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?"
Re:Easy (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm going to stress two of those: Lack of funding and business risk.
Our "company face" website is browser-agnostic, but our major web apps are strictly B2B. We designed them years ago, in the first round of ASP, updated it slightly for ASP2.0, with lots of inter-connected controls, and we were never given time ("funding") to make it work across other browsers when some nice cross-browser JS frameworks came out. And you know what? All our customers enforce IE in-house, so we have no requirement to make it cross-browser, and in fact, a major change at this point would be a "business risk" (although God knows I wish we could scrap it and start over--we've had to add so many features that it's a nightmare now--but there's that "funding" issue again).
Although I must add, anything designed for the end-user (where the environment isn't mandated) should darned well better work in IE, FF, Opera and Safari!
Requiring scripting is even more annoying (Score:4, Interesting)
[/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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Wild guess here... (Score:3, Interesting)
That would make sense if they were only supporting IE6, but they are supporting IE5.0+, which means IE5, IE5.5, IE6, and (presumably) IE7. That is already four browsers, and they are browsers that cannot easily be installed on the same computer at the same time, making them even more difficult to test.
Re:What could be worse? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obvious arrogance. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I guess I'll never know.
Why are websites still doing anything? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Movielink Uses Microsoft DRM, requiring IE (Score:1, Interesting)
Blame DRM for this one kids, not laziness or poor site design.
Re:Requiring scripting is even more annoying (Score:2, Interesting)
You're not going to stop the JS/AJAX trend, from what I can tell, and it may be a while before something supersedes it, so I'd get used to it. If not, you'll just be one of those guys whining on a forum on how everything isn't your way. Oh wait, you're almost there now...
I'm a Lead Web Dev - I hate IE (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm the Lead Web Developer for a company and I hate IE. I had held out some hope that the fn morons that are developing it would get a clue but they didn't. Just have a look at:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css [webdevout.net]
I'd really like to ditch all the crappy tables but IE is so screwed up I'm stuck in the 90's with page design.
CSS 3 is so cool I can't wait to use the print capabilities but at the rate Microslow is developing IE I'll be retired before they even get freak'n css 2.1 working. How many Billions of dollars? And this is all we get?
I'm a Lead Web Dev and I hate IE.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Why yes, I am bitter. Why do you ask?
eTRADE requires IE to access account (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently, I needed to open an account on eTRADE in order to access a stock grant given to me by one of my clients.
Well, it turns out that it is impossible to open an account without IE.
I then called tech support to complain. Well, the rep said that I had no choice but to use IE. I then said that I don't use IE because of security issues and that I was surprised that the leading eCommerce financial services company requires users to exclusively use buggy and insecure Micro$oft software. He kept insisting that I couldn't open an account and access my stock grants without IE. In fact, he couldn't even access my account until I used IE to first open the account.
I then suggested that maybe he could open it for me but he said that too was impossible. Finally, I got him to go to a supervisor to ask whether there is any way for me to get access to my money (i.e. stocks) without being required to use IE. After a long time on hold, he said that if I was willing to wait for 3-4 weeks they could snail mail out a written form that I could then fill out and return by snail me -- he warned that even after I returned it, manual processing would delay opening of the account. He was not even able to fax or email the form.
Even I was not willing to take that much time and effort to stand on principle. So, after haranguing the poor rep a little longer and finally getting him to file a complaint and bug report, I had no choice but to break down and launch my dusty copy of IE on my laptop.
Re:eTRADE requires IE to access account (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:eTRADE requires IE to access account (Score:5, Interesting)
a. your computer
b. a lousy support person who didn't want to help with something they didn't know about.
We only support IE because... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Lack of IT expertise (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...) (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Forcing people to use IE? (Score:3, Interesting)
As of mid-April 2007 the official SOS site only supports IE. As a Mac/Firefox user, I quite literally could not use the shopping cart to purchase certain documents as the site simply refused to work. Clicking certain links did nothing. It didn't complain. It didn't bail. It just didn't do anything.
