Why are Websites Still Forcing People to Use IE? 899
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?"
Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Forcing people to use IE? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Allowing" IETab? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's (somewhat) progressive about MovieLink isn't that they're allowing IETab... but that they're recommending it.
Then don't go there (Score:5, Insightful)
Wild guess here... (Score:3, Insightful)
features - (kinda) (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lazyness, Popularity (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
"This site works best (for us, not for you) with Internet Explorer"
Do what I do... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no sense worrying about one site when there are usually at least 3 more to replace it.
Re:"Allowing" IETab? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they're created by clueless n00bs (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Allowing" IETab? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
What could be worse? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Then don't go there (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious arrogance. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Laziness (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:New technologies, "corporate design" and other (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Laziness (Score:3, Insightful)
One example: (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Then don't go there (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks so very much (Score:2, Insightful)
But because I do take exception to being so categorized, I'll comment that I have IE, Firefox, and Netscape Navigator installed on my current laptop and use IE about 80% of the time. Firefox is usually quicker, but IE gives a browsing experience that, in general, I prefer. I've articulated some of the reasons in past posts, so I won't go into it here. Just wanted to inform you that there are one or two intelligent, hard-working geeks about who actually happen to prefer IE.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Isn't it, ultimately, about choice? Right?
Re:It says you must use IE. (Score:3, Insightful)
Making the decision to use ActiveX is a conscious decision to say "We don't care about the tens of millions of people that use OS X or Linux". I know that it's easy to tell your boss "It works for 95% of the world" and have it be OK, but somehow, changing that around to say "I've purposely chosen to block out tens of millions of potential customers by going this route. And by the way, they just happen to be the ones who tend to A) be the most technically savvy or B) have the most disposable income to spend (or both)".
If that's OK with their bosses, fine, but somehow I don't think that particular message is getting through. As for me, I'll gladly take my business elsewhere.
I'm not just part of that five percent. I'm part of the top five percent!
Re:Why are websites still doing anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because HTTP is a stateless protocol. When implementing user sessions, you have to rely on extra-protocol information, either with cookies or by including a session id in the url. Cookies tend to be easier to work with.
Re:Thanks so very much (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The reason why our company does is ... (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't know much about NTLM authentication, but from what I'm reading it's pretty crappy. This sounds like a classic case of choosing a crappy Microsoft technology, then saying that alternatives don't measure up because they don't support the crappy MS tech, even though they support much better and more reasonable alternatives.
Re:Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
Web Developer: Fine - we can do all that and reach 90% of the market and it will cost $x. Or we can build a cross-browser site that will cost $y and reach 99% of the market.
Business: Well, $x is less than $y and 90% is still a lot of people. Do the first thing.
Re:Thanks so very much (Score:3, Insightful)
Again with this "browsing experience". I don't want a damn browsing experience, I want the damn information/content that I'm going to a given website for. Anything that gets in the way of that -- especially all-singing all-dancing crap -- may be a "browsing experience" for some (and an image of 60s drug-addled hippies grooving to Jimi Hendrix comes to mind), but it just gets in the way for the rest of us. Gods, it's even worse than blink tags.
The worst in people? (Score:5, Insightful)
I propose a much simpler answer: Return-on-investment.
Here's an example: When the site was created, it was around the time that building for IE was considered a must-have and getting a presence on the Internet meant untold riches coming your way. Companies hired designers based on those premises. The designers delivered. The companies sunk a chunk of money into it.
A few years later, designing for _ALL_ browsers is a must-have, but... The company didn't make the untold riches they were promised (turns out people would rather buy tube bending by phone and email). They don't see the point in sinking money into a redesign for a website that doesn't amount to much in the company's overall income.
Yeah, it annoys me when Firefox doesn't work on a site, but I have alternatives and, for the most part, some of those sites are indeed being retooled little by little. All of my bank sites support Firefox without question. Something not true a couple of years ago.
Cheers,
Mike...
