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?"

Re:Obvious

For the same reason people use IE in the first place: They are stupid and/or lazy.

They could also have a passionate love for Microsoft. Oh wait, I guess that falls under the "stupid" category, doesn't it?

Re:Obvious

Or they are stuck using Microsoft Visual Studio on a Microsoft Vista workstation, producing Microsoft ASP.NET applications for bosses who enjoy the occasional dinner and/or trip by... Microsoft!

Why yes, I am bitter. Why do you ask?

Re:Obvious

I have mod points, but there is no "-1 dumbass" mod.

Re:Obvious

Nonsense. I've worked on a number of ASP websites that behaved perfectly under Firefox.

Re:Obvious

Yes, after you turned off the "downlevel" browser feature that treats IE as CSS 2 compliant

Or you could not use all the compound controls and wizards, and just code it by hand. People bash ASP.Net for the poor automated HTML output. Well you don't have to use that.

Re:Obvious

You don't get it. It is the old "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mentality, replacing IBM with Microsoft. We do everything the Microsoft way. There are some features that don't work the same under FireFox -- not that it couldn't be done on FireFox, but when all your tools are Microsoft based and all your users are Microsoft equipped, you just fall into doing thing the Microsoft way. Even if something would just work perfectly with FireFox, it is hard to justify (at this company) testing with other browsers. It is easier to just throw in a browser check and call it good.

The issue isn't if we could support something other than IE, the issue is why in the world would we want to? Oh, and those trips and dinners sponsored by Microsoft are apparently pretty good.

Now I'll wait for some smart ass to point out I should just quit.

Re:Obvious

One thing is certain: You're doing exactly what Microsoft wants you to do. What's odder: you seem to be enjoying it. No matter, to each his own, but I know very few webmasters who would 'impose' IE - most I know spend most of their time pulling their hair out because of it.

With that thought in mind, I wonder if there's some way to calculate how much money IE has lost webmasters trying to make their websites look the same in both IE and web-standards compliant browssers?

Re:Obvious

You're doing exactly what Microsoft wants you to do.
Yes, obviously.

you seem to be enjoying it.
No, not at all. It is, however the job that pays for my current lifestyle. The original question was Why are websites still forcing people to use IE? I'm trying to provide some insight.

I know very few webmasters who would 'impose' IE
Gee, my bank imposes it on me. (Heck, they don't even support IE7 yet.) Our "customer" is actually another organization, and they prefer their users having little choice in browsers (and other things). They certainly don't want to pay for the extra effort to support other browsers -- never mind how much that might cost. Think highly conservative here, low (perceived) risk. Decisions are being made by people influenced by Microsoft but who don't have to deal directly with the headaches those decisions cause. In particular, no one from Mozilla or Apache or MySQL have taken my management out for dinner lately. None of the reps from PHP or Python or Perl have flown them to Seattle. Hell, you'd think the guys at the Free Software Foundation would at least buy my boss a beer to explain the advantages of emacs over vi.

But now you think my management are being simply wined and dined to purchase Microsoft Solutions. Not so: I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with ego stroking too.

I'd rather do things right, but this decision is way over my level.

Re:Obvious

I've never done IE only sites, so I can't exactly quantify the additional work for standard-compliant browsers, but I do know that MSIE 6 (I no longer support IE 5.x) perhaps as much as doubles the amount of time I spend developing a website. MSIE7 on the otherhand, whilst rather poor in comparison with *all* the competition, does at least behave in a predictable manner, and as such, it fairly easy to support. But my personal irritation as MSIE 6 is... well.... epic!

For anyone unfamiliar with developing websites for IE6, basically, you get given (or design yourself) a page layout; columns here, images there, content centred, etc, you create a fairly simple XHTML document to contain the content, you create CSS to position stuff. And I can do all this whilst testing only in Firefox and know that there will be few if any issues with other browsers. Even IE7 which as mentioned, isn't perfect, but at least I know (as with other browsers) that any slight issues can be dealt with later on.
BUT with IE6, it'll throw all sorts of weird and wonderful bugs at you. Bits of content might appear fine as you tweak XHTML/CSS and refresh, but when you fire up the browser afresh, it'll screw up. Or content will appear, but when you scroll the page, it'll disappear.

So I'd be more forgiving of Microsoft if they'd allowed IE7 to run on pre-Windows XP machines since this would allow me (and all the millions of other poor-sods) to drop IE6 support in the forseeable future! For the most part, IE7 is just a bug fixed IE6. At the very least, the bug fixes should've been back-ported.

PS apologies for the above turning into a bit of a rant!

