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
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That’s because up until 1998, Netscape was a piece of software that had to be PURCHASED.
Right. How many people do you know that actually paid for Navigator ?
Saying Navigator “had to be PURCHASED” is rather a stretch. It was freely and easily available, being included on nearly every ISP setup CD ever given away, with no attempts at restricting its usage.
Indeed, Netscape’s whole business plan revolved around getting their browser out in as wide use as possible by giving it away, then leveraging its proprietry extensions to on the server side and make money that way.
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?
Funnily enough, people did “pay for Netscape” (if we assume your assertion that any meaningful number of customers ever paid for it is correct at all) right up until the point IE became the better product. Coincidentally, that’s right about the time Navigator started sucking immensely and its marketshare plummeted (1997 – 1998).
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.
Rubbish. Income from the browser was never more than a bit of gravy on the side. Netscape’s *real* money spinner in its business plan was its webserver and their proprietry HTML extensions.
No. The biggest obstacle is most people, including web designers, don’t give a sh!t about it.
Bingo! While these kind of people are busing using an non-standard W3C browser, other have already enough to be hacked with spywares and viruses so they already change the browser.
Those companies who are too stubborn to rewrite their website to be at least W3C standard compliant will either lose customers or go out of business. Time to evolve or die, period.
I just laughed at my friends who were stuck in advertisment hell and happily clicked along.
Where have you been? XP SP2 has had popup blocking for months.
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.
Correct me if I’m wrong but you strike me as a high school kid or something. Unless your website is targeting anything-but-IE, you’re basically ensuring that no IE user is going to visit you. Which is fine. Only 6 billion other sites to go to. And you actually think this is going to make a difference?
Bingo! While these kind of people are busing using an non-standard W3C browser, other have already enough to be hacked with spywares and viruses so they already change the browser.
You Linux guys should really give XP SP2 a try. Your rant about viruses and spyware is getting really tired — and outdated.
> 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.
Yes, illegal in HTML4 – NO, not illegal in XHTML, not closing a tag in XHTML is illegal. <img /> is shorthand for <img></img> – The two are functionally identical. ALL TAGS in XHTML must be closed and can no longer be ‘standalone’ effectively making 99% of the worlds HTML 2, 3 and 4 code illegal, for what? It might seem odd to be bitching about having to add two characters ( /) to every ‘standalone’ tag, but over how many times a page over how many pages over how many users? Wasteful at best, stupid at worst especially when it worked JUST FINE before that.
XHTML does two things, makes it cross compatable TO XML – Why? Why would you EVER need to go FROM HTML to XML. The other direction, fine. Translating XML to something easily displayed in HTML, sure – but saying valid HTML is now invalid just because a different reader type for an entirely different purpose can’t read it out of box? Nonsense.
The other thing is chew up extra bandwidth for ZERO functionality in WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE FOR – building web pages. As if DOCTYPES and the endless hordes of META tags didn’t fugly up HTML’s elegance enough to begin with, they have to malf it up with this rubbish?
P.S. Not that I take comments from anyone who calls image alt text ‘dumbass’ too seriously.
You Linux guys should really give XP SP2 a try. Your rant about viruses and spyware is getting really tired — and outdated.
Linux with a good SELinux policy beats XP SP2 at security, so that might be a better road for them to follow in case they are not allready doing so.
Whats more worrying is that there is a lot of windows users that for various reasons still run win2k or earlier. They have no XP SP2 to apply.
OK. Yes, I agree on some of your points, but as Uno said, not a lot of people has XP SP2. In a lot of countries, the only Internet connection that you get is dail-up (broadband is usually way too expensive). IMO, 250mb is too much to download at 5kb/s, costing me around the same price/hour as a Big Mac would.
That is why I use Linux at home. Security is excellent, speed is good, and the local LUG gives damn good support.
BTW, I’m not pushing Linux, but its nice to give Microsoft some competition again.
E
You Linux guys should really give XP SP2 a try. Your rant about viruses and spyware is getting really tired — and outdated.
