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Hi Chuck, I would not be so sure it is Firefox's fault. Usually Firefox and other browsers like Safari and Opera are correct, but IE is wrong. Sadly too many sites are written for IE only, bugs and all. When I was in web development it took my a while to prove to others that the bug was in IE, but eventually people understood and coded to standards and adjusted for IE. Now I haven't checked the source in the examples you cite, but can you be sure it not the developers coding to IE? I have used Firefox and Safari for many years now with little trouble, I have a Firefox IE tab extension for troublesome pages, but usually I just move on. Anyway you've got to choose what's right for you, so good luck. :-)
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The browser of choice
I'm the last person to be an IE apologist, but when a product has 80-90% of the marketshare (give or take a few points here and there), it's a bit difficult for someone with the minority share to say "we demand you do it our way!". The reality is that even if the standards weren't rife with politics and even if IE had a lower share of the marketshare, the smart answer would still be for Firefox and all the wannabes to have a switch that invokes "IE compatibility mode". If they did that, they'd probably double their marketshare overnight! But no, they're content to natter on about how IE has it wrong, and to continue to make life miserable for programmers. Joe -
The browser of choice
Joe: January stats for www.boldts.net show 76% for IE. IE usage is indeed dropping. Should the rest of the browser developers pander to the leading, non-compliant vendor? Look Joe, they've all implemented to standards developed and agreed upon by a number of different parties including Microsoft. Is it hard to grasp the concept that Microsoft should also implement to those standards? Don't you think it's unfair that the others should have to provide compatibility with IE using a kludgy "quirks mode"? And if other can implement the standards properly, why oh why can't MS? Are they staffed with idiot programmers? (BTW, I use FireFox exclusively at work and at home without problem. Especially enjoyable and useful are the extensions.) Cheers! HansComment
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The browser of choice
zzypt, It doesn't really matter which one is correctly interpreting the web page, as the rule book says, it only matters which one presents to me what I want to see. If sites are written to a "bug" then I want them presented to me correctly. chuck Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. "zzypt"Comment
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The audience for my site is 100% IE. I was the only Firefox user and that prompted the switch. The 76% you cite is probably the number of page hits. Since "techy" people tend to browse more than a casual user and the "techy" people are the ones that will tend to use FireFox the number of hits will show them to be higher. However, the number of unique users that use IE is considerably higher than 76%. My company's site is a "consumer" ecommerce web site and our IE usage is considerably higher than 76%. chuck Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. "Hans.Boldt"Comment
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The browser of choice
Ah, Hans, the joy of using your own website to measure statistics. Do you take into account the fact that many of your clicks are your own? Just wondering. In any case, whether dropping or not, even by your measurements IE is over 3/4 of the market, thus holding a commanding sway over the market place. It's the same reason that the "Windows interface" is the de facto standard for the GUI world. Even if you have a "better" GUI, by not supporting the Windows conventions you're positioning yourself to alienate a large segment of the users. The other issue is the word "compliant". By compliant you mean compliant with the W3C standards of course, which in turn implies that the W3C standards are somehow the grail of development. I contend that many of the W3C standards are hardly a standard like IEEE or ANSI and are instead a political battleground. In fact, the W3C standards are littered with optional features precisely because nobody can agree on the correct implementation, even among the W3C members. The same holds true for the Java standards, by the way, and they're pretty much solely the purview of a single vendor. In any event, your attitude strikes me as head-in-the-sand and perhaps a little disingenuous or at least naive. You use words like "pander" and "kludge" and "quirk" in order to try and establish some sort of philosophically correct position. There is no such thing in business, and in fact, most successful software developers understand that; it's something you learn when you sell software. If the primary player in the market space does something, then from a pure economics standpoint you ought to support it as well. If you CHOOSE not to support those de facto standards, then you have to sleep in the bed you make and all the posturing in the world won't change it. It's a business decision, not a religious one. JoeComment
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Joe wrote: Ah, Hans, the joy of using your own website to measure statistics. Do you take into account the fact that many of your clicks are your own? I knew you were going to say that. My own visits to my web site do not contribute much to the percentages. They fall well to the right of the decimal point in fact. Actually, the 76% number should be considered an upper limit since many Firefox and Opera users spoof the user agent to get into sites that barf on anything other than IE. I often do that myself. Regarding business decisions, as you're well aware, wintel has an almost complete domination of the desktop among iSeries users. There's no disputing that. On the other hand, iSeries customers also tend to be a conservative bunch, being quite comfortable at the trailing edge of technology. Therefore, if you want to look where the industry is going overall, the iSeries marketplace is probably not the place to look. Cheers! HansComment