I tried every browser I have (several in all), and none worked. In the end having no Windows machines around I had to have a friend go through and purchase the documents for me from his Windows PC.
I'm lucky to've been in a position where someone could so easily help me out. I'm sure there are plenty of people and situations where this just isn't practical.
In 1996 I might understand this situation, but in 2007? Coding a shopping cart to be cross-browser compatible just isn't that difficult. In fact it sure seems to me it's actually tougher not to be.
Re:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:eTRADE requires IE to access account (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...) (Score:5, Interesting)
These problems immediatly compound when trying to add CSS to the mix.
Re:What about Firefox only sites? (Score:2, Interesting)
And what's with the release of IE7? Workarounds for IE6's shittiness doesn't work anymore, but the shittiness those workarounds were design to circumvent are still there. Good job, now I must make three different sets of CSS for simple, basic layout. Almost got a stroke there.
Re:Because they're created by clueless n00bs (Score:3, Interesting)
1.) Most software engineers know HTML and JavaScript from learning it on there own, or taking a crash course in it. Unless they have been working with it for a long time, they don't know the good coding practices that allow compatibility with all browsers, however most awful habits work with IE just fine. Unfortunately, not all code that renders correctly in firefox, renders correctly in Internet Explorer. So if you ensure firefox compatibility, you may find I.E incompatibility, which is the worst case scenario.
2.) Good web designers cost more money. And what the company gains is not irritating the niche audience who have to switch to I.E from whatever browser they were on. Thats just not worth it to them.
3.) The things that make the most money are the stupidest. Ringtones, Porno, screensavers, and anything else that they can make a popup for. And the people who spend the money on this kind of garbage are again people who think that the internet is the Internet Explorer Icon. Again, no need to worry about the niche audience.
4.) Considering how fast developers have to make projects live, spending less time getting it to work is more important than spending more time getting it to work good (see Microsoft). Although this isn't ideal, it happens to allow companies to be competitive. For example, Movielink had to get out there fast or see Netflix and Blockbusters domination grow while they ensured compatibility.
It is interesting to note though, that with Dell now shipping systems with Linux or just not Windows, that the I.E. market share could start dropping quicker, in which these will become more of a problem than an inconvenience.
What is a website? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think part of the problem is that too many people involved in designing websites think of them as printed material. Why treat webpages like they are coming off a printing press with mathmatically precise margins, borders, and character spacing? A lot of sites I run across like that, use a font size that's too small for my older eyes. When I try to bump up the font size in my browser it doesn't work, or the page becomes a jumbled mess.
If it is readable, looks basically the same at first glance in different browsers, why limit yourself to one browser because you have a ruler and know how to use it? You can usually get a page to render nicely in different browsers just by using good coding practices. A website should not be considered printed material. A web page is, and can be, much more than that.
FrankNRe:Obvious arrogance. (IE dependence war story...) (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obvious arrogance. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I force Firefox (Score:2, Interesting)
According to our stats, 90% of our users are on IE with 40% of those being IE7, 7% on Firefox, and 2% on Safari. We serve upwards of 10,000 visitors per day with more than 30,000 pageviews. We don't have to support anyone or anything but we (as in I) choose to do so because not doing so reflects stupidity and arrogance. Being in the business of education, I find it is very necessary to educate the general public (your typical IE / windows user) that they are using an insecure and non-standard browser while still offering to support them until they are comfortable making the change to something better.
Re:eTRADE requires IE to access account (Score:2, Interesting)
First Estimate of Mac Users on /. (Score:4, Interesting)
While we're asking pointed questions..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Inevitably these same sites are coded to display a fixed page width, so again at 800 x 600 they fill the screen from edge to edge, but at 1920x1200 there is 6 inches of blank white screen either side of the content.
How many people HAVE to use something else? (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll generally see figures like: "In Europe, non IE browsers are approaching 25% market share." or "Non IE browsers now account for 15% of web traffic."