Re:Obvious

I do understand the 'majority of browsers are IE' argument - that figures in even in a company's financial decisions - but this has nothing to do with the quality of the browser. With the increasing amount of 'other' browsers climbing, there may come a time where a company may actually lose money by taking the 'IE only' option. In any case, companies are already losing money because of IE, because of all the time (and bug research) it takes for webmasters to make a website look the same in all browsers. I'm talking from experience.

Re:Obvious

It is, however the job that pays for my current lifestyle.

You sound like a porno queen.

Re:eTRADE requires IE to access account

Huh? I opened accounts with Safari and have used their system with it for years with zero troubles.. They do have 1 problem with Firefox ( at least on OS X ) where it will log you out if you try to go to the market research tab, but certainly they are not IE only.

Re:eTRADE requires IE to access account

I'm in the same boat as AC. I have company options at ETrade and we don't permit the use of IE at my company (It's good to be the king). Everything I've needed to use has worked perfectly using Firefox and I can also access everything from Safari on my Mac at home. I'd have to say your problem was:
a. your computer
b. a lousy support person who didn't want to help with something they didn't know about.

Re:Obvious

Ever heard the phrase "you only have one chance to make a first impression?"

Applies to software, too.

Sure you say he should try Firefox again now that it's bumped up a version and improved. But I'm going to wager (this being Slashdot) that you're unwilling to install and try out RealPlayer again. Right?

Re:Obvious

> Ever heard the phrase "you only have one chance to make a first impression?"
> Applies to software, too.

Unless it's Microsoft s/w, apparently - I don't recall it being particularly good when it first came out, but they have the 'advantage' of being able to put it on everyone's desktop, so people used it, *despite* their first impression.

Re:Obvious

I believe it's more like website project managers saying:

92% of our server logs show people using IE7.

Except that there are two problems with that argument.

1) It's not 92%. I mean I *suppose* there could be some Microsoft fansite out there that does nothing but talk about how great Microsoft is all day that gets 92% of their audience from IE. But at my company, which is a mainstream entertainment company, IE usage is currently at 64%. That's all versions, including AOL, including IE4, even including Opera identifying itself as IE.

2) So the question then is how does that website project manager turn to his executive VP for marketing and say "oh, sorry, we're not going to develop for that other 36%, even though that's a couple million visitors per month." If you're at all familiar with the modern corporate environment, you know that the "but we don't have time!" excuse doesn't fly anymore - whether it's actually the case or not. Every web department I've ever worked in has been staffed with overworked, burnt-out, disgruntled workaholics that are on the job 18 hours a day, about 15 of which are spent doing browser QA. (Yeah, you can tell I'm saying this from experience.)

Even if it *is* only 8%, that's still potentially a million visitors or more at some sites. No company in the world is going to say that's not worth making an effort for, even if it means hiring one more person.

We've leveraged scripting technology that only works with ActiveX. If you want to replace it, I'm going to need the following additional server, developers, and it's going to delay the $NEW_CONTENT_PROJECT by 4 months and cost $LARGE_AMOUNT_OF_MONEY.

Or, in other words, time to start looking for a new job while your boss hires somebody who will actually do the work he wanted you to do. It sucks, but that's modern corporate life.

So really, the only reason a modern site would be developed for IE only is gross ignorance on the part of company executives. They'd have to have no interest in or knowledge of the company's own web site. That's certainly possible, but less common these days than it used to be. Because no company these days would knowingly exclude a large portion of their potential audience unless they had some vested interest in doing so (e.g. an MS-affiliated company - though even sites like msnbc.com now use Flash video made to work across all browsers, rather than the ActiveX-enabled Windows Media that they used to use).

Re:Thanks so very much

"And there's nothing wrong with that. Isn't it, ultimately, about choice? Right?"

I got the impression that the article was discussing the server-side requirement for IE, not the user's voluntary browser selection. If you like IE, good on you.

But if, as you say, it's ultimately about choice, the article is pointing out how odd it is that people running websites would still design new sites demanding one particular browser.

Re:Not Obvious

Or...there are people who simply do not know about Firefox.

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.

Re:How many people HAVE to use something else?

Well the question is better stated: Is your website worth enough to those users for them to open up IE every single time they wish to look at it. Most of the time the question is "no." In the end most people would just say "fuck it" after a while and use another website that provides the same service (welcome to capitalism).

Re:Obvious arrogance.

How about IE has functionality that your sacred cow doesn't?

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).

Re:Obvious arrogance.

Such as? What necessary piece of functionality does IE have that Mozilla (or Opera, or others) don't have?

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.

Thanks for your interest in Movielink, the leading movie download service. Sorry, but Movielink is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States.

I guess I'll never know.

Re:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...)

