Firefox Rant

[reanjr]

Our site has about 92% IE 5.5 and above. Annoying? Very much so, but that is the way it is and I have to cater to the dominant audience. I think I will be much happier once IE7 is ubiquitous.

That's an unusual situation. Can I ask who your audience is? Is it an internal site for a company with old versions of Windows?

IE 5.5 is now below 1% market share I believe. It is much more effective to target the latest version of Opera (the minority browser) than it is to target IE 5.x

 

[reanjr]

And there are many more professionals that have tried to make mostly-CSS, standards-compliant markup work, and given up in frustration because some tiny thing causes the whole structure to fall apart in one browser or another. My sites absolutely have to work in IE6+, FireFox 1+/Windows, and Safari, while keeping marketing people happy with their look and feel. And it's just not practical to use an all-CSS layout for them yet.

But it will be when IE7 hits. The main sticking points that force non-CSS use are the lack of support for display: table-x and display: inline-block, both of which should be supported in IE7. Opera and Safari already support them (though Safari can have issues with mixing inline-block with floats, this will probably be fixed soon, and there are workarounds). Firefox does not support inline-block properly yet (to my knowledge), but as soon as IE does, Firefox is sure to follow quickly.

After that web developers won't have any excuses left.

 

[reanjr]

You know, I don't think the browser argument has anything to do with security or standards or any of that. Those are excuses. I think it's simply hate for Microsoft because it's a big business. Think about it. A few years back, NS was THE browser of choice for all the Microsoft haters. Now none of them even mention it, probably because I believe it's owned by AOL (another of the evil coporations!). They've all gone to worship at the altar of Firefox. According to the Gospel of Open Code (), anyone who isn't running Firefox on a Linux box is playing the Internet version of Russian roulette.

Netscape was released open source, became Mozilla, and was then trimmed down to Firefox. It didn't disappear as an MS competitor, it just morphed and was renamed.

IE was alot less secure than the other browsers, but most of that has been fixed. The main problem with IE and Netscape is the poor user interface. People who surf and research on the web alot can up their productivity tremendously by using a different browser. IE and Netscape are least common denominator products without many features for anyone who wants to really take advantage of the www.

 

[reanjr]

3) A footnote to the security features issue: there is a reason why there are very few viruses created for UNIX-type operating systems--it's nearly impossible to create a virus for those systems. The user permissions required to do anything limit the damage a non-root user can do. There may be fewer UNIX-type systems out there, but they do hold quite valuable information. Break-ins to UNIX-type systems are usually caused by administrators who use simple passwords to their /root like "god".

IE7 promises to beat out even that security by sandboxing the process into a limited user account in Vista.

 

[reanjr]

It's not in IE6.x because Microsoft didn't think of it (and it didn't show up in Mozilla/Firefox until long after IE6 came out). It is in IE7.

It has been in Opera for years and years. MS just didn't think it was intuitive for users based on usability studies. Remember when Office apps used to be MDI - they would have a single window and you could then switch between the documents open from that window? MS has since abandoned that design paradigm as it was shown to slow people down. Of course browsing is a totally different experience. Unfortunately, MS never had a large testbed to see how it could and should work until Firefox came along. Hopefully MS learns from Firefox's tabbing mistakes and goes with the original Opera design which is far more intuitive.

 

[FreeXenon]

That's an unusual situation. Can I ask who your audience is? Is it an internal site for a company with old versions of Windows?

IE 5.5 is now below 1% market share I believe. It is much more effective to target the latest version of Opera (the minority browser) than it is to target IE 5.x

The actual stats are more like IE6 91% and IE5.x 1.5%. Lumping the two together can definitely be misleading.

Mozilla browsers are about 6.5% and Opera is less than .1% or so.

I work for a small wisconsin county. www.co.sauk.wi.us
We are in the process of a usability base redesign.

 

[reanjr]

The actual stats are more like IE6 91% and IE5.x 1.5%. Lumping the two together can definitely be misleading.

Mozilla browsers are about 6.5% and Opera is less than .1% or so.

I work for a small wisconsin county. www.co.sauk.wi.us
We are in the process of a usability base redesign.

Ahhh, I missed the "...and above" note, thought you were saying 92% IE5.5 which sounded very odd.

You may want to check out the IE7 scripts at http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ . Add those to your site and IE becomes almost completely standards-compliant. I have had phenomenal success using these on corporate, public and personal web sites. It basically consists of IE-specific behaviors that use scripting to reform the markup and CSS to fit what you'd expect it to do. The entire thing is loaded by a one-line HTML comment with an embedded script tag. And this comment is fully standards compliant but not seen by other browsers due to a feature in IE5+ that allows conditional inclusion of markup.

It also allows CSS to support advanced CSS2.1 selectors which can make your life a whole lot easier by not having to <div class=""> everything for special cases.

It truly is a fantastic effort by the developer. It has saved me countless weeks of working on browser compliance on some projects.

 

[IronWolf]

I code to standards.

I just want to say the effort to code to standards is much appreciated by me.

 

[glass]

Odd, I use firefox all the time and have only had an issue with one site.

Me too, except I have never had any problems with any site (except problems that would have been the same in any browser -sites being down, for instance).


glass.

 

[Agamon]

I have to use IE if I go to Windows Update, but otherwise, I've not had a problem with Firefox anywhere.