The biggest obstacle facing widespread adoption of the Firefox browser is lazy programming – not from the Mozilla Foundation but from corporates that have not tested their applications with anything but IE. And this is a good opportunity to remind new OSNews readers about our mobile-friendly site.
Firefox’s biggest obstacle is lazy programming
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It’s not so much a matter of testing as it is of simply following the god damned HTML/CSS/XML/.. syntax. Some people seem to go out of their way to screw things up. “Hey, I’ll put this stuff outside my <HTML> tag so it’s on top” …….
Hmm.
The new eWeek, main cover, says Firefox Sizzles. It says the only thing that keeps it from wider acceptance is IT and IE inertia.
Where I work we have the opposite – we develop standards compliant websites using Firefox, then later we find that MSIE6 renders stuff funny – it has useless CSS support.
Frankly, we need html compilers for immediate error checking. A html2dvi compiler would be KILLER; especially if W3C produced it.
If anyone knows of this, please tell me cause I’d love to have it.
Microsoft should release a new version of IE which follows the W3C specs, and this way it’ll break everyone’s web pages that were coded outside the spec. I think the programmers will stop being lazy then. And maybe people will wake up and smell the coffee about Microsoft’s gross disregard for standards in computing.
But I don’t blame programmers, I blame Microsoft, and that’s the damn bottom line. If I claim I’m implementing a web browser, and I push it into 90% of computer users’ PCs, then I had better well have developed a web browser. Microsoft’s IE isn’t a web browser, not while “the web” is defined by the W3C. Microsoft’s IE is a “Microsoft Internet” browser, an internet where standards are defined by Microsoft.
We are only so lucky in that Microsoft based their standards loosely on the W3C ones. That’s why many pages work with Firefox anyway.
Microsoft has the lazy programmers. They don’t even seem to be trying to fix things like CSS support or PNG Alpha transparency.
w3c already provides a really good HTML validator on their website. This site, for example, does not pass.
Just remember that when MS was really pushing IE, it had better standards support than did the 4.x series of Netscape. Netscape was the first to really stray from standards with all their NS only tags.
Of course, I completely agree that MS has gone limp with IE as of late but they’re weren’t the only company who thought the web should go in a certain, proprietary direction.
Let’s hope this is where the new Firefox-based Netscape can step in. (I’m officialy testing it these days and its already quite good for a pre-beta)
Truth is, if you’re paying people to write code to work with browsers, you don’t have much of an incentive to spend money paying them to write code for a browser used by a tiny fraction of your market. It is a financial decision: If it costs more to develop for and support Firefox than you’ll make from selling that product to Firefox users, then you have no reason to develop for Firefox.
As for standards, as long as people are scrambling to be compatible with them, MS is in the catbird seat. Why should they care about someone else’s standards if that isn’t going to make them any money?
That’s the way things are, right now. I’d rather they were different, but they won’t be until Firefox grabs a much bigger piece of the browser market.
Lazy programmers, huh? Let me get this straight: they developed their websites for the browser that had close to *100%* penetration, and they’re lazy?
That’s like calling programmers who develop win32 apps without linux ports lazy. Or authors in the United States who write novels in English but don’t translate them to Spanish.
Come on – targeting the 95% case isn’t called lazy, it’s called good business sense.
It’s not lazy, it’s business. Return on investment, that’s where it’s at. It’s a lot cheaper to code for IE because everybody’s got it, everybody knows it, and it works with sloppy code. We are hear to make money, not win some award for writing the most beautiful code. Until it’s as easy to develop for mozilla as it is for IE, we are IE only. If you don’t like it, don’t do business with us.
My solution is a little bit radical but works. We all know that good webmasters made their sites with the standart in mind and then test it in IE and make the needed workarounds. But these are not always possible. So what I did was to block every IE browser and display a message to change their browser. They could not enter the site with IE. This is a rather radical approach and I admit it will not work for every case. But I’m ready to make all my sites restricted to IE and imagine every possible knowledgebable webmaster do the same. Then the IE users will pay attention and use another browser. If only MS could just make their browser standart compliant, then we wouldn’t need to do such things. On the other hand, I’ve installed Firefox on all computers which I have access and disable internet access for IE through the firewall
Cheers,
gamehack
I have been playing with firefox on suse. Even OSnews pages display much more narrow than in IE. I guess I could just have it set up wrong.
@businessman
Because of people like you, the world uses the most buggy browser in the universe… So you’re writing IE code day and night… because of the f****** money… so you can eat in a better cafeteria. Great! I just cannot understand this… can someone explain it to me?
Well it depends on your point of view… if you’ve been living in the dark for 10 years and then see light, you will think that light is bad, aren’t you? But if you’ve been living somewhere where there’s no light and suddenly everything goes pitch-black you’ll think that the night is bad, aren’t you? Everything depends on your starting point of view…
Cheers,
gamehack
A lot of comments are missing the point of the article that a lot of places build *internal* apps for *intranets* and have no reason to support browsers other than the one they get for free from the company that sells them their OS and their servers. They support IE and IE only and use things like activex that only IE supports. The article oddly doesn’t even mention activex. As much as I absolutely *despise* the new Netscape “prototype”, it may be of some use to places that have MS dependant apps they use only internally.
Did we already forget places like IBM not being prepared to allow XP SP2 because of the changes to IE6?
This artile is not about whether or not companies are coding their public websites properly.
Here’s the explanation: Most people work for a living. The more they’re paid, the better off they are. When the choice is between spending money to write for a browser that, perhaps, 5 percent of the market uses or write for a browser that 95 percent of the market uses, the decision is obvious.
It is the same reason you can’t buy spreadsheets to run on DOS. Or seatcovers for your Edsel.
Why should businesses choose to put themselves out of business by abandoning 95 percent of their market?
It’s not about them writing for 95% of the market or 5%; they should follow the standards. The W3C have described how HTML should be written pretty clearly; people choose to ignore this and use IE-specific stuff.
When you’re writing to standards, IE’s more work to support than Firefox (because Firefox just gets it right), but you at least know you’ve done your job properly – nobody’s being excluded because they can’t get IE.
I’m not talking about abandoning the market… I’m talking about trying to develop the sites with the standarts in mind…. It’s obvious to me that it’s obvious to target IE because of the market share, but if everyone is just doing this, what are the other browsers going to do? Probably trying to copy MS’s cool html+css standart and implement their hacks?
Cheers,
gamehack
@gamehack please explain
Sure, money buys food and food allows my kids to grow. Money buys a house and a house keeps my kids heads dry. Money biuys clothes and clothes keep my kids warm. It'[s a practical approach to living.
@archangel It’s not about them writing for 95% of the market or 5%; they should follow the standards. The W3C have described how HTML should be written pretty clearly; people choose to ignore this and use IE-specific stuff.
