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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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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?
Making the decision to use ActiveX is a conscious decision to say "We don't care about the tens of millions of people that use OS X or Linux". I know that it's easy to tell your boss "It works for 95% of the world" and have it be OK, but somehow, changing that around to say "I've purposely chosen to block out tens of millions of potential customers by going this route. And by the way, they just happen to be the ones who tend to A) be the most technically savvy or B) have the most disposable income to spend (or both)".
If that's OK with their bosses, fine, but somehow I don't think that particular message is getting through. As for me, I'll gladly take my business elsewhere.
I'm not just part of that five percent. I'm part of the top five percent!
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
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?
Because HTTP is a stateless protocol. When implementing user sessions, you have to rely on extra-protocol information, either with cookies or by including a session id in the url. Cookies tend to be easier to work with.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Couldn't you do what all these other web sites do and use sessions and cookies to track whether a user is logged in and what they should be allowed to access?
I don't know much about NTLM authentication, but from what I'm reading it's pretty crappy. This sounds like a classic case of choosing a crappy Microsoft technology, then saying that alternatives don't measure up because they don't support the crappy MS tech, even though they support much better and more reasonable alternatives.
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
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...
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
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.
Not sure your exact meaning of authentication cache... however if you are talking http authentication (Popup login password window brought on by .htaccess or such) then I know that it can be done with the web developer plugin in Firefox.
Miscellaneous -> Clear Private Data -> HTTP Authentication
It should be a quick trip through their code to find out how they did it and make a little plugin of your own to do it for you.
In fact... while you are in there grab the code that lets it clear session cookies and run that at the same time also. That will kill ANY authorization system they have been in for 99.999% of the web.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
no...no it's not
TFA is about websites which are coded to be IE only.
Any web developer who does not know about Firefox is stupid or lazy.
In any event, there is no need to support Firefox, Safari, IE or any browser at all. There is only a need to code to W3C standards, not to browser-specific hacks. IE's extensions to standard HTML were made specifically to Embrace, Extend, then Extinguish the free internet. Don't contribute to the trap.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
That's reason for mandating IE for your kiosks, not a reason for mandating it for the site. Or is the site only ever accessed from the kiosks?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Do you have to use the billing page to set up an account? If so, that could explain a lack of Firefox/Opera/Safari/... users :)
If I were a customer of your ISP I wouldn't complain, I'd just leave. I complain to companies I like, not ones I don't like. The ones I don't like I waste as little of my time with as possible; I certainly don't help them out with feedback. Have you ever correlated requests for the billing page from non-IE browsers with cancelled acounts? It shouldn't be too hard to work out retention of customers who use IE compared to those who use other browsers.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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
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
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.
"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 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.
"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.
why don't 1 or 2 of you take a few evenings and port the js/css to work on firefox? put it on your qa server and say see? looky, it works, it doesn't suck and now we can stop being mocked.
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.
Nobody here is dumb or lazy.
Yes they are - the boss deciding this policy is fundamentally stupid. If he worked for me he'd have 1 month notice to realign his attitude or it's goodbye. Anyone stupid enough to reduce the availability of a commercial website by making it browser specific doesn't deserve a job in the IT industry (unless he's downgraded to Janitor!).
As a maintainer of a Top 10 website (it's the only British one listed in the Netcraft Top 10), I can tell you that Internet Explorer accounts for less than 50% of our visits right now and has IE use has visibly declined in the last year. Indeed "other" Operating Systems now account for over 45% of our site visits. We will not be using proprietary codecs in future for our on-line programme services.
Game Over, Microsoft!
Um, you do realize that the vast majority of users who encountered that issue probably just wrote off your company and switched to another, right? I use a Mac; just using IE for the billing page isn't an option for me, so I wouldn't even consider using your company for an ISP. I wouldn't bother complaining to you; that would be a lot more work than just finding another ISP. You have such a small number of complaints because your sample is self-selecting; your users are only the ones who would put up with that sort of thing.
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.
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.
User agent switcher
I really hate using it though, because if the webmasters care at all (and are looking at their logs), it just looks like "oh everyone is using IE anyway, who said Firefox is gaining in marketshare?"
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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)
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.