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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?"
I'm going to stress two of those: Lack of funding and business risk.
Our "company face" website is browser-agnostic, but our major web apps are strictly B2B. We designed them years ago, in the first round of ASP, updated it slightly for ASP2.0, with lots of inter-connected controls, and we were never given time ("funding") to make it work across other browsers when some nice cross-browser JS frameworks came out. And you know what? All our customers enforce IE in-house, so we have no requirement to make it cross-browser, and in fact, a major change at this point would be a "business risk" (although God knows I wish we could scrap it and start over--we've had to add so many features that it's a nightmare now--but there's that "funding" issue again).
Although I must add, anything designed for the end-user (where the environment isn't mandated) should darned well better work in IE, FF, Opera and Safari!
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
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
but probably so that they only have to test for one browser's compatibility
That would make sense if they were only supporting IE6, but they are supporting IE5.0+, which means IE5, IE5.5, IE6, and (presumably) IE7. That is already four browsers, and they are browsers that cannot easily be installed on the same computer at the same time, making them even more difficult to test.
I've seen webshytes that are even worse! Not are they entirely in Flash, they display a static image! No animation, no changes, just links to click on just like in real HTML.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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
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.
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.
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.
Or they are stuck using Microsoft Visual Studio on a Microsoft Vista workstation, producing Microsoft ASP.NET applications for bosses who enjoy the occasional dinner and/or trip by... Microsoft!
Why yes, I am bitter. Why do you ask?
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.
...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.
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.
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 wish this were always the case, but I recently ran into an issue when trying to request documents from the Nevada Secretary of State web site. In this case there's no alternative to the official site.
:-\
As of mid-April 2007 the official SOS site only supports IE. As a Mac/Firefox user, I quite literally could not use the shopping cart to purchase certain documents as the site simply refused to work. Clicking certain links did nothing. It didn't complain. It didn't bail. It just didn't do anything.
I tried every browser I have (several in all), and none worked. In the end having no Windows machines around I had to have a friend go through and purchase the documents for me from his Windows PC.
I'm lucky to've been in a position where someone could so easily help me out. I'm sure there are plenty of people and situations where this just isn't practical.
In 1996 I might understand this situation, but in 2007? Coding a shopping cart to be cross-browser compatible just isn't that difficult. In fact it sure seems to me it's actually tougher not to be.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
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?
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.
Not that I consider myself particularly good or in any way a professional when it comes to web development, but I have created sites that lack functionality in IE. Why? Because IE is the constant frustration when doing a site, it never works as expected, and the fact that I am right so many times and IE wrong, just pisses ME as a developer off, meaning I every now and then plays ignorant about functionality in IE.
And what's with the release of IE7? Workarounds for IE6's shittiness doesn't work anymore, but the shittiness those workarounds were design to circumvent are still there. Good job, now I must make three different sets of CSS for simple, basic layout. Almost got a stroke there.
Don't be crazy anymore!
Why do they not waste time ensuring firefox compatibility?
1.) Most software engineers know HTML and JavaScript from learning it on there own, or taking a crash course in it. Unless they have been working with it for a long time, they don't know the good coding practices that allow compatibility with all browsers, however most awful habits work with IE just fine. Unfortunately, not all code that renders correctly in firefox, renders correctly in Internet Explorer. So if you ensure firefox compatibility, you may find I.E incompatibility, which is the worst case scenario.
2.) Good web designers cost more money. And what the company gains is not irritating the niche audience who have to switch to I.E from whatever browser they were on. Thats just not worth it to them.
3.) The things that make the most money are the stupidest. Ringtones, Porno, screensavers, and anything else that they can make a popup for. And the people who spend the money on this kind of garbage are again people who think that the internet is the Internet Explorer Icon. Again, no need to worry about the niche audience.
4.) Considering how fast developers have to make projects live, spending less time getting it to work is more important than spending more time getting it to work good (see Microsoft). Although this isn't ideal, it happens to allow companies to be competitive. For example, Movielink had to get out there fast or see Netflix and Blockbusters domination grow while they ensured compatibility.
It is interesting to note though, that with Dell now shipping systems with Linux or just not Windows, that the I.E. market share could start dropping quicker, in which these will become more of a problem than an inconvenience.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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....
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.
Also, aren't Bank of America the gasbags that are giving credit cards to illegal immigrants?
