Hollywood's favorable position towards Windows Media Player, forces their uses to use IE instead of Firefox.
Trust me, if FireFox actually supported what is neccessary to legally sell movies online (WMP), then you would be able to use Firefox. Historically, the Hollywood studious have only given their blessings to selling content using Microsoft's DRM. This is changing very slowly. Hollywood's policies are the reason for 90% of the public's complaints about legal movie download sites. They are strictly limited to what the studios let them do, not by what their programmers can do.
I find that quite incredible. Of course, it depends on the complexity and markup of the site and so forth, but even when we introduce IE6-only markup, it tends to be often 1% or less than the size of the primary stylesheet.
:)
I have noticed that this amount varies with developers though; I guess there are indeed many ways to skin a cat
ROFL
Look if your going to develop an alternative to the leading browser can you please ... "Support everything the leading browser does FIRST..." then I'll take you seriously. Until then your just a bunch of whiners with a piece of hacked code and a chip on your shoulder.
(~)(~)
Firefox isn't the only browser affected by this annoying IE dependency.
If you're running OS X you don't HAVE a choice of using IE. Well... I suppose you could use IE5 if you still have an old copy, but generally you'll then be told your browser is out of date and you have to update to the latest version!!??!!??
Not too long ago, when looking at the visitor logs for my site IE would always be the most widely used browser, but these days it's more often than not the 2nd most used, and sometimes even gets knocked to 3rd place behind Firefox (usually in the Number 1 slot now) and Safari (showing a growing number of OS X users out there).
Another annoying trend - and this goes hand-in-hand with this problem, is Windows MediaSlayer files being used containing DRM which Flip4Mac can't handle. Some high-profile sites are using WM content with DRM enabled which locks out ALL non-Windows users... totally against the whole ethos of the web really.
Lord knows what will happen when M$ release their version of a Flash-like app. Most likely they'll not develop a plug-in for anything other than IE on Windows, further trying to FORCE users onto their OS to view what should be platform-independent content.
Your site doesn't seem to work with my browser.
Their product only works on Windoze (it appears to be a Windoze-only DRM media site), so everyone else isn't in their market anyhow...
Some mac users use Shiira.
So if you HAVE to have WMP installed to download Hollywood movies, thus requiring IE, then how are Apple ever going to offer downloadable movie content through iTunes? Mac users for one can't view WMP content which uses DRM. M$ have chosen to exclude them from this through pulling out of support for the platform. Flip4Mac WILL playback WMP movie files, but not DRM restricted ones. DRM is just an excuse being used by M$ to force users onto their OS/Player/Browser, end of story.
I am not trying to view Excel documents as a webpage and I'm not complaining. I have a specific program that I use at work that displays data as an embedded excel document after generating the data on the fly with a java application. I have not found any similar programs (odfreader is in version 0.2 and can't be used in production applications) that can be used cross browser. The IE solution is much better and thus the application must be IE specific (rather than re-coding to make it firefox specific). Microsoft has a more fleshed out browser in many ways that make it the unique, *supported* solution for many business applications. Until firefox catches up in that arena, IE will still be the browser of choice for IE specific applications.
I tend to write for IE so that I don't have to depend on the end-user's screen resolution, etc. One of the quirks of IE (the flawed box model) allows me to write web applications that use all available screen space by proportionally sizing all elements while still using fixed width margins and padding. I can't stand pages (much less applications) that are set in pathetic narrow columns, but under the correct W3C box model (which adds fixed margins and padding to the outside of the % width contents) the only way to preserve a layout without adding tons of extra markup is to fix content widths, which means narrow columns for the lowest common denominator resolution (or resizing all content objects with JS on load, but that is really sloppy).
Until the W3C fixes their box model to match the superior IE one, I'll keep coding to IE. Microsoft occasionally does things right, and its not as if everyone hasn't adopted one of their creations before (AJAX)...
I also can't stand that Firefox doesn't allow me to return false on the JS onselectstart handler, but that's a comparatively minor nuisance (false onselectstart is very useful in creating draggable objects from divs).
As you business plummets downhill backwards, remember this: the answer is You'll never know.
That's FUD. If the server logs start noting many, many more hits coming from Firefox (hits that necessarily do NOT, by business logic, become sales) and the number of IE hits dropping coupled with news reports of IE's declining market share, then the "You'll never know!" excuse doesn't fly, particularly considering that knowing the market's choice in web browser is crucial information to a web-only storefront.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
change ur user agent
Stop using CSS for positioning and revert to tables. I even reccommend using tables with nested tables and spacer gifs as well.
No, I'm not trolling at all, even though the sentence above is like pouring acid in the ear of some very, very ardent CSS zealots which frequent this board. CSS positioning will never be easy. It will always be a morass of hacks upon hacks upon hacks that will never look completely right in all browsers. It will always take longer, require more arcane (read: useless) knowledge, and turn previously mundane tasks into exotic feats of dick-sizing-contest proportions. Just swallow your pride and go back to tables for positioning. You will feel better and you will enjoy your job more.
Then again, if you work in a zealot shop ("100% CSS and proud of it!") then you have my sympathy.
(Here come the expected counter-arguments: "CSS isn't the problem, it's the browsers." "You just hate handicapped people." "CSS is the future!" "You just don't want to learn anything new.")