There is the official standard, and then there is the practical standard. For most people MS is the standard and the w3c is just standing in the way of having a consistent internet experience for all users by insisting on an official standard that breaks sites in IE. w3c should just adopt IE as the standard and stop pretending there is a big enough market for people that care about stuff like this.
Another major obstacle in the way of corporate adoption of Firefox is its (current) unfriendliness towards centralised distribution and management in Windows networks. They need:
* An *official* MSI distribution and a tool to create MST transforms; and
* Either a set of Mozilla GPO policies _or_ Firefox to use the existing browser-related settings that can be configured with the default GPOs.
The prognosis for any Corporation or Organization developing ‘websites’ based on a mere 5% of the market share is pragmatic at best. One has to realize the facts based on Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer. With 95% of the market share, and a broad developer community it is best to stick with what works. Presently, IE has the upper hand and will continue to do so, since Windows is the dominant operating system of choice. Until then, the 5% minority should not and will not influence overwhelming support for Internet Explorer.
Standards exists because if everyone follow them we can have multiple implementations with the same results.
That’s all.
If a company break standards (even if it has 95% of the market) it doesn’t mean that you have to follow that company, stick to the basic standard (i’m sure you can do a useful website using standard coding that works on every browser, in fact most part of the internet work this way) and everyone is happy. As usual, look at the porn industry, porn websites are “cute” and work in every browser, keep in mind, porn is always ahead in the intrnet…after all i think the real reason for the internet existance is free porn
IE is the standard….. w3c stuff aren’t standards since the majority of web browsers don’t necessarily follow them 100% completely…
whatever is the majority is usually the standard….
Every pro IE person here talks about this 95% market share of IE and that it’s stupid to target the 5% in stead of the 95%.
They are forgetting, however, you can also target 100% in and just if you follow the standards. It’s untrue that a website designed for a webbrowser that will only allow the w3c standards to render correctly, won’t for sure work on IE.
It’s, however, true that IE breaks a lot w3c standarized things. Which might result in unreliable designs, rendering of your pages etc etc on IE. But this is a ‘might’ and it’s easily ‘possible’ to make things work on both browsers.
Therefor it’s not or 5% or 95% market share for both 100% of the costs. It’s 100% market share for 101% of the costs. Or 95% market share for 100% of the costs.
A business that choose to abandon 5% of it’s customers just to save 1% on their website development, ain’t smart.
I’ve been having a blast for the past few months using Firefox to browse the web. It had proven to be very secure; so secure that I had become rather lazy. I just laughed at my friends who were stuck in advertisment hell and happily clicked along. It started to remind me of the good old days when the www first came to existence. Firefox was such a pleasure to use that it got me to put my guard down. I was so confident in it that I even started surfing the web with administrator rights.
Then the strangest thing happened today. I visited a sight and got infected with tons of spyware. I was shocked. Maybe I clicked a little too fast and didn’t bother to check what I was clicking on, but I didn’t expect Firefox to be susceptible to this. I cleaned up my system. I then made a guest account and visited this same website again. Well, the good news was that as a guest user on my system, it wasn’t able to do as much damage. The bad news is that there still were quite some spyware installed in high privileged areas on the system. I scratched my head and shuddered with my realizations: Windows is not very secure locally and it doesn’t matter that Firefox is more secure because there is some fundemental design flaw in how the browser interacts with your computer.
Have you ever seen any standard be developed by a single company?
Then what was IBM/Intel doing for 20 years?
As much as I would also like to see more and more pages being 100% standard compliant this won’t happen for quite a long time (IMO). The “new” Netscape might help promote that because it has a reputation to build on. Firefox is still pretty much unknown to the general public, though you have to admit they are trying hard.
Firefox isn’t as innocent as people might belive. Try the pages below. NOTE: those are just a couple I bookmarked, there are a lot more (serious) examples around.
NOTE #2: Both of these pages validate as 100% XHTML Transitional and XHTML Strict. To your surprise, they don’t work correctly in Gecko, but do in IE.
http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/test/test_trans.htm
http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/test/test_strict.htm
Do we really need to discuss the value of standards ? If so, maybe we should decide that a foot equals the length of Queen Elizabeth II limb. We could also decide that we are not in 2004 but in the nth year of the reign of monarch X. History has shown us that the “designed for Internet Explorer” mantra is stupid, period. So, I suggest we quit arguing about this nonsense.
The W3C have described how HTML should be written pretty clearly; people choose to ignore this and use IE-specific stuff.
The W3C provides specifications and recommendations which have been coined by practitioners as “standards” when they are not precisely standards, but de facto standards. ISO, for example, is a standards organization with a full compliance set that if not met – well, products don’t ship, period. With a true standard, compliance is mandatory. With de facto standards, if you don’t follow the standard that’s fine.
Microsoft left W3C some time ago http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/03/21/HNdepart_1.html , Microsoft does not care about W3C web standards. They know that they are large enough to influence the computer industry any way they wish and they don’t have to play with anyone else if they don’t want to. It is sad really, I wish the U.S. Government could do something about a blatant monopolist, but hey I guess money is more important than upholding principles of the Sherman Antitrust Act (and subsequent acts) and making a capitalist democracy work.
In my web design class this past spring we only descussed using MS, Netscape and Safari. So it’s not only cooporates, but edu also. I use firefox and it works exellent.
Yes, it’s actually interesting that there are still so many websites that support “IE and Netscape”, when Netscape has been more or less dead for a very long time, almost irrelevant, and Mozilla/Firefox are increasingly popular and will soon reach 10 % of the market share. The inertia and ignorance is incredible. I wonder how many more % for Mozilla/Firefox will be needed for these fossil “companies” who still live in the past century to notice that supporting Netscape with its 0% market share and not supporting Mozilla/Firefox that’s so much more relevant and popular today is nonsense.
I’ve seen it time and time again…
A business takes the quick and dirty way out… they use all Microsoft tools to get their intranet put together. Any slack-jawed pencil pusher who can work Word is put into action creating online documentation for other employees.
Now, try to come along later and modify that documentation. Well, the code is crap, so you can’t just modify it, you have to start from scratch and have another slack-jawed pencil pusher retype all of the documentation, or just copy and paste all day.
Are these businesses doing something magical with their intranet that you can’t do with standards-oriented HTML? No. They just want what looks like the cheap way out. So instead of getting people who know what they’re doing to put together a system that will stand the test of time, they end up spending hundreds of thousands reworking documents that should never have been so hideously flawed in the first place.
Now, try to come along later and modify that documentation. Well, the code is crap, so you can’t just modify it, you have to start from scratch and have another slack-jawed pencil pusher retype all of the documentation, or just copy and paste all day.