Assumption is very bad when you don’t know who you deal with. FYI, I am also Windows XP SP2 user. I have tried IE6 and decided against to use it after noticing spywares still come from IE.
As far as I can say, vast majority of sites renders good in both browser. As a web developer I have problems with IE bugs and shortcomings. I belive that there is more difference between versions of IE than between Firefox and latest IE.
The real problem for me is Flash. Some morons create sites that can’t be navigated without Flash. And I do not use Flash. I have no patience to wait for it to download, and I don’t like moving content that distracts me from information I came for.
Yes, there is Firefox Flash plugin, but I am very carefull not to have any trace of it on my machine.
DG
I code pages using Dreamweaver, Homesite and Fireworks (MX Suite) and as far as I see if it works good in Netscape 4X it will work in IE 5 and 6 and Firefox.
I think the problem is people pull out a copy of Frontpage and make a site with that and then wonder why it half way works in IE and doesn’t work worth crap in anything else! Most of those people don’t know or even care about standards because they don’t even know about HTML. They just use the point and click of Frontpage and are excited they even have a page up. LOL!
Most of it is lazy, people don’t want to learn HTML. I have a friend who does sites for a living and has yet to learn a lick of HTML. She does everything in pictures and makes the pictures clickable. They look good but she forgets to change titles, doesn’t even have a clue about meta tags etc! And won’t pick up a book to learn it!
Just leave the Microsoft zealots to eat their lousy browser! At least us alternative browser people “know” we are a hell of a lot safer. Wait till a virus or worm jumps out and bites em in the ass!, They’ll learn.
Why do you guys think something very easy in a very complicated way?
Simple way is: Assuming you are a business man, or just a normal person. You now need to develop a web site. You are up to the choices of Firefox or IE.
Now let’s just count using your fingers; count what? Count how many hours extra that you will need to use to build a web site that is IE specific, BESIDES — the patches released by Microsoft that are having more endless security holes, the strong but useless to IE bugs firewall on servers, the training to employees not to go to pop up sites even there is a popup blocker in IE, which does not work well, the time you spend AGAIN & AGAIN to patch computers and computers JUST for IE security holes, the…
The list is pretty huge, I don’t wanna mention all. I am not a business man and I am just standing in a math point of view.
I just wanna say that my friend got a new laptop, and it was infected because of IE in hours. Then she had to install patches, strengthen the firewall, the whatsoever to just avoid the virus/trojan coming in through IE/Outlook,…yeah…you guys are right, what so more convenient and easy than using IE? because it’s easy to be infected, and easy to crash your entire system due to the core of the explorer? I doubt it.
Happy browsing.
I have a comment on the topic. I have worked as a Web Developer and I know how much biased my colleagues were towards IE. I was made to adapt pages to IE even though they didn’t conform to W3C standards. So its the case that the term “laziness” does not come necessarily from programmers, but it comes from the supervisers.
OK. Yes, I agree on some of your points, but as Uno said, not a lot of people has XP SP2. In a lot of countries, the only Internet connection that you get is dail-up (broadband is usually way too expensive). IMO, 250mb is too much to download at 5kb/s, costing me around the same price/hour as a Big Mac would.
Firstly, the SP2 download an end user needs to make isn’t 250MB.
Secondly, you can order it off Microsoft for nothing more than shipping costs.
Thirdly, it’s probably been on every magazine cover CD/DVD since the day it was released and will continue to be for another 6 – 12 months.
It’s trivial to obtain XP SP2 for next to nothing. Certainly no more than it would cost you to acquire 3 years worth of Linux $DISTRO patches.
That is why I use Linux at home. Security is excellent, speed is good, and the local LUG gives damn good support.
And for some reason you think Windows and a Windows user group is different ?
i don’t test my website with msie becorse i don’t own a pc with windows (and never will)
“You Linux guys should really give XP SP2 a try. Your rant about viruses and spyware is getting really tired — and outdated.”
I don’t think they care – it’s the ranting they enjoy moreso than actually using their computers in any meaningful way.
It’s business alright but it don’t say much about the sheep that conduct it does it?