How many of that 15-25% (depending on figures) truly don't have the option to open IE if they need to?
Don't get me wrong, I accept that it's still bad form to force your users to switch to an app they don't want to use and you'll certainly not win any friends that way...
But are you truly excluding Firefox and Opera users if they have IE bundled with their OS (which is still true for, what, 95%? of home users) but simply choose not to open it?
If a restaurant in a racist area decides to serve people regardless of race, are they truly excluding the racists who have elitist views, think the other race harbour viruses, etc. and therefore won't eat there? Or are the racists, who absolutely have the option to eat there, excluding themselves because of their elitism?
Sure, a few users truly don't have the option to use IE and it's certainly bad form to force people to use something they don't want to, even if they do already have it... But are you necessarily excluding them when they do still have the option?
Re:How many people HAVE to use something else? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hotwire penalizes you for using Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Foresight... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bank Of America also does this (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, aren't Bank of America the gasbags that are giving credit cards to illegal immigrants?
Re:What could be worse? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not Obvious (Score:1, Interesting)
Kinda hard to do if you have an employer who insists on FrontPage and no other. Have you ever seen what FrontPage does to a site? It's even worse if your web server is IIS. This is the kind of crap a web developer has to work with every day in those Microsoft only shops (and yes, they do exist).
(=/snip-}
I know what you mean. Had a PHB in love with FrontPage. He "helped" us poor coders "build" pages for the company web site. I spent more hours than I care to think about either cleaning up the crap he gave us or just scrapping his pages and rewriting them (had to be careful, though, they had to look exactly the same) so the pages would load in under 5 minutes and work with browsers other than IE...
Testing time (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:"Allowing" IETab? (Score:3, Interesting)
Then I spend a bit of time dealing with IE issues, but since I already know most of IE's quirks from experience I can relatively easily avoid most of them. e.g. I know about IE's horizontal border/margin width hiccups and I design from the start using nested div pairs when I want to assign both a fixed width and border/margin to a box so that IE won't freak out on me, etc.
So far I've never had to exploit a browser parsing bug to get the job done either. Now, I concede that the sites I work on aren't shooting for the most avante garde look, but they're typical of the big websites like Intel, Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, etc. Features of CSS that aren't well supported are simply not used. I have a very light touch when it comes to AJAX use, and so forth.
I specifically elect not to use tools that emit IE-exclusive code that doesn't work on other browsers. THAT, in my experience makes up the greatest offenders; any half decent html guy that can hand-code a page doesn't have a lot of issues with browser support once they've had a bit of experience. Its the guys who are heavily invested in shitty CMS tools and other page authoring systems that build noncompliant pages on the fly; the people stuck using them are largely unable to do jack with them to fix the output.
or write one ActiveX control that services 95% of your visitors
Anyone using ActiveX outside of an INTRA-net should be shot. ActiveX is an enterprise feature, it sucks on the public internet.
business types find a billion-dollar corporation constantly working on security more reassuring than the promises of volunteers who would rather add features than debug code.
Why the billion dollar corporation doesn't want to do maintenance either. They'd rather work on something with a profit margin. You'll notice that IE stagnated for a LONG time once it had more or less killed netscape. It wasn't until FF was starting to gain a LOT of mainstream press that IE started moving again.
Internet Explorer has been around a lot longer than Firefox has
Before there was the Firefox/IE browser war there was the Netscape/IE browser war, and Firefox is the evolution of Netscape.
stop wondering why nobody paid for a thousand man-hours of labor on your behalf
Its only a thousand man-hours if they decide to make it FF compliant (or should I say STANDARDS compliant) if they start at the end after a gazillion IE only pages have been generated using tools that can't emit standards compliant html/xhtml to save their lives. Hell half these tools don't even emit well formed pages with proper balanced opening/closing tags. That they work on any browser at all is almost more luck than anything else.