But the slack-jawed pencil-pusher is half the cost of the guy that can hand code pretty html docs. It is a pure dollars and sense decision based on cost benefit.
Even the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web thinks people who use MS products to force the shoddy IE standards on the world is a stupid thing to do.
Apparently, the people who design pages for IE don’t know jack shit about making webpages. All they know how to do is cobble up some type of lame ass page made with an idiot proof MicroSoft product!
“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
even so, this website renders perfectly fine in every browser I have ever used on any OS
so far…
(amiga, dos, beos, mac, windows, linux, palmOS, etc)
Which just proves the point that no web browser is stricly following the W3C standard?
btw: Google’s browser (rumors say it’s based on gecko) should push the ‘standard’ a little further to lazy web designers. People sure love Google.
@matej.barac
Huh? Both those links seem to render identically for me in Firefox 1.0 and IE w/SP2. What difference am I supposed to be seeing?
Check the lower side of the left/upper <div> on strict.
This is probably the biggest problem accorss the board. There are some open source projets that attempt to solve a very important problem but fall short because the developers didn’t spend enough time refining their work. Or proprietary programmers not paying enough attention to proper security practices or proper standards and a clunky product is born unto its poor users.
Standards are set by what is used the most, not by what some self-gratiating brain-trust tries to say it is.
Coders will continue to write pages for IE so long as it has the dominant market share – Those who do not code for what the majority of the public uses deserves to go the way of Betamax or Micro Channel. These other browsers want to make a REAL dent in IE, they should code for IE compatability! Quit wasting time on some alleged ‘standard’ that may or may not be adopted, sees almost yearly revisions (how many different combinations of doctype and meta strings are there now?!?) is cryptic beyond need, is inept in backwards compatability and makes almost 100% of ‘valid’ HTML3 code invalid.
Of course, the more I work with CSS the more and more I am amazed at how often it seems things that work in IE on EVERY tag, like width, is ignored on ‘more compliant’ browsers like gecko or opera. It’s a object model – one of the points of objects is inheritance and common properties – it would be NICE to see it actually used as such.
Not that CSS or the DOM have any REAL provision for inheritence in the first place. Object model my @$$.
How lazy can you be when your already working with html/css/dhtml/xml? Come on this isn’t PPC Assembly.
It’s the W3C that define the standards/recommendations that guide what markup browsers can/should understand. Granted, some do a less than perfect job, and others add their own ‘features’ to their browser’s engine. Coloured scrollbars in MSIE is the perfect example.
Before I start, I am a web developer in an MS only shop. At home I use Linux. Wherever I am I use Mozilla. Wherever possible I use W3C compliant code. However the applications that I work on use M$XML/JavaScript to pull/render information from the database. I have no say in it. To rewrite it would take thousands of man hours, time and money that is not available.
I am all for W3C standards and OSS. Management know this. The product architects know this. Only Thursday did I convert the lead QA/tester to FireFox (I use the Mozilla Suite myself).
If I am writing a product/site from the ground up, I would go 100% W3C all the way. It is fairly easy to develop a site that looks and works virtually identical in MSIE & Mozilla. I did this with XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and now XHTML 1.1. Any semi-competent web developer can do this.
Microsoft have a less-than-honourable track record. Granted, they have the majority, but a company who’s sole goal is OS (and browser) dominance and the “bottom line” should not be in charge of standards and their direction. A democratic system where submissions and proposals are commented/voted on is a much better way to go. Freedom of browser choice is only possible when the standards are developed by those without bucketload$ of money to gain.
My 2 cents.
But the slack-jawed pencil-pusher is half the cost of the guy that can hand code pretty html docs. It is a pure dollars and sense decision based on cost benefit.
That’s a lovely argument… and it’s why this happens. The problem is that the pencil pushers spend 3 times (on average in my experience) as long slogging through the work.
Plus there’s another cost to doing things this way. You not only pay more to get the work done and get a worse result, but you take people who do have a skill and take them away from what they do well. They’re doing someone else’s job poorly, and while they’re doing it, their job isn’t getting done.
Deathshadow’s hit the nail on the head regarding standards. The W3C standards aren’t worth the hard disk space they take up to consumers and they won’t affect browser adoption or choice except among W3C worshippers. MS HTML and CSS are the defacto standards – consumers have chosen them and consequently websites are written for them.
Here’s a quick a quick history lesson to the open source and W3C goldfish. In 1995 Netscape’s bastardised version of HTML was the standard. Consumers chose it and most web sites were written for it. MS won the browser war over the following few years by making IE compatible with bastardised Netscape HTML, not by whinging about standards and dobbing those naughty Netscape boys into the W3C. The Firefox crowd aren’t going win people over by throwing tantrums every time they find a website written for IE (the defacto standard) – they need to make Firefox compatible with those sites.
What annoys me is how very true this is. I work for a gaming website and currently and responsible for just their backend code along with server (game servers as well) maintaince. The backend was coded by the guy before me who was just a college age kid who didn’t understand anything at all about how the real world works and got fired because of it. So I get handed all his backend code, coded in semi-sloppy PHP 4 mostly OO. The code strictly works for IE only. All the javascript and DHTML displays correctly on IE… ONLY! When it was coded he asked if coding it for just ie would be okay since he just uses IE and it ‘would be faster and easier’. So he did that, a year later everyone in this company uses firefox… most of the people don’t even own PC’s anymore, they own macs!
So because this kid decided in the code design phase to write it half assed, I gotta spend a month now rewriting chunks of it as I find it and hunt out the chunks I’m mostly likely missing. Can we say pain. Yes.
</ramble>
and yea FF is winning over more people then they know. My mother is starting to use it, without my suggestion to do so. She downloaded and installed it and loves the tab’s and lack of popups + ‘issues’ ie has given her in the past. The project seems to being paying off, finally.
not everyone owns a pc with windows ie on it
following standards makes it hella easier for other browsers to read the site correctly
ie is a monopoly tool
It’s not okay to let Microsoft redefine standards just because they’re big. They exist for a reason; because then everyone knows how things work. A website written in fully compliant HTML/XHTML renders damn near identically in almost every major browser now – IE is the only exception, and there’s generally a workaround that will stay within compliance.
Whereas if you write in IE HTML, it will only work in one browser and on one platform. Which is the majority sure, but it’s under 90% last time I heard – and it’s going down. At what point does it become an issue – and if a site’s done in IE HTML, and in five years time IE is at 50%, then it’ll have to be swapped over.
Admittedly most sites would be redesigned by then anyway, but there’s often legacy code etc to be saved.
Do it once and do it right; it costs less in the long run.
HTML4/XHTML are better anyway; Deathshadow mentioned the width attribute. It’s gone because it should be done in stylesheets now; they have a massive advantage in that you can specify it once, site-wide. This is simply not possible using width attributes, at least without aggressive server-side scripting which is just silly.