Websites designed by people who just discovered image slicing and image maps are really annoying. Using one big image sliced up (for no good reason) with lots of links on it does not prove your prowess -- it shows you really don't want your site indexed by major search engines.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
{=snip=}
Kinda hard to do if you have an employer who insists on FrontPage and no other. Have you ever seen what FrontPage does to a site? It's even worse if your web server is IIS. This is the kind of crap a web developer has to work with every day in those Microsoft only shops (and yes, they do exist).
(=/snip-}
I know what you mean. Had a PHB in love with FrontPage. He "helped" us poor coders "build" pages for the company web site. I spent more hours than I care to think about either cleaning up the crap he gave us or just scrapping his pages and rewriting them (had to be careful, though, they had to look exactly the same) so the pages would load in under 5 minutes and work with browsers other than IE...
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.
The issue isn't if we could support something other than IE, the issue is why in the world would we want to? Oh, and those trips and dinners sponsored by Microsoft are apparently pretty good.
Now I'll wait for some smart ass to point out I should just quit.
One thing is certain: You're doing exactly what Microsoft wants you to do. What's odder: you seem to be enjoying it. No matter, to each his own, but I know very few webmasters who would 'impose' IE - most I know spend most of their time pulling their hair out because of it.
With that thought in mind, I wonder if there's some way to calculate how much money IE has lost webmasters trying to make their websites look the same in both IE and web-standards compliant browssers?
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
As a professional software developer who frequently works on websites, webservices, and nothing-to-do-with-the-web-applications, when I'm working on web content: I *start* with Firefox, and thereby support Macs, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, along with Windows. Opera, Safari, and Konqueror support are usually free too, and require only minimal tweaking, if any.
Then I spend a bit of time dealing with IE issues, but since I already know most of IE's quirks from experience I can relatively easily avoid most of them. e.g. I know about IE's horizontal border/margin width hiccups and I design from the start using nested div pairs when I want to assign both a fixed width and border/margin to a box so that IE won't freak out on me, etc.
So far I've never had to exploit a browser parsing bug to get the job done either. Now, I concede that the sites I work on aren't shooting for the most avante garde look, but they're typical of the big websites like Intel, Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, etc. Features of CSS that aren't well supported are simply not used. I have a very light touch when it comes to AJAX use, and so forth.
I specifically elect not to use tools that emit IE-exclusive code that doesn't work on other browsers. THAT, in my experience makes up the greatest offenders; any half decent html guy that can hand-code a page doesn't have a lot of issues with browser support once they've had a bit of experience. Its the guys who are heavily invested in shitty CMS tools and other page authoring systems that build noncompliant pages on the fly; the people stuck using them are largely unable to do jack with them to fix the output.
or write one ActiveX control that services 95% of your visitors
Anyone using ActiveX outside of an INTRA-net should be shot. ActiveX is an enterprise feature, it sucks on the public internet.
business types find a billion-dollar corporation constantly working on security more reassuring than the promises of volunteers who would rather add features than debug code.
Why the billion dollar corporation doesn't want to do maintenance either. They'd rather work on something with a profit margin. You'll notice that IE stagnated for a LONG time once it had more or less killed netscape. It wasn't until FF was starting to gain a LOT of mainstream press that IE started moving again.
Internet Explorer has been around a lot longer than Firefox has
Before there was the Firefox/IE browser war there was the Netscape/IE browser war, and Firefox is the evolution of Netscape.
stop wondering why nobody paid for a thousand man-hours of labor on your behalf
Its only a thousand man-hours if they decide to make it FF compliant (or should I say STANDARDS compliant) if they start at the end after a gazillion IE only pages have been generated using tools that can't emit standards compliant html/xhtml to save their lives. Hell half these tools don't even emit well formed pages with proper balanced opening/closing tags. That they work on any browser at all is almost more luck than anything else.
If one goes into a project with the requirement that it be standards compliant, it takes only a fraction of a percentage longer, and your users can generally use whatever modern browser on whatever modern platform they like.
Note I did say modern -- if you want to support OLD versions like IE5 for OS9, Netscape 3 on NT or something, you can still do standards compliant but you've got use standards dated accordingly, and that will limit your design.
You're doing exactly what Microsoft wants you to do.
Yes, obviously.
you seem to be enjoying it.
No, not at all. It is, however the job that pays for my current lifestyle. The original question was Why are websites still forcing people to use IE? I'm trying to provide some insight.