If one goes into a project with the requirement that it be standards compliant, it takes only a fraction of a percentage longer, and your users can generally use whatever modern browser on whatever modern platform they like.
Note I did say modern -- if you want to support OLD versions like IE5 for OS9, Netscape 3 on NT or something, you can still do standards compliant but you've got use standards dated accordingly, and that will limit your design.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Slashdot Webmasters Forcing IE? (Score:5, Interesting)
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",
Re:We only support IE because... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that the GP poster meant that older versions of Real Player were so invasive that people lost interest in using it and never came back. I did, but only after a long time and because I needed it to watch BBC news. Then, I had discovered that it wasn't as bad as it used to be (it didn't try to take over my desktop), but I bet a lot of people only remember what it used to be like and refuse to use it.
Opera UA string can still have 'Opera' in it (Score:2, Interesting)
As browser sniffers got even sniffier and started excluding any browser that said 'Opera'
Re:And he's right (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, he did that because he had *money* in the e*trade account.
I bet that if he didn't had any money to fetch back from there, he wouldn't even bothered calling in, but would have moved to a customer-friendly on-line trader...
I know that I don't even bother writing to web sites any more. If the web site I use don't work with firefox, I just go away, and that's all.
banks (Score:2, Interesting)
How's this for stupid? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a worse problem with Movielink.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Don't go there... and request change! (Score:3, Interesting)
Believe me, nobody cares about what browser you'd prefer to use. The decisions regarding where to spend money on a web presence are almost always made by someone who barely knows what a web browser IS, let alone that there's more than one. Most marketing departments (and make no mistake, that's who controls the web site budget) work in percentages. If they can support 90% of the market they're happy.
What I'm saying is that this isn't a customer service issue or a quality of product issue, it's a "the wrong people are making these decisions" issue. Most big enterprises would rather piss off a small percentage of their customers than spend money on something that nobody who matters within the organization understands.
This issue will not make any headway (and clearly it hasn't, how long have we all been bitching about this?) until two things happen. 1: Technical decisions should be made by technical people. That means no overpaid MBA C*O, no Marketing director, no VP-in-charge-of-things-that-begin-with-H-on-alter
It's not going to get fixed any time soon, and probably not at all. The only recourse that we have is to use another company for the services we're looking for and hope that someone realizes that lack of browser choice is equating to a loss in revenue, and that loss in revenue is significant enough to outweigh the additional cost of supporting multiple browsers. Not holding my breath.
Re:Then don't go there (Score:2, Interesting)
As much as I'd like to take my business somewhere else, by the time I'm buying my net connection for the night I already have my bunny slippers on and don't want to have to get dressed to find a new hotel.
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
So, I was affraid my bank was stupid, turns out they're lazy.
The lesson is, people say IE is required out of habit, not because it actually is.
Am I the only person on /. who understands this?? (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason is that Firefox does not support ActiveX, and certain aspects of Movielink's business depends on Windows Media Player and especially DRM updates done through ActiveX. This is the only reason that Movielink, or CinemaNow or any other online movie distributor that relies on Hollywood's favorable position towards Windows Media Player, forces their uses to use IE instead of Firefox.
Trust me, if FireFox actually supported what is neccessary to legally sell movies online (WMP), then you would be able to use Firefox. Historically, the Hollywood studious have only given their blessings to selling content using Microsoft's DRM. This is changing very slowly. Hollywood's policies are the reason for 90% of the public's complaints about legal movie download sites. They are strictly limited to what the studios let them do, not by what their programmers can do.
Re:Obvious (Score:1, Interesting)
Then you're a tool with no ability explain or convince your boss what the "right way" to do things is (i.e. follow standards that were made without the bottom line involved).
We need less people like you in the tech world and we need a hell of a lot more leaders.
When your boss says no, you say yes. Then you explain why. If, after numerous attempts to make him/her understand they still bathe in ignorance, you retain your integrity and fucking quit.
I just tried this out... (Score:1, Interesting)