M$ Video over IP platform (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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 arrogance. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
The other thing to consider is that if 92% of the logs show IE7, is that really because your clients don't use other browsers, or is it because your site's so broken that the Firefox/Safari/Opera users just go to another vendor that knows how to properly code a friggin web site ? That 8% of "outcasts" are probably hitting your page once, realizing it doesn't work with their preferred browser, then switching to IE because they love you too much to go elsewhere. That's what I have to do with certain Government sites because 1. their web developers are idiots who can't code and 2. they're oblivious to anything developed in the last decade. Thing is, I don't really have a choice; it's either I switch to IE and get my tax files uploaded, or I don't and they send the men in black after me. How about you ditch the server logs and ask your paying customers which browsers they want to see supported ? It could go one of two ways: either that 92% turns into something more representative like 60-70%, or it tips the other way and everyone says "I love IE, screw the rest". At least then you have documentation to support your decision.
Re:Obvious arrogance. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a big deal. (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean is there a serious important website that is relevant that doesn't load in Firefox?
rhY
Re:The reason why our company does is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Proprietary Stuff That's IE Exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)
no...no it's not
Re:Not Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a growing population of non-browser devices hitting the web too. The reality is, if you're designing for just IE you're alienating a lot of customers and EVEN IF if you're a lame web dev who would need to charge more to support all browsers, the extra cost of the coming years will catch up with that pathetic development savings.
(The real moral of the story is that if a web dev quotes you two prices, one with and one without "other browser" support, then you need to get yourself a difference developer because your current one probably uses Microsoft Publisher for making websites.)
Re:The reason why our company does is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
That is very deceiving. For one, they could easily change their browser identification to be just about whatever browser your site wants. Second, as posted above, that 8% could be just landing and finding out you don't support them and moving on or changing their ID as above. Still, for those that don't know about the ID you have just forced them away from your site just because a log file told you to. Like the poster above, I recommend you ditch the log and ask those that visit.
B.
Re:Thanks so very much (Score:3, Insightful)
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Yes, there is. It's fucking selfish. As an "intelligent, hard-working geek", you know how much Internet Explorer users are holding back the web. And yet you continue to be part of the problem.
It's people like you that make it impossible for web developers to use CSS described in a specification nine years old. It's people like you that make it impossible for web developers to use PNG functionality described in a specification over a decade old. It's people like you that make it impossible for web developers to use HTML features described in specifications over a decade old.
You are holding back the web, causing web developers all over the world to give up on going home to see their kids early because they have to nail that elusive Internet Explorer bug or the website update can't go live. You are causing a ton of absolutely needless work because you insist on using a retard web browser. You are, for all intents and purposes, polluting the web.
Re:Because they're created by clueless n00bs (Score:3, Insightful)
This statement tells me you've never done web development.
IE, FF, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and all the other browsers out there ALL treat HTML, JS and CSS just differently enough that it's very hard to "write a brilliant page that works everywhere." Even different versions of the browsers will handle some situations differently. Sure, you can do some static HTML and some modest CSS and it'll look fine everywhere. But you can't create anything complicated or impressive without tripping over these browser bugs or quirks. Look at
Quirksmode [quirksmode.org] documents a lot of these differences, and almost any time you try to make a "brilliant page" you will come across some weird quirk of some browser that will make you search the world trying to find out why something doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Half of those are on Quirksmode. In the end, you'll find another way to do it that works equally badly in all browsers, but is at least consistent.
Re:From an ISP whose billing page is IE-only... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have to use the billing page to set up an account? If so, that could explain a lack of Firefox/Opera/Safari/... users :)
If I were a customer of your ISP I wouldn't complain, I'd just leave. I complain to companies I like, not ones I don't like. The ones I don't like I waste as little of my time with as possible; I certainly don't help them out with feedback. Have you ever correlated requests for the billing page from non-IE browsers with cancelled acounts? It shouldn't be too hard to work out retention of customers who use IE compared to those who use other browsers.