As far as I’m concerned there are a few things IE HTML can do that normal HTML can’t; these simply aren’t worth the hassle of breaking the site for others. Imagine writing a whole site for IE then having the clueless boss ask why some irate customer can’t use it a year later…
I scratched my head and shuddered with my realizations: Windows is not very secure locally and it doesn’t matter that Firefox is more secure because there is some fundemental design flaw in how the browser interacts with your computer.
How true. The OS should stop these things from happening. So far, the only OS where this can be prevented would be Linux with SELinux turned on using a well tuned security policy.
The funniest part about all this so-called ‘standards’ pushing is that the first wide spread browser to break them was Netscape, and then suddenly everyone else was wrong. So everyone has to match Netscape’s quirkiness. And what is Mozilla’s original base? Netscape.
IE was based on Spyglass which was built to the ‘standard’, which had to be ‘broken’ in order to match the ADOPTED STANDARD. Funny how the wheel turns.
Then we have the W3C which seems to enjoy ignoring what the industry has already adopted and making their ‘standards’ break the majority of pages. Funny, how if it was MS doing this and breaking the adopted industry standard, everyone would be up in arms and bitching.
Here’s a sad fact for you: The W3C is NOT the industry standard.
I may use FF, but if I made a page, it bloody better well work properly in IE. Your crap is as good as useless if it doesn’t work on the majority of implementations.
Why is MS in such a ‘monopoly’ position? Because they made suse their browser didn’t go around breaking existing implementations everywhere, and this why customers keep going back to MS – because MS go through great lengths to make sure YOUR stuff works.
If MS fixed something but ended up having to break your application, you’d all start whining like little babies. Want proof? See XP SP2.
The only standards being pushing forward by the so-called ‘standards’ evangelists are the double-standards against IE and MS in general. Just shut up, stop crying and make your application AT LEAST have graceful backwards compatibilty.
It’s very tempting to say standards are what’s most popular, until you realize that there are reasons for standards, and often those reasons get lost when implementations rely on “popularity”.
The W3C is not a “self-gratiating brainue to write pages for IE so long as it has the dominant market share – Those who do not code for what the majority of the public uses deserves to go the way of Betamax or Micro Channel. These other browsers want to make a REAL dent in IE, they should code for IE compatability! Quit wasting time on some alleged ‘standard’ that may or may not be adopted, sees almost yearly revisions (how many different combinations of doctype and meta strings are there now?!?) is cryptic beyond need, is inept in backwards compatability and makes almost 100% of ‘valid’ HTML3 code invalid. trust.” The W3C (Tim Berners-Lee & Co.) defined the standards that let the web work, today. It’s only because TBL & Crew made web standards the way they are that we all aren’t stuck with some proprietary binary format (“MSWEB” or something) instead of HTML on most websites. It’s only because of the original insights there that the web is as successful as it is.
I’m sad to say that the standard for word processed documents is MS Word, the de facto standard (and therefore, by your count, the only standard). But guess what, it’s a binary format. That’s why we in Linux world are stuck reverse engineering Microsoft’s “standard,” and that’s why MS Office receives little serious competition since the #1 FAQ for a new user is “Will it read my old files?”
If the W3C had come up with a RTF-like format for document exchange, I’m sure we’d be in much better shape. More freedom for users, probably more innovation on the web (since MS Word files are practically unindexable, the self-gratiating brain trust I’m sure would have come up with a more structured and somewhat-plain-text-readable format, like the XML format Abiword uses)
But hey, let’s just listen to you. Standards are what’s popular. So let’s just let proprietary standards lock us in to shoddy software all our lives. Hooray.
I do not know what happened to the first part of my comment. I think I must have pasted by accident… oh well, I shoulda previewed.
I cleaned up my system. I then made a guest account and visited this same website again. Well, the good news was that as a guest user on my system, it wasn’t able to do as much damage. The bad news is that there still were quite some spyware installed in high privileged areas on the system.
Please define “guest user” more clearly (which groups were they in ?) and what you mean by “high privileged areas on the system”.
I scratched my head and shuddered with my realizations: Windows is not very secure locally and it doesn’t matter that Firefox is more secure because there is some fundemental design flaw in how the browser interacts with your computer.
Sounds like another example of user error to me.
Perhaps, but at least realistic. I used beta and Micro Channel for a reason – both WERE in theory superior to their competitors (VHS and ISA/VLB respectively)… Although in my own mind I more think of the W3C’s standards of the past five years to be closer to EISA in relationship – Too complex for it’s own good.
Of course, what I’d like to see out of a browser is somewhere between IE. One of the biggest shortfalls in IE is not that it renders pages ‘wrong’ it’s that it will render ‘wrong’ pages well without error. It handily displays poorly coded pages extremely well by virtue of a very good bug engine. Common sense stuff like if you hit a </tr> before a </td> automatically do a </td> – NOT CORRECT, but makes sense… Of course, it would be nice if it TOLD you it did this, hence the problem. It is very hard to make IE generate an error forming a page by leaving out a closing tag.
The Gecko engine and most others on the other hand get so confused by this simple mistake so as to go into apoplexy, crashing javascripts, screwing up CSS, and giving you no indication of where the error even is. XHTML and the W3C’s validator is your only salvation there, unless of course you are using javascript or DHTML to build the page in which case you’re boned.
Would it be that hard to A> have error correcting like IE and B> actually REPORT these errors?
XHTML/HTML4 always looks to me like mental masturbation. Making tags that worked FINE in HTML4 in everything more complex, larger, and for no functionality… Oh yes, I’m really going to put content inside of <img></img> or <hr></hr>… Yes, I want a link to the W3C’s website as the first line of every single HTML file I make, sure I do (dripping sarcasm). That one right there should be big indicator of the overinflated egos at the W3C.
The W3C has gone from three people with good ideas sitting at a table (Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly, Karen Muldrow) to design by committee – Splitting a philisophical hair? Not when you see the result which makes C++ look outright legible and hand-coding 80×86 assembly simple. Rather than saying “The existing tags should render like THIS:” they said “Ok, all the existing tags will be rewritten”
There was NOTHING wrong with HTML4+CSS that simply agreeing HOW to render it wouldn’t solve. Adding all these stupid other things to it is NOT a solution, and just another way to chew bandwidth with no change in functionality.