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

Obvious denial

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.

Re:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...)

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.

Re:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...)

It'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.

We only support IE because...

...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.

Re:We only support IE because...

"The boss wants to cut costs and doesn't see the choice driving away clients."

And then you say "Nobody here is dumb ..."???? Come ON!

And he's right

"The boss wants to cut costs and doesn't see the choice driving away clients."

And then you say "Nobody here is dumb ..."???? Come ON!

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.

Re:And he's right

It's a question of how many people will boycott your site rather than use IE.

As you business plummets downhill backwards, remember this: the answer is You'll never know.

To ensure ongoing salary payments, you might wish to explain this to your boss now!

Re:We only support IE because...

Nobody here is dumb or lazy.

Yes they are - the boss deciding this policy is fundamentally stupid. If he worked for me he'd have 1 month notice to realign his attitude or it's goodbye. Anyone stupid enough to reduce the availability of a commercial website by making it browser specific doesn't deserve a job in the IT industry (unless he's downgraded to Janitor!).

As a maintainer of a Top 10 website (it's the only British one listed in the Netcraft Top 10), I can tell you that Internet Explorer accounts for less than 50% of our visits right now and has IE use has visibly declined in the last year. Indeed "other" Operating Systems now account for over 45% of our site visits. We will not be using proprietary codecs in future for our on-line programme services.

Game Over, Microsoft!

Re:Proprietary Stuff That's IE Exclusive

it's sort of cool to have an entire page pixelate/warp/dissolve/rotate/... in.

no...no it's not

Re:Obvious arrogance.

a lazy and/or dumb development team

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.

Re:Obvious arrogance.

Typical slshdot arrogance. How about IE has functionality that your sacred cow doesn't?

If Y% of the market uses IE and Z% uses Firefox, Opera, etc... well, as Z grows, supporting only IE gets stupider and stupider.

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...

Re:Obvious arrogance.

If Y% of the market uses IE and Z% uses Firefox, Opera, etc... well, as Z grows, supporting only IE gets stupider and stupider.

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...

Re:Obvious arrogance.

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!

Forcing people to use IE?

I think you mean forcing people to use other sites.

Re:Forcing people to use IE?

Doesn't work. I use Mozilla suite as my browser (Firefox just has a slightly different "feel" that I never got to like). The site gives me the "You must use IE" message. So I change my User-Agent string to "IE 6.0 WinXP" through Mozilla PrefBar [mozdev.org] (an awesome tool for Mozilla or firefox users, basicly lets you change any config file variable direct through the toolbar). When I tried it changing my UA string, the site just didn't load.

I don't know what they use, but it does need IE. Probably ActiveX or some such.

Re:IE!!!!!

A flame war means page views.

"Allowing" IETab?

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.

Re:"Allowing" IETab?

What's (somewhat) progressive about MovieLink isn't that they're allowing IETab... but that they're recommending it.

It's not all that progressive though is it? That just means the website isn't from a time where for most people there really was no known alternative to IE. They're obviously well aware of Firefox and yet they have chosen to jam a proverbial fork in the user's eye by suggesting they change their software to fit the website. If anything that's regression in my book. They're aware of other browsers, they explicitly just don't care.

Poor programming

In those cases re-making a site/changing it for maximum browser capability doesn't make as much sense as some instructions for how FF users might get round the problem. It might be that they don't care, it might be its actually the most sensible action.

In 90% of the "IE-only" sites I've encountered, the problem is not that they would need to re-make their site but that they stuck some "browser verification" script on the front page that doesn't know anything about the capability of non-IE browsers and thus excludes them. Changing the site in these cases is as easy as removing the "you must use IE to enter" code. I usually test these cases by asking my non-IE browser to lie about what it is, and things then usually work perfectly.

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.

Re:"Allowing" IETab?

What's (somewhat) progressive about MovieLink isn't that they're allowing IETab... but that they're recommending it.

That isn't progressive, its idiotic.
They support non-IE/Windows platforms by telling you to install Windows and IE.

I bet this bullshit was because someone said "Make sure it supports firefox too"!

Then either the developer was colossally arrogant and BS'd his way through by showing that it worked with IE tab, or the developer was colossally stupid and actually thinks supporting IETab somehow constitutes support for firefox.

Either way, the developer deserves to be beaten to pulp.

Then don't go there

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.

Re:Then don't go there

Exactly. This is the strongest message you can send and it's actually your easiest option thanks to Internet search engines. Any decent web logfile analysis package is capable of showing stats on the number of visitors that only visited the home page and didn't follow any links. If the site in question is using one and that figure gets high enough then they might just correlate it with browser usage and the clue train will pull into the station. If not, well, it's their lost sales, advertising revenue, warm-fuzzies though high pages hits or whatever other factor they judge the success of the site by.