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The browser of choice
Chuck wrote: Since "techy" people tend to browse more than a casual user and the "techy" people are the ones that will tend to use FireFox the number of hits will show them to be higher. Chuck: You'd certainly expect a low percentage of IE users to, say, slashdot. Likewise, you'd expect a higher percentage of IE users to this site since, as I mentioned elsewhere, MS is pretty much ubiquitous in iSeries shops. But there's nothing about my site that would attract anyone based on geekiness. I don't make any claim that my numbers are in any way definitive, but the percentage of IE visits has definitely been trending downwards. BTW, as I mentioned elsewhere, FireFox and Opera users have the ability to spoof their user agent. Since many e-commerce sites do complain about anything other than IE, it's to be expected that some number of browsers claiming to be IE visiting your site will in fact be something else. On the other hand, my site is not an e-commerce site, and so visitors have little reason to lie about their browser. Cheers! HansComment
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The browser of choice
Hans said: "iSeries customers also tend to be a conservative bunch" Yet they look progressive compared to the entire Inernet space as a whole. I can guarantee that any iSeries "conservative" person is much more progressive than my soon-to-be 90 year old mother. Certainly you should design your web site for your users. If it's a general consumer web site then that would be IE since only a small percentage of users would be non-IE users. Heck, even YOUR site, which is probably visited by more advanced users, is OVERWHEMINLY using IE. Why would you design for a miniority, maybe even a small minority, of users unless you're product is so niche that you simply don't care to please the masses? chuck Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.Comment
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The browser of choice
Chuck wrote: The audience for my site is 100% IE. I was the only Firefox user and that prompted the switch. The 76% you cite is probably the number of page hits. Since "techy" people tend to browse more than a casual user and the "techy" people are the ones that will tend to use FireFox the number of hits will show them to be higher. However, the number of unique users that use IE is considerably higher than 76%. My company's site is a "consumer" ecommerce web site and our IE usage is considerably higher than 76%. Chuck: After reading your last note again, I'm confused. You say you have a consumer targetted e-commerce site. And yet you also say your audience is 100% IE? Does that mean your company is purposely turning away up to a quarter of your potential customers? Cheers! HansComment
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Chuck: As I explained in another note, there's absolutely nothing about my site that would attract "advanced" users more than any others. But to your other point, when designing a web site, you have choices. You can either be inclusive or exclusive. Designing a site to work well with any browser is not much more difficult than designing for a specific browser. Since you can't always control the choice of users browsers, it only makes sense to go for the widest possible coverage. It's a no-brainer, and most companies do get it right. And that may well include your competitors. And as I mentioned elsewhere, if you run an e-commerce site, requiring a particular browser also means possibly alienating potential customers. And as I'm sure you well know, if a potential customer has a bad experience with your web site, he probably won't be back. Cheers! HansComment
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The browser of choice
Designing a site to work well with any browser is not much more difficult than designing for a specific browser. This is an awfully broad statement, and because of that it's not particularly true. Yes, if you stick to basic CSS and don't use alot of DOM functions, it's relatively easy to design a site that all browsers can use. However, as soon as you start trying to either use advanced CSS function (handled better by Gecko than IE) or try to make use of advanced DOM features (much better in IE than Gecko), then there is considerable work required to make both browsers work. Here's a simple example: give me the code on a Gecko browser that will allow me to emulate an "uppercase only" field. The exact effect is that as the user presses each key, lowercase letters are immediately translated to uppercase. I do NOT want them to enter lowercase data with is then "flashed" to uppercase when they exit the field. It's very easy in IE. As to market share, chweck this page: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3 While Firefox is indeed trending up, this clearly shows that IE has no real worries. According to this, Firefox may equal IE in marketshare sometime in 2016, although since Microsoft seems to actually be putting some new features into IE I wonder whether even this trend will continue. JoeComment
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I made the switch to FireFox about 6 months ago because I had heard it was faster then IE. For some reason when I use firefox I get double the bandwidth then what I get with IE. I ran the exact same speed test with both browsers and FireFox was the clear winner. I have used it ever since.Comment
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Hans, Sorry for the confusion. Our AS/400 apps are internal users only. That audience is 100% IE. Our ecommerce web site is a consumer web site. Very heavily IE. I don't have the numbers but the number of non-IE users is insignificant. The site gets about 70,000 unique visitors per day. chuck Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. "Hans.Boldt"Comment
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Jared, Yes, I did notice a speed improvement also when using Firefox over IE 6. However, IE 7 is actually faster, in my experience, than Firefox. chuck Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. "Jared Dawson"Comment
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