“I used beta and Micro Channel for a reason” – uhm, no.
should read “I used them as examples for a reason”
I don’t think anybody actually USED beta where I’m from (east coast)
We used to do all our banking and investments (four companies, one focussing on daytrading) through the leading internet bank in Holland: Rabobank. For years the bank was leading the way on internet, miles ahead of the competition. Being a Mac outfit, we could use the website, but it had some annoying features:
– a warning: this website has been designed for …. your browser is too old …. please download a modern version at http://www.mic …
– menus that wouldn’t render in a good way
– pages that crashed while putting in transactions … really nice when you have to complete long forms regarding foreign payments or, even worse, you want to shoot in your stockorders.
We spoke a few times with the bank on ‘Hey, what about you supporting …. say Mozilla? That’s available for Mac, Linux and Windows …’ But they refused: ‘Good idea, we might even consider that for the future’ …
Just recently (a year after our final conversation) came competitor SNS Bank with a 100% Mozilla and Safari proof solution. We switched immediately and Rabobank started calling us: “Why are you switching? Are they cheaper?” Our answer was simple: “No, they are not cheaper, but SNS Bank actually listen.”
I never test nothing uder IE. I don’t have it, and even if I could have it, I don’t want it. If it works under Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror — then Im home.
I never test nothing uder IE. I don’t have it, and even if I could have it, I don’t want it. If it works under Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror — then Im home.
How do you convince your customers that no testing on ie is necessary?
I had an idea the other day. You know when you go to a Flash-player page, you get a popup that tells you you need to download flash player?
There should be one of those for firefox – a firefox-IE plugin. Webmasters can make their page “compliant browsers only” and make IE using visitors download the firefox plugin to view it.
Obviously people making money from the web would not do this, but flash seems to have quite some traction, so I think it could work.
the whole reason why IE has such a big majority in the whole place is that M$ used anticompetitive tactics to force OEMs to bundle IE with their machines.
deathshadow,
Get a clue.
According to your reasoning no one would have ever written web pages designed for IE. At the time IE came out Netscape was the de facto (NOT!) “standard”. According to your logic everyone would have continued to design their web sites for use with Netscape.
Now why is it that people started developing their web pages for IE when Netscape still was the dominant browser? Is it perhaps because “Standards are set by what is used the most, not by what some self-gratiating brain-trust tries to say it is.” Think about it.
The fact is that Microsoft controlled the desktop computing domain at the time the WWW became relevant-they were in a position that none of their rivals could even compete with-they held the carrot of browser-OS integration luring developers away from the competition. It’s ironic that 10 years later exactly this browser-OS integration would become the “achilles heel” of Microsoft.
Sun’s Java provided an oppurtunity for browser-OS integration via an OS-specific virtual machine-one that has never had any of the security problems which define the IE experience. What did Microsoft do-they killed Java on Windows machines. They did this by intentionally breaking compatibility with the existing java implementations and using their own “java” to further propagate their vision of an integrated OS-browser. Now Microsoft has chosen .NET as their ultimate answer-.Net turns the entire MS OS into a virtual machine-again with the goal of absolute browser-OS integration. The WWW on a .Net enabled machine of the future will have little in common with the WWW which the rest of humanity uses.
The good thing in this scenario is that it will be another 2-3 years before a .NET enabled WWW becomes anything more than the plan which Microsoft is pursuing-and this is sufficent time for things like Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari and Konqueror to establish enough of a foothold to preclude IE from re-achieving its once absolutely dominant position again. Microsoft hasn’t gotten it yet-but they will-their are ever fewer developers who are developing for Microsoft-and most of the developers who previously developed for MS are not going to develop for .NET. MS is loosing the battle for the allegiance of its developers. The writing is on the wall.
What is so truly sad in your comment and many of the other comments posted here is how quickly you end up defending the status quo. No one here has stated that the existing standards are perfect. No one here worhsips standards in and of themselves. Standards serve as the basis for a community of consensus. When there exists a community consensus behind the technologies and applications we use we as users and developers profit immeasurably. Those who design their web pages exclusively for IE do not form such a community of consensus- their agreement with one another is contingent upon their ability to deny the existance (ie.relevance) of alternatives. They form a de facto “community”-and as a group they are the ones carrying out Microsofts goal of MS specific WWW-browser-OS integration. It is these indidividuals-not Microsoft itself-which make the establishment of standards, which in turn enable alternatives to exist, so radically difficult. Most of this stuff boils down to simple psychology : MS was the “winning team”- most support the winner, identifies themselves as “winners” by identifying with the “winning team”.
Whats even more bitter is how this kind of identification reveals the economic realities of developers. Those developers who resolutely refuse to code to standards are terrified of loosing their position. The transition afoot is triggering waves of conservative reactionarism. IE developers became a commodity item a long, long time ago- their work value has steadily decreased over the years and they have become totally replacable. What these people fail to see is that coding to standards means the ability to work with alternatives-alternatives which can and then do form niches of specialized knowledge-something which is in demand and has work value.
Personally the beauty of the browser is the fact they are so forgiving, so long as the job gets done, I’m not really concerned about the code. Until I have to rewrite the site hehe:)
Honestly i think Opera is better than both!
Personally the beauty of the browser is the fact they are so forgiving, so long as the job gets done, I’m not really concerned about the code. Until I have to rewrite the site hehe:)
Honestly i think Opera is better than both!
>>”…but a company who’s sole goal is OS (and browser) dominance and the “bottom line” should not be in charge of standards…”
MS is not “in charge” of standards. It’s the simple fact that almost everyone uses Windows and IE. Hardly any of those users care about standards, or even know they exist. They care that their browsers works with all the sites they visit.
>>”A democratic system where submissions and proposals are commented/voted on is a much better way to go. ”
Again, no one except developers cares. Besides, who would vote in these elections? Developers, users, or the people who pay developers? If the latter two groups, wouldn’t they be likely to vote for the status quo?
Saying these things isn’t taking a pro-IE postion. It is just recognizing reality.
IE might have 90% market share, but there are some very important customers in that 10%: Google, Yahoo, Altavista, … If you have a sloppy structure on your website, your site *will* be ranked lower. Those bots use the structure to find out what your site is dealing with.
Webbies that just develop for IE, just miss the entire point.
Karl,
Get a clue.
MS didn’t win the browser war because the big bad monopoly conspiracy theory you seem to believe is true. They one it by:
– putting a lot of effort into compatibility with the formerly dominant Netscape browser
– improving the browser and even supporting standards Netscape didn’t
– taking advantage of Netscape’s three or four year holiday to the land of Open Source (perhaps that holiday wouldn’t have cost them as much if they’d continued improving the browser in the meantime)
This all happened before OS integration. All three are equally important, but the Firefox crowd seem to ignore the first (compatibility with the dominant browser.) If they don’t change that, neither will IE’s market share in any significant way. But if Firefox wants to become a quaint little experiment that failed to live up to expectations because of community pig headedness, it’s up to them. Most of the general computing public really couldn’t care – IE fulfills their needs, and will continue to long after Firefox dies a slow and miserable death because it won’t render common web pages.