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I have (unfortunately) IE7 loaded on one of my machines, though its not ever used. I have deliberately turned off Windoz Updates, and disabled activeX controls in Windoz and in IE. When you go to the site using IE, it wants you to enable activeX. Why is that do you suppose??? Hmmm... Like they want to install something??? Hmmm... Nope. Not here. Thanks but no thanks. Bye. I'll go somewhere else that isn't likely to compromise me for business purposes...
Firefox users can use the User Agent Switcher extension to fool websites into thinking they're using IE. At least it's a temporary solution...
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
The real problem isn't so much that they aren't developing for Firefox, it's that they aren't developing to the accepted W3C standards, and validating their html/source/whatever. IE allows you to do things that are otherwise illegal according to the standards. Firefox and many other browsers force you to adhere to those standards... Heck that's the point of standards in the first place.
web developers, publicly traded companies, and etc should be held accountable to have equally accessible web-content that is not browser dependent.
The reality is that the user-agent should not be a factor in anything working. If you have an MP3 you expect any reasonable MP3 player to be able to play it... If you have a website you expect any web browser should be able to 'play' it as well.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
*I await the shower of invective*
Please, by all means, do your own research. Bring up taskmamager or top (well, can't really compare IE there)...
I use IE at work and Opera at home. Microsoft dosen't hold the monopoly on "New isn't necessarilly better."
"While allowing the IETab Firefox extension is somewhat progressive"
How is that progressive when I'm on Linux running Firefox?! It requires IE, it's not "progressive" in any way at all.
I don't feel like it...
...and /. crowd are freaks.
What kind of trollish flamebait 'article' is this anyway?
[he dons the 'ignore-the-retorts' cloak]
because windows and IE are great at concealing the fact that i only know how to code in javascript, and i don't do that very well either. netscape pukes over anything i write... even comments. also, security sounds pretentious and boring. webmasters are hip and exciting... why else would they call themselves webmasters?
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
In my experience, there are lots more sites that say that they require MIE than actually do.
I have gone several years now without ever using MIE, and can't say that it has really hindered me at all.
I don't mind enabling scripting in some cases, but in some sites the links don't even work without scripts enabled. It's ridiculous.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Well, a few years ago I was working for an online learning provider, and a number of our courses used a proprietary plugin that was only available for IE. This included our Linux courses, which always made me laugh.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
I am a college student and in an online math course, and of course the damn math course is designed to ONLY work with IE, they even have to be bastards and mention that it not only "Works best with IE" but that it doesnt work at all with anything else, mentioning firefox specifically. If it was a website i didnt have to use, i would have long since abandoned using it.
So they just miss out.
good point. it also has been mentioned before, that even things which seem obvious to them in their base business, are hard to grasp when it comes to other field, but it seems to be an exceptionally bad area.
recently i saw a fresh computer network, which supposdly was made by somebody "with a great reputation in the field". cables were running directly from a switch (which was loosely attached to the wall in a corner) to computers, they were not labeled, server was sitting in a corner without any ups, and so on. the weird thing is, there were no limitations on the budget.
so maybe complaints about bad websites should go to webmasters first, to company management second, if the problem is not resolved...
Rich
You are asking the wrong question. Normally you design a page and than add extra rules for IE, not the other way round.
The uses doesn't care if a padding is 2px off. They don't even know there's something wrong. The only thing they do know is that a page sucks if it tells them to go away or what to do.
... Now I want to see the manager, who tries to make it look similar in Lynx and IE. Because presentation is that important.
What's even more funny about that "most users use IE" is that most users also use text-oriented UA, similar to Lynx. These UAs are called search-bots and the user use them as Google, Yahoo,
These UAs are called search-bots and the user use them as Google, Yahoo, ...
Don't EVER tell the ties about that secret! Please, for the love of all that is holy and good and nice in the world of IT. Do you want to make the life of every web designer on this planet miserable? Can you not tell what damage this piece of knowledge could do to their productivity if this ever falls into the hands of a manager? If this ever leaks to them, I will find our web designer dangling from the lap in the lobby.
And then I'll get YOU to cut him down. Take this threat serious.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Any web designer that only codes for IE should pack their bags! This is Not the way to code webpages. The correct way to code a webpage is so ALL Browsers can read it...period!
While I use IE (6), I code for FF, Safari, and all the others, why? Because I am an experienced, real life web master who would be out of a job if even 1 of my clients wan't able to view their site the way I intended.
"There is still no full consensus over how certain things should be displayed."
SMACK!!!!!!
I hate statements like that. There is a thing called the W3C and they have defined standards. There is not consensus because Microsoft has refused to follow standards. Firefox3, Safari, and Opera follow those standards much more closely than Microsoft does.
I am not a typical Microsoft basher. I will say that my XP machines have been stable and pretty secure for the most part but when it comes to IE... That is one of them many nightmares that they have forced on us.
MFC is another one but only people that have written code for it know that pain.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I wasn't suggesting that anyone drop IE support, as it is certainly the dominant browser and to do so would be just plain dumb. My analogy was poor, since my intended point was that failing to take simple steps to support Firefox is almost as stupid because it locks-out some potential users. I was also implying that IE is backward and using it is silly, not that it is not commonly used.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Well i don`t use IE i use Firefox, and to people that use IE is because they don`t search for another explorer , so they stay what bill gates gives for them. IE is not better that firefox. I think people that use IE are lazy.
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...the project leader did a course on web design 5 years ago (probably one run by Macroslop) and was told Idiot Exploiter was the best and most efficient browser to target for and interpreted that to mean, ignore web standards to favour the proprietory format... ...oh, that comes under the "Stupid" category, too
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1