I know very few webmasters who would 'impose' IE
Gee, my bank imposes it on me. (Heck, they don't even support IE7 yet.) Our "customer" is actually another organization, and they prefer their users having little choice in browsers (and other things). They certainly don't want to pay for the extra effort to support other browsers -- never mind how much that might cost. Think highly conservative here, low (perceived) risk. Decisions are being made by people influenced by Microsoft but who don't have to deal directly with the headaches those decisions cause. In particular, no one from Mozilla or Apache or MySQL have taken my management out for dinner lately. None of the reps from PHP or Python or Perl have flown them to Seattle. Hell, you'd think the guys at the Free Software Foundation would at least buy my boss a beer to explain the advantages of emacs over vi.
But now you think my management are being simply wined and dined to purchase Microsoft Solutions. Not so: I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with ego stroking too.
I'd rather do things right, but this decision is way over my level.
Do you honestly believe there exists a /. webmaster who would require IE?
...)) aren't implemented in that version, although they do apparently work if you use a nightly build of AppleWebKit. So, essentially, yeah, we produce a web site that only works properly in IE and Opera.
And if such a monster exists, do you honestly believe he'd admit it?
I'll nearly admit it. My company produces a web content management system whose admin interface was IE-only in the previous version. The current version adds support for FF, Opera and Safari, although we're considering officially recommending that our clients not use FF with it: FF's implementation of HTML design mode ("midas") is severely fucked. So far, we've spent hundreds of hours working around bugs in it, and they're not all finished with yet. Safari support isn't entirely there on the current official versions of Safari, because some of the features we need (specifically execCommand("inserthtml",
I do understand the 'majority of browsers are IE' argument - that figures in even in a company's financial decisions - but this has nothing to do with the quality of the browser. With the increasing amount of 'other' browsers climbing, there may come a time where a company may actually lose money by taking the 'IE only' option. In any case, companies are already losing money because of IE, because of all the time (and bug research) it takes for webmasters to make a website look the same in all browsers. I'm talking from experience.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
I think that the GP poster meant that older versions of Real Player were so invasive that people lost interest in using it and never came back. I did, but only after a long time and because I needed it to watch BBC news. Then, I had discovered that it wasn't as bad as it used to be (it didn't try to take over my desktop), but I bet a lot of people only remember what it used to be like and refuse to use it.
bang goes my karma... again...
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'
> 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.
Well, he did that because he had *money* in the e*trade account.
I bet that if he didn't had any money to fetch back from there, he wouldn't even bothered calling in, but would have moved to a customer-friendly on-line trader...
I know that I don't even bother writing to web sites any more. If the web site I use don't work with firefox, I just go away, and that's all.
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.
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?
I just tried it, and it only accepts US IP addresses. So for a frontierless service, it's already broken!
Believe me, nobody cares about what browser you'd prefer to use. The decisions regarding where to spend money on a web presence are almost always made by someone who barely knows what a web browser IS, let alone that there's more than one. Most marketing departments (and make no mistake, that's who controls the web site budget) work in percentages. If they can support 90% of the market they're happy.
What I'm saying is that this isn't a customer service issue or a quality of product issue, it's a "the wrong people are making these decisions" issue. Most big enterprises would rather piss off a small percentage of their customers than spend money on something that nobody who matters within the organization understands.
This issue will not make any headway (and clearly it hasn't, how long have we all been bitching about this?) until two things happen. 1: Technical decisions should be made by technical people. That means no overpaid MBA C*O, no Marketing director, no VP-in-charge-of-things-that-begin-with-H-on-alter
It's not going to get fixed any time soon, and probably not at all. The only recourse that we have is to use another company for the services we're looking for and hope that someone realizes that lack of browser choice is equating to a loss in revenue, and that loss in revenue is significant enough to outweigh the additional cost of supporting multiple browsers. Not holding my breath.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
A particularly bad example of websites requiring IE is the current Wayport "buy a connection" page. They use some javascript that simply breaks in Firefox, and will not allow you to purchase a connection.
As much as I'd like to take my business somewhere else, by the time I'm buying my net connection for the night I already have my bunny slippers on and don't want to have to get dressed to find a new hotel.
My bank does it right. They warn you that you are using an unsupported browser and give you an option to continue. I like it, plus that only happens when I use Opera, not Firefox.
Cheap storage VM.
So, I was affraid my bank was stupid, turns out they're lazy.
The lesson is, people say IE is required out of habit, not because it actually is.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
Then you're a tool with no ability explain or convince your boss what the "right way" to do things is (i.e. follow standards that were made without the bottom line involved).
We need less people like you in the tech world and we need a hell of a lot more leaders.
When your boss says no, you say yes. Then you explain why. If, after numerous attempts to make him/her understand they still bathe in ignorance, you retain your integrity and fucking quit.
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...