What’s really sad is the resorting to Microsoft bashing any time Microsoft comes up. You don’t realize that if IE had kept breaking pages that worked in Netscape, most people wouldn’t have bothered using IE even if they showered you with IE and IE solved world hunger.
How do you convince your customers that no testing on ie is necessary?
Most of the time, IE has no problem with pages that runs ok on Mozilla/Opera. If they have a problem, and Im sure it’s not my fault (ie. it’s validate ok) I just tell them that from my point of view it’s not my fault. They can complain to [email protected] or anyone who provide them with broken browser. Or, for no charge, I can install Firefox for them and make a little traning on Firefox features sutch as tab browsing. My last client (big comapny that makes wool and ordered complex system for production) has moved to Firefox and they’re very happy. IE had some problems with session that never happend under Mozilla/Opera/Whatever. I could try to fix it, but it’s not my job.
We should give our clients smart hints. Not just argree on everything. If I hire a painter, I don’t advice him how to mix colours to get best effect.
Just listen to what some of you are saying. “Let IE be the standard”.
IE is a proprietary browser, developed at closed doors. How on earth you want that to be a standard?
So, suppose IE is the new standard. And we all implement it. Then next month, all of a sudden, MS silently changes IE and makes everyone else’s browser not work. Everyone who implemented it looks like a fool, while MS is just laughing out loud (“what a fool these people are!”).
Can’t you see this cannot work? Is this what you really want? To play by Microsoft rules? What a MS monkey you are then.
Victor.
browser integration happened with windows 98. a long time ago. and that DEFINITELY made a huge impact on the browser statistics.
so, yes, netscape/mozilla have missed a lot of opportunities in 98/99/00/01 and 02 and were basically completely wiped off the internet in the meantime. but you just can’t completely ignore the influence that micrososft’s decision to include ie into windows had.
my bet is: if mozilla 1.0 (in its 2002 form) would have been released in (let’s say) 1998, and firefox 1.0 in 2001, we would now have a 70/30 situation. and i mean 70% internet explorer and 30% netscape. a strong minority of loyal users (because netscape would have been a great product for a long time). of course, these numbers are totally random, just my personal bet.
still: i am tired to hear the argument that netscape screwed up and microsoft’s browser integration “had nothing to do with it”. if course it had something to do with it. you either are a fat, rich monopollist who can force stuff down people’s throats or you’re not. and they were. and they did.
regards,
christian
Wow. The validator complained about a url. What am I missing here?
That’s a funny term.
> Wow. The validator complained about a url. What am I missing here?
To anticipate the response of the IE fanboy community:
“You ain’t missing anything. Forget about the w3c crap. It’s a broken standard and nobody cares about it. People will keep using IE long after all of us are dead. Get real!”
Can anyone point to the definition of “Microsoft IE HTML standard”? I thought not. That’s the real problem here.
It wouldn’t matter so much if there was a documented standard that was used by IE. Any browser could then implement it in compatibility mode. And the HTML / XHTML / IEHTML standards could compete on their own commercial merits.
As it is, we have a test suite called Internet Explorer. Not a standard. Poor web designers have to guess what the valid syntax and semantics is when using IE. And it varies between versions of IE, leading to much testing required. And may well change again in future.
How many of those “IE standard” websites will still work when Microsoft release their next version of browser? Especially since it is likely to be a significant rewrite with security in mind.
Those sites coding to documented standards will be in a much better position. The complaints from broken HTML sites won’t be taken very seriously when they demonstrably break the standard.
I’d say the real reason for these types of problems is what I call “buzzworditis”. Rather than make real applications, programmers are being asked to make webapps- for everything! Rather than make a real ASP, PHP, or Perl dynamic website, people are being told to use java and other such buzzwords. If all the PHB’s out there realized that the best technology isn’t always the one on the front page of Fortune, it’d be a much better, much more compliant, world out there.
“Until it’s as easy to develop for mozilla as it is for IE, we are IE only. If you don’t like it, don’t do business with us.”
That’s interesting because I find it a lot easier to code for Mozilla (and oh gee whiz…I can get it to show up correctly in IE at the sametime!).
If you just follow the standards, things WILL work in both IE and Mozilla.
“But hey, nevermind all the people who have their computers trashed, because afterall, your kids’ gotta eat, right?
I hope your kids are happy”
I somehow fail to see how another company’s software woes are “businessman’s” fault. I’ll tell you what. Since “businessman” is so very selfish and greedy to not keep us all in mind when he goes to work and degrades the security of our nation or something akin to what you’re complaining about, let’s see YOU quit your job because it just wasn’t RIGHT coding for MICROSOFT’s browser when omgpls!!1 They don’t even support some of The Standards! And THEN (see that’s the easy part. Anybody can just quit their job) go home and when your wife gets home from work, explain to her why you can no longer contribute to the well-being of the family. She’ll be really impressed with fancy words such as “standards” and “compliant” and “mortgage” and “food.”
I don’t know of too many people who agree with their company’s practices, but you know something, darius, as long as their employer is not sending them out to bomb nuns and kittens and homeless babies in wheelchairs, they are not going to jeopardise their family’s well-being by attempting to make a stand for some “standard” which apparently 95% of “the internets” does not seem to care too much about. And even if it was 100% of the internet screaming for standards compliancywoowoo, I don’t care, I’m doing what my employer pays me to do because family comes first after Mr. T and beerpudding.
And who’s fault is that? I’d say the fault lies more with the companies who say, “You!” in Canadian, which is the language of Ninjas everywhere, “Write this page to work in IE!”
And that’s even IF there is some sort of blame to be handed around in the first place.
I love the browser, but when I left it (Windows version) running for a few days, it turned into a resource hog, stealing most of my CPU time. I’m not sure if it was the browser or the Quicktime plugin that was running, but the browser seems more likely. Hopefully this will be addressed soon, with all of the high-profile attention. And what’s the status of a BeOS version?
I had an idea the other day. You know when you go to a Flash-player page, you get a popup that tells you you need to download flash player?
Firefox has already option to allow you download Flash-player under the tabs.
There should be one of those for firefox – a firefox-IE plugin. Webmasters can make their page “compliant browsers only” and make IE using visitors download the firefox plugin to view it.
No thank you if means to support broken html codes and ActiveX(proven to be virus and spyware magnet). Consider getting next AOL instead.
“An individual can easily switch to Firefox. But doing that on a corporate level is a disaster. All kinds of internal applications are dependent on IE. They never tested them against Firefox or Mozilla because they never thought about it and now they are kind of hooked – that was Microsoft’s plan,” said Tippett.
I must be an old man: I do remember times when Netscape browser was the king, IE nowhere to found.
