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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?
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
A flame war means page views.
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!
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
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
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!
Sure can...it's very easy too.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
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.
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
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
I use the User Agent Switcher plugin for sites like this. Well, in this case it doesn't help. The page brings up a clock timer/progress meter and gets no further. Bringing up the error console, it fails on a javascript error. And a look at the javascript code shows that the site uses ActiveX (Microsoft.ActiveXPlugin.1, MediaPlayer.MediaPlayer.1, etc).
I beleive there is an ActiveX wrapper plugin for Firefox, though I'd never dream of actually using it. However, even that probably wouldn't help, because a bit further down the page.....VBScript. I'm pretty sure theres no way to get THAT working in Firefox.
In short, I think the page is absolutely hopeless.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Bank of America works...Of course, they're the official bank of the antichrist, so there's that.
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
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
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.
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...
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 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.
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."
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems this is a issue limited to the American Citibank.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
I was curious about the error message, so I tried to go to movielink, which caused Firefox to crash. Fun fun fun!
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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'
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)
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.
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.
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?
hehe, typo. It'll make Firefox tell the website that it is IE even though its still using the FireFox rendering engine.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
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.
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.
Wow! Are you posting from the future?!
I ask because we ought to alert the authorities that Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee didn't invent the worldwide web -- you did.
You see, history records that Berners-Lee created the first web site at CERN on Aug. 6, 1991. So, by my reckoning, you beat him by more than four years!
You remind me of a former boss I once had at a web site in NJ. She was so prone to misrepresenting the truth (she would have called it marketing) that she sometimes believed her tales.
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.
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