Re:What could be worse? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't go there... and request change! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Allowing" IETab? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey developers, the front page of a site is like the doorway to a place of business. Does yours say "Welcome!" or "Fuck Off!!"?
Re:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Obvious arrogance. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing bothers me more, being a hardcore Opera user, than going to a webpage and getting the message "Sorry, you must use IE, Firefox, or Safari to browse this page".
Theres nothing wrong with Opera - its just as good (of course, in my opinion, far superior) to the other browsers, and i find that almost all webpages work.
And if i get another "Your browser must be java compatible in order to view this webpage" error, ill scream.
That doesnt even makes sense.
-Red
And he's right (Score:4, Insightful)
And then you say "Nobody here is dumb
About three comments further up, someone posts a story about trying to use an IE only site to open an account. The poster in that comment went through a long, fruitless call to the companies tech support, complained bitterly to them that they did'nt support firefox, and then caved in and used IE.
The simple fact is that Windows has over 90% of the OS market, (Probably over 99% of certain demographics) and every single windows user has a copy of IE. If a firefox user tries to access a site and gets an "IE only" message, he will just click the blue E and get on with it. Both my desktop and my laptop run ubuntu, but if I really needed to access an IE only site, I'd just boot into windows.
It's not a question of how many people use firefox. It's a question of how many people will boycott your site rather than use IE.
Re:Thanks so very much (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you are stupid and/or lazy for forcing IE down everybody else's throat by writing web-pages that will not work in any other browser.
And your reading comprehension needs work too.
Obvious denial (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
No (Score:3, Insightful)
"Allowing" the IETab Firefox extension is not "somewhat progressive"
It's MS-Windows only, and can be exploited by nearly all of the security flaws that plague IE.
Their BUSINESS is the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And he's right (Score:2, Insightful)
Or how many people have a Mac and can't use IE (also a growing number) and have no choice but to boycott the site?
Re:We only support IE because... (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Frontpage because it is all I know (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems like a logical fallacy to me. I may have disliked previous versions of RealPlayer, but I don't go running around slashdot bashing the current version while using my experience with an earlier version as justification.
Re:We only support IE because... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:From an ISP whose billing page is IE-only... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obvious arrogance. (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be more correct to say that they're requiring English in the U.S. to order. Note that I said "more" correct, because it's still not a good analogy -- but it's better than the one you offered.
Just because Firefox is better doesn't make it the dominate browser.
Re:Obvious arrogance. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
You'd have a hard time justifying it with a potential userbase of nearly 13% Firefox users and another 5% "Other"? You clearly work for some very stupid people.
Because IE is not alone in its world (Score:2, Insightful)
However, Microsoft does so much more. IE is only one small little part of the Microsoft world. As a small part integrated into a huge world, I prefer IE to FF. It's just that simple.
For example, I do a lot of programming in HTA's. I think that it's just a glorious environment/platform/API that comes ready with a network engine, rendering engine, scripting engine, and interface engine ready to go. So building business applications is simply a matter of programming the business logic. It's performance and memory usage are obviously poor compared to alternatives, but for business apps, it's absolutely perfect.
And that's because the entire operating system is available. People mock activex controls, but really they simply allow a developer to access anything in the system. I have no idea where to begin if I wanted to integrate a barcode scanner into a Firefox web app. Maybe a simple application, like an inventory system. And some systems have a barcode scanner. Is FF going to let my web page access the barcode scanner? I don't know. But IE will! And with the scanner's native drivers too, or with my own, or with a generic port reader.
It seems that FF deals with security by destroying features. Instead of starting off as a client application, and having access to everything -- like every installed application -- FF seems to start off with nothing, in its own little world -- like every web page. That's a browser. I haven't browsed the web since the days when I surfed the web. As a tool, it simply needs to be more powerful.