99.9% of all Web pages worked with Netscape. Some of them were using Netscape proprietary HTML extensions. Small number, but visible one, intentionally refused to show content to users running something other than Netscape. Some zealots even planted code on their Web pages intended to crash rival (i.e., not Netscape) browsers.
I still remember these times, when nobody tested their pages for IE or what else. These were the times when everyone was eagerly waiting for Netscape to come with new version of a browser supporting Netscape invented features.
Standards? What standards? Whatever Netscape does, whatever it tells you it can do- that was the standard.
I hardly remember anyone complaining about it except, may be, this guy if quotation is correct:
————————
“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
————————-
In 1996 Internet Explorer was just emerging, Bill was still undecided if he wanted to embrace Internet or create proprietary AOL-like MSN network. TCP/IP stack was not installed by the default in original Windows 95. The only “invented for browser” Tim could mention was in reference to Netscape.
Well, boys and girls, these my memories of old days should tell you that there always were and always will be lazy programmers. They will code for 95% of their user base, does not matter how loudly you scream.
Standards? 95% of user base run a standard browser, whatever it is: Mozilla, Firefox, IE or Opera. Does not matter what browser it is: if 95% of users run it, it is a standard of the day. Get used to live with it.
The question is how would you make your browser a standard, so that these HTML designers will notice it. Simple: make a better browser. That simple.
Yes, boosting an ego of your users by giving them free t-shirts for downloading your browser, or by publishing their names in a city newspaper- helps too. Be creative, but remember: better browser comes first.
I have installed both FireFox and IE (latest versions). The more I use FireFox, the less impressed I am with it and recently found myself switching more and more often to MSIE. Why?
With IE I have my favourite download manager – FlashGet integrated with it, so I can select “Download All” menuitem and leech the mp3’s off a site. Also some sites don’t show properly with FireFox, and the speed isn’t as good as the speed of IE. But I guess that’s only me.
Not agreeing with your company’s policy is a LOT different from begin pro IE-only webppages, or anything similar.
If you don’t agree with your company’s policy, you fight to change it. You don’t quit it. Quitting is not going to solve anything.
Instead, you try to show them why they’re doing it wrong, and you make the best to get a better situation.
Victor.
So far, the only OS where this can be prevented would be Linux with SELinux turned on using a well tuned security policy.
“the only OS”.. are you sure that a BSD wouldn’t solve the problem?
I heard that when security is the main issue (and it often *should* be) BSD rules, over both Linux and Windows.
Deep study: The world’s safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/021104.php
“The world’s safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment – operating system plus applications – is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin.”
(btw, MacOSX is BSD-based)
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.netbsd.org
http://www.openbsd.org
“XHTML/HTML4 always looks to me like mental masturbation. Making tags that worked FINE in HTML4 in everything more complex, larger, and for no functionality… Oh yes, I’m really going to put content inside of <img></img> or <hr></hr>… Yes, I want a link to the W3C’s website as the first line of every single HTML file I make, sure I do (dripping sarcasm). That one right there should be big indicator of the overinflated egos at the W3C”
I’m not quite sure where you’re getting these ideas from, but you’re wrong. </img> and </hr> are illegal in HTML4 and I assume XHTML too.
<img src=”…”> fine in HTML4 (okay, there’s that dumbass alt thing, but that’s another discussion). In XHTML it’s <img src=”…” />. Big deal – especially given that there’s a good reason for it: XHTML is XML compliant, so you can read it with a general XML parser. No, I’ve never done that, but it’s not much different from good HTML4 anyway. Those two extra characters aren’t exactly a big deal.
And the DTD thing: Who cares… it’s one line in an included file somewhere that you never look at. I assume they had some theory about browsers being able to go and get the DTD if they didn’t understand it; I highly doubt this actually happens but let them dream.
I know this comment was a wee way back, but no-one corrected it at the time…
What the writer of this commentary doesn’t seem to understand is that most corporate web development is NOT client-facing or for the public at large. In other words, it’s mostly back-office web-based systems and systems for buiness partners. In these cases it is most usually the case that the browser type is dictated at a higher level, and most of the time it’s IE. So, spending the extra development time to develop and test for anything BUT IE does not fly in most corporate environments.
Add to this the fact that most of this development is “web applications”, not “web sites”. Web Applications tend to be much richer and fat-client-like. This makes cross-browser development more difficult (not impossible by any stretch, but more time-consuming if for no other reason than testing with multiple browsers). Folks, you have to understand… developing a typical web site to work with all browser isn’t that big a deal, but writing a web-based CRM application that has to look, feel and function largely like a Windows VB app is much more difficult, and if you have to make it work the same on ten different browsers it becomes extremely time-consuming. Businesses don’t usually like the term time-consuming because it equals more money.
In my company for instance, we are standardized on IE and have been for years. We can debate whether that’s a good thing or not, but it is a fact. Most of our work is IE-only because most of our work won’t be used by anyone other than those we know use nothing but IE, or those who we can dictate must use IE and nothing else. This is not an exception, it is the way many companies work, I’d even say most.
If your writing a web site that will have an unknown audience, then you take the time and put in the extra effort to do it in a cross-browser fashion. But if it’s a more advanced web application, this isn’t a straight-forward as this commentary would have us believe, and this is where Firefox, at this point at least, is all but irrelevant. IE is the istalled base, and while that will change slowly as far as the general public goes, and certainly the Slashdot crowd, it’s not going to happen nearly as fast, IF AT ALL, in the corporate space, where, frankly, it matters more.
“FlashGet integrated with it, so I can select “Download All” menuitem and leech the mp3’s off a site. Also some sites don’t show properly with FireFox, and the speed isn’t as good as the speed of IE. But I guess that’s only me.”
install linky and ieview extension. problem solved….
browser integration happened with windows 98. a long time ago. and that DEFINITELY made a huge impact on the browser statistics.
[…]
still: i am tired to hear the argument that netscape screwed up and microsoft’s browser integration “had nothing to do with it”. if course it had something to do with it. you either are a fat, rich monopollist who can force stuff down people’s throats or you’re not. and they were. and they did.
People were _voluntarily_ switching to IE in *droves* a good 12 months or more before Windows 98 was released. IIRC IE had taken something like 30% – 40% of the market off Netscape before Windows 98 hit the shelves.
Certainly browser integration would have had some influence, but the writing was on the wall long before that.
Right on!
Matt: you get a clue, the only thing that led to MS winning the Browser war was the bundling of IE with Windows and user appathy. You want freedom of choice, you can’t handle it. MS lacky.
BTW most WWW3 standard complient browser? Opera.
Geez, I hate some of the idiots who post here.
As a consumer, if any institution doesn’t allow for me to use the software I want then they don’t get my business. So simple and my way of supporting choice.
