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?"

Comments

User Agent Switcher (for Firefox users)

[mackil]

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.

The reason why our company does is ...

[dook43]

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)

Poor programming

[Yobgod Ababua]

In those cases re-making a site/changing it for maximum browser capability doesn't make as much sense as some instructions for how FF users might get round the problem. It might be that they don't care, it might be its actually the most sensible action. In 90% of the "IE-only" sites I've encountered, the problem is not that they would need to re-make their site but that they stuck some "browser verification" script on the front page that doesn't know anything about the capability of non-IE browsers and thus excludes them. Changing the site in these cases is as easy as removing the "you must use IE to enter" code. I usually test these cases by asking my non-IE browser to lie about what it is, and things then usually work perfectly.

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.

Re:Forcing people to use IE?

[PyroMosh]

Doesn't work. I use Mozilla suite as my browser (Firefox just has a slightly different "feel" that I never got to like). The site gives me the "You must use IE" message. So I change my User-Agent string to "IE 6.0 WinXP" through Mozilla PrefBar (an awesome tool for Mozilla or firefox users, basicly lets you change any config file variable direct through the toolbar). When I tried it changing my UA string, the site just didn't load.

I don't know what they use, but it does need IE. Probably ActiveX or some such.

try living in a COUNTRY that mandates IE

[naph]

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...

"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/0,390369 62,39154849,00.htm ...)

Re:Obvious

[Skreems]

Nonsense. I've worked on a number of ASP websites that behaved perfectly under Firefox.

Re:Obvious

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I've never done IE only sites, so I can't exactly quantify the additional work for standard-compliant browsers, but I do know that MSIE 6 (I no longer support IE 5.x) perhaps as much as doubles the amount of time I spend developing a website. MSIE7 on the otherhand, whilst rather poor in comparison with *all* the competition, does at least behave in a predictable manner, and as such, it fairly easy to support. But my personal irritation as MSIE 6 is... well.... epic!

For anyone unfamiliar with developing websites for IE6, basically, you get given (or design yourself) a page layout; columns here, images there, content centred, etc, you create a fairly simple XHTML document to contain the content, you create CSS to position stuff. And I can do all this whilst testing only in Firefox and know that there will be few if any issues with other browsers. Even IE7 which as mentioned, isn't perfect, but at least I know (as with other browsers) that any slight issues can be dealt with later on.
BUT with IE6, it'll throw all sorts of weird and wonderful bugs at you. Bits of content might appear fine as you tweak XHTML/CSS and refresh, but when you fire up the browser afresh, it'll screw up. Or content will appear, but when you scroll the page, it'll disappear.

So I'd be more forgiving of Microsoft if they'd allowed IE7 to run on pre-Windows XP machines since this would allow me (and all the millions of other poor-sods) to drop IE6 support in the forseeable future! For the most part, IE7 is just a bug fixed IE6. At the very least, the bug fixes should've been back-ported.

PS apologies for the above turning into a bit of a rant!