I don't care about the FF bugs. And I'm not talking about the maybe bugs, or the security bugs. I'm talking about the rendering bugs -- like contents overflowing it's container, or hidden (display:none) objects not being centered within a non-hidden container, and then not being centered when they are later revealed.
I care about the limitation of FF as a system component. It has addons a'plenty, but it isn't an addon itself. IE is a small component -- very small. Having created my own pluggable protocols -- another thing I don't know if FF can handle -- I'm used to blurring the line between web page and client machine.
So yes, any time a web page grows to the point where it does something interesting -- more than presenting plain information -- it quickly benefits from being a system piece of client software, rather than a restricted web page. FF falls short there. IE starts there.
So, the reasons again are: system peripherals, other system components, pluggable protocols, activex controls. The idea is that IE is on a real client machine. FF is a terminal app that hides the client machine for "security purposes". I guess that means no automatic printing too. No controlling CD burners, or card swipes.
Think of every piece of software that you've seen in your consumer life labelled "employees only". Now that we live in a time where everything goes over the Internet, how many of those can be built on FF? All of them can be built on IE. And I can promise that.
I can swear, right now, that if it a real-world issue can be solved by a web site in any browser, it can be solved by an IE browser. Can you say the same of FF?
Control of peripherals like printers, scanners, readers, burners, drives, keys, locks, turnstiles, IR, RF, and any device attached to the client machine; Control of other software installed on the client machine like remote desktop, and ftp server, old DOS apps, corporate software, and anything else installed on the client machine.
The idea is that there is a client machine. It's only a security hole when a malicious individual comes along to take advantage of it. When that criminal is not around, it's a feature. Now that criminal needs to be stopped, but not by destroying all of the features.
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
At ASP.Net 1.1, if you build using most of the ASP.Net controls you will end up with a non-standards compliant site. With ASP, you have to work harder to do that.
Re:eTRADE requires IE to access account (Score:3, Insightful)
User agent switcher [mozilla.org]
I really hate using it though, because if the webmasters care at all (and are looking at their logs), it just looks like "oh everyone is using IE anyway, who said Firefox is gaining in marketshare?"
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Development and support are not free... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Beaten to a pulp ?????? Sickening comment! (Score:2, Insightful)
Very rarely does anybody deserve to get 'beaten to a pulp' over technical choice issues. I am surprised and saddened that the parent was modded insightful for the above comment. Only days after 35 people are gunned down by a nutcase with petty grievances we see pre-pubescent slashdotters suggesting people should be killed because they choose to support a particular web browser. I understand that this whole M$ thingie gets people a little hot under the collar. However the whole debate gets rather dogmatic and quasi-religious. Some of the comments flying round fit better to religious extremist websites than a supposed tech geek sites. Tone it down!!
My 2c
KA
3rd party tools purchased 5+ years ago (Score:1, Insightful)
Secondly, non-technical people in charge of the budget who set the requirements.
Third, Testing requirements. If you don't explicitly test it, then it is considered dangerous to allow other clients (by some).
Forth, the cross-site advertising method they use isn't compatible with anything other than I.E.
fifth, IE still has 80% of the browser market and they want to target folks that just do what they are told.
Lastly, they don't like YOU.
vote with your money (Score:2, Insightful)
James
Re:Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Obvious (Score:1, Insightful)
<script language="javascript">
window.location.href = "#myanchor";
</script>
The old "almost everybody uses IE" excuse (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Allowing" IETab? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a professional web developer, too (my sites get in the ~6 million hits/month range), and I have never come across a need for ANY Active/X object. All it does is add bloat to the page, and anything it provides can be done with HTML/Javascript/SSI for better quality (i.e., lighter, compliant pages), easier extensibility (just try to change an Active/X object without using a compiler) and ease of use (does any Active/X POS work for folks who are on text-only or limited browsers?
The sooner Active/X is dead, the sooner dumb developers will leave the field and find work more suitable to their skills, such as cleaning toilets. No, that's insulting to janitors. Sorry.