“Instead, you try to show them why they’re doing it wrong, and you make the best to get a better situation.”
I agree there, but it is very very rare to see a company change its policy based on, “Well, IE isn’t 100% standards compliant, so even though the overwhelming majority of visitors to our webpages are using IE, we should devote more resources to making our pages viewable for both IE and browsers which fully support the standards.” Your bosses will give you “that” look, and want to know why. What will your answer be? So that a few people who use Firefox or another browser can surf your sites knowing that the code is standards compliant?
They will not listen if the amount of money it costs to make their pages standards compliant exceeds the amount of money they stand to earn from having said pages standards compliant. Why are there so many people placing the burden onto the shoulders of the people writing the webpages? They don’t make the rules, and it really is unfortunate that they are often the target of misinformed rants coming from people who scream, “OMG UR SO SELFISH YEH UR FAMILY COMES BEFORE THE WORLD OOOOKAY WATCH NASCAR.” Seriously, anybody who thinks that the needs of the internet world come before their own family really needs to whipe the orange Cheetos stains from their fingers (and I’m not knocking Cheetos; anything endorsed by a hippie way cool talking cheetah in sunglasses just has to be enriched with vitamin radium and glass shards) and think before they click “submit.”
Sadly, your reply did not mention anything about Mr. T or Ninjas, so I’m going to have to plead the soda.
Very simple Andrew. Your boss and his likes will not get the custom of 5 – 10% of web users and that figure will grow as more and more people see alternatives to IE that don’t
1. Install spyware
2. Allow for gross security breaches fo their computers or
3. Find a complete alternative to Windows which IE doesn’t run on.
As a result, sure, in the short term your boss will save some money but in the long run he will either forced to loose customers or spend more money to completely rewrite the companies web site to try and get his lost customers back. Not only will money be spent there but there also will have to be money spent in communicating the fact that when the site is able to cater to other browsers, your company will have to make mention of the fact to regain the lost customers in the first place.
Does not writing clean and W3C complient sites from scratch seem to be the cheaper option? Be sure that the tide is turning and alternatives to MS in computing are on the rise? If people adhere to standards then it doesn’t matter what systems are used, the information and services are available to all. It’s called diversity. Works well in nature (although we are trying to f that up to) should work well in computing.
[“…but a company who’s sole goal is OS (and browser) dominance and the “bottom line” should not be in charge of standards…”]
MS is not “in charge” of standards. It’s the simple fact that almost everyone uses Windows and IE. Hardly any of those users care about standards, or even know they exist. They care that their browsers works with all the sites they visit.
I never said they were in charge of the standards… I was responding to those who said that Microsoft should be (due to their browser’s proliferation).
[“A democratic system where submissions and proposals are commented/voted on is a much better way to go.”]
Again, no one except developers cares. Besides, who would vote in these elections? Developers, users, or the people who pay developers? If the latter two groups, wouldn’t they be likely to vote for the status quo?
I would like to add to that list the people who want to choose their own browser, not necessarily the browser that comes with Windows. If enough people use different browsers, standards compliance is the only route to keeping customers.
For example, Westpac (Bank of Melbourne) had to add support for Gecko based browsers after enough people complained. They had to do this, or risk losing customers to other banks.
Your bosses will give you “that” look, and want to know why. What will your answer be? So that a few people who use Firefox or another browser can surf your sites knowing that the code is standards compliant?
No, that’s not exactly the reason why you must support web standards.
It’s not just “some people using Firefox”. First of all, you need to understand the importance of the WWW to the world we live today, and the world we’ll construct tomorrow. The WWW is or will be everywhere in our lives. Anything you can imagine. Thus, we need to make the web a “free” space, a space everyone have access to. Everyone. Not 90% percent of the people who has a computer (which, by the way, is a very low percentage of people. Here where i live – Brazil – only 9% of the population has enough money to buy a computer, let alone to buy proprietary software).
By endorsing IE-only pages you are endorsing the digital exclusion of the poor countries. Please don’t forget IE is a proprietary browser that only runs on a proprietaty OS.
And about blaming the people writing webpages; well, sometimes (lots of times) these people could have put just a little effort to make it run on all web browsers. I’m not talking here about a “project to make it standard compliant”. Most of the times is just little things, your boss doesn’t even need to know (well, but he should know what you’re doing is a good thing).
Victor.
You’re still forgetting the part about None of What You Mentioned is the Coder’s Problem. Do you have an issue with a design firm or some other company writing IE “only” pages? Great! I do, too! But don’t sit there and blame the people writing the code, because they’re doing just that: writing code, not making policy. If it really is that big a deal to you, then rally like-minded people together to write the people who actually make the decisions and tell them why they should support standards. Write articles about how bad these companies are that write IE only pages. Who are the decision makers in a company going to listen to? Jeff Browndavidsonburgtonvilleshire working on the code who for some reason is complaining about standards, or people representing a large portion of their customer base who apparently have a problem with this “previously unheard of” (“What?? Standards? Why I never heard of such a thing ever except for the time Jeff B in coding mentioned it to me but I pay him so that doesn’t count.”) standards issue?
The people responsible for making the decisions that you want to see made are going to listen to the people GIVING them money before they listen to the people who THEY are giving money to. An exception to this, of course, is when a company hires an insultant to tell them what their employees had been telling them all along.
I’d like to point out that the mobile site doesn’t appear to work on at least 2 samsung phones that i’ve tested it on…the VGA1000, and another.
I get:
Content Error.
There may be a problem with this web page.
screenshot:
http://www.667studios.com/images/a620.jpg
I was at a job interview for system administrator for Telstra, one of the question they asked was witch web browser I was using at home.
At the end of the interview I asked my they asked that question. They said they wouldn’t hire people that were using IE as their default browser because it shows that they don’t care about security.
Lots of IE “features” which allow interpretation of lazy-written or even buggy code are directly related to exploits and holes, like various stack-frame violations, memleaks etc.
“People were _voluntarily_ switching to IE in *droves* a good 12 months or more before Windows 98 was released. IIRC IE had taken something like 30% – 40% of the market off Netscape before Windows 98 hit the shelves. Certainly browser integration would have had some influence, but the writing was on the wall long before that. ”
—That’s because up until 1998, Netscape was a piece of software that had to be PURCHASED. MS, being a multi-billion dollar monopoly, could subsidize the entire cost of development and marketing of IE and undercut Netscape on price. Why pay for Netscape when you could get IE for free? The only reason Netscape ever stopped charging is because there was absolutely no way to compete with that and they were forced to find other ways to generate income or die.
Add the height to the #innermast div style, XHTML compliant and renders correctly in Firefox and Opera (the browsers that were displaying “incorrectly”) in addition to IE.