Wild guess here...

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.

features - (kinda)

Many sites (especially employee websites) require IE because they are using some active-X or item that IE has integrated into it. People say, "cool I can use x,y,z instead of a stand alone app." Since IE is so much more then a browser it does all of this wonderful things. Annoying I know, but people want a one stop app for everything even if it means you use IE to imput your time or run some database app for work.

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?

User Agent Switcher (for Firefox users)

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.

Re:User Agent Switcher (for Firefox users)

Just tried it, it just saye that it's loading and sits there.

Easy

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

New technologies, "corporate design" and other bs

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.

Re:New technologies, "corporate design" and other

And I've had this discussion with people since the browser came out.

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.

Lazyness, Popularity

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.

Malware-dependent sites

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"

Do what I 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.

Because they're created by clueless n00bs

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.

Slashdot Webmasters Forcing IE?

If you are a webmaster, what are your reasons for forcing IE?

Do you honestly believe there exists a /. webmaster who would require IE?

And if such a monster exists, do you honestly believe he'd admit it?

Re:Slashdot Webmasters Forcing IE?

Do you honestly believe there exists a /. webmaster who would require IE?

And if such a monster exists, do you honestly believe he'd admit it?

I'll nearly admit it. My company produces a web content management system whose admin interface was IE-only in the previous version. The current version adds support for FF, Opera and Safari, although we're considering officially recommending that our clients not use FF with it: FF's implementation of HTML design mode ("midas") is severely fucked. So far, we've spent hundreds of hours working around bugs in it, and they're not all finished with yet. Safari support isn't entirely there on the current official versions of Safari, because some of the features we need (specifically execCommand("inserthtml", ...)) aren't implemented in that version, although they do apparently work if you use a nightly build of AppleWebKit. So, essentially, yeah, we produce a web site that only works properly in IE and Opera.

What could be worse?

Never mind IE, the idiots I'd like to kick the shit out of are the ones who do a website entirely in Flash!

Requiring scripting is even more annoying

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]

Hmmmm Maybe this is a clue

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...

As I was told

by a tech support person, "because Linux and free software are hacker tools".

The reason why our company does is ...

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)

Re:The reason why our company does is ...

Not sure your exact meaning of authentication cache... however if you are talking http authentication (Popup login password window brought on by .htaccess or such) then I know that it can be done with the web developer plugin in Firefox.

Miscellaneous -> Clear Private Data -> HTTP Authentication

It should be a quick trip through their code to find out how they did it and make a little plugin of your own to do it for you.

In fact... while you are in there grab the code that lets it clear session cookies and run that at the same time also. That will kill ANY authorization system they have been in for 99.999% of the web.

Laziness

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).

It's worse than that

No 98, no ME, no MAC, no Linux

Sorry, but as of May 2, 2005, Movielink no longer supports Windows 98 and ME operating systems.
Movielink also does not support Mac or Linux.

In order to enjoy the Movielink service, you must use Windows 2000 or XP,
which support certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies.

Just to balance things out...

...I use an XHTML mime-type on all my pages.

Why are websites still doing anything?

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?

One example:

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.

Lack of IT expertise

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.

Incompetence

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.

The worst in people?

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...

Their BUSINESS is the Internet

Sure, brick-and-mortar pipebending stores that can do business by fax & phone don't need to accomodate all web browsers.

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.

try living in a COUNTRY that mandates IE

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...

"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 [zdnet.com]

http://www.zdnet.co.kr/etc/eyeon/internet/0,390369 62,39154849,00.htm [zdnet.co.kr] ...)

First Estimate of Mac Users on /.

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.

Hotwire penalizes you for using Firefox

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....

Testing time

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.

I use Frontpage because it is all I know

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.

The Internet...

... uses the blue e thingy. So, you don't use the internet?

Development and support are not free...

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.

IE only sites make me a sad fox....

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 [toastytech.com] 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.

How's this for stupid?

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?

The old "almost everybody uses IE" excuse

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.

Re:Banks

Bank of America works...Of course, they're the official bank of the antichrist, so there's that.

Re:Citibank and Firefox

Citibank is the issuing bank for many popular retail credit cards. Their account access site (with the name of "Account Online" https://www.accountonline.com/ [accountonline.com]) is not tested for any browsers other than IE

I have a account in Poland with Citibank, the access site is www.online.citibank.pl. I tend to use the English site (because I prefer English language) and I can tell you it is fully compatible with Firefox, Safari, IE etc.

Seems this is a issue limited to the American Citibank.