Firefox Gripes

July 22, 2004

Firefox [Logo]Most peo­ple I’ve talked to about the Fire­fox browser could care less about the “tech­ni­cal purity” and stan­dards com­pli­ance. Rather, they are more con­cerned if the par­tic­u­lar site they fre­quent is dis­played cor­rectly, and some­times, espe­cially if the site was built for IE only, it may not load at all with the Fire­fox browser.

Imme­di­ately they are turned off from the advan­tages of what Fire­fox has to offer instead of look­ing at the whole pic­ture, wherein the devel­oper of the par­tic­u­lar site chose to code it with only IE in mind. One man has started a Fire­fox Gripes page, doc­u­ment­ing the sites that cur­rently do not ren­der in Fire­fox. Most of the sites on his list use some form of pro­pri­etary code and it’s com­pletely under­stand­able why most of these sites do not ren­der in Fire­fox, when the major­ity of them were not devel­oped for uni­ver­sal browser use.

The recent fiasco with All Music Guide is a per­fect exam­ple of this. For those of you out of the loop, All Music Guide is the equiv­o­lent of the Inter­net Movie Data­base, but in this case for music infor­ma­tion. AMG recently re-designed their web site, which dis­played with­out prob­lems in IE, but for those using Fire­fox (or any other browser besides IE) a mes­sage was dis­played essen­tially say­ing that AMG was built for IE and might incur dis­play prob­lems with other non-IE browsers.

This is ridicu­lous, only for the fact that you are lit­er­ally slap­ping your read­ers in the face if they don’t con­form to your browser demands. Rather than design a site that works uni­ver­sally with any browser, you’ve spent the time and money cre­at­ing some­thing that only dis­plays cor­rectly with a par­tic­u­lar browser. It’s not fair to your read­ers, who will more than likely jump ship to another site that doesn’t cau­tion them for their browser choice. In the case of All Music Guide, many read­ers sug­gested MP3.com, which uses a licensed ver­sion of the AMG database.  

13 comments

Let’s face it man — we devel­oper nerds are the only ones who really give a hoot about web stan­dards. That’s why I never bring that issue to clients — I just try my best to cre­ate a site that will pay for itself in the long run, being standards-compliant while it per­forms rea­son­ably well across browsers, includ­ing, of course, the Son of Satan browser, oth­er­wise known as IE.

Some­times this all feels like some kind of pur­posed con­spir­acy by soft­ware giant Microsoft, forc­ing us (and every­one else) to accept and con­form to what they think web stan­dards should be — an issue of which 99% of com­puter users are totally unaware about. As long as they keep being the bully in town just because they can afford to be because of their dol­lars and brute-force mar­ket share, instead of play­ing fair and get along like every­body else… this will keep on and on forever.

I’ve been using AMG with Firefox/Windows and have had no real issues so far.

Does it show I haven’t had cof­fee today? Ergh.

by beto on July 22, 2004 at 11:56 am. Reply #

Ah, the Monop­oly that is Microsoft.

by kartooner on July 22, 2004 at 12:57 pm. Reply #

First of all, you have a prob­lem in your link above to the Fire­fox Gripes page. I won’t bother retyp­ing the URL, take a look and you’ll see exactly what hap­pened. :-)

Some­times, a web­site is IE-only when it really doesn’t need to be. Go to http://www.weightwatchers.com in Fire­fox and you’re told “sorry, get a dif­fer­ent browser” but if you go to http://www.weightwatchers.com/index.aspx directly in Fire­fox it works fine. I can’t see any­thing, even in the subscription-only sec­tion, that doesn’t work.

I wrote to the folks at Weight Watch­ers and explained this to them, and their answer was essen­tially “we sup­port the browsers that we sup­port, get a dif­fer­ent browser, thanks for calling…”

by Judi Sohn on July 22, 2004 at 1:21 pm. Reply #

Thanks Judi for catch­ing that. I acci­dently left off the http:// part of the URI, oops. That’s what I get with­out hav­ing a full-time editor.

As for Weight Watch­ers’ response, I’ve received the same response from Ingram­Mi­cro. They acknowl­edged the exis­tence of Fire­fox, but — at least for the time being — don’t see the advan­tages of sup­port­ing other browsers.

by kartooner on July 22, 2004 at 1:26 pm. Reply #

True beto, most peo­ple just don’t care, I have tried to con­vert sev­eral peo­ple to FF, but they don’t care what browser they use…they cite things such as “what about my book­marks?? I say we’ll import them. Blah blah blah. I try to win them over with the tabs if noth­ing else.

Dude, there is NO WAY I could ever use a browser with­out tabs, those things are just sweet! I fre­quent sites that run web-mapping apps, and many of these won’t run on any­thing but IE, which sucks (although this is becom­ing less and less of a prob­lem lately).

Per­son­ally, I don’t think any­one should ever be told what browser to use (we can sug­gest all we want, right?), whether it be IE or Mozilla, that choice is ulti­mately left up to the end user. Telling peo­ple your site is “Best viewed in IE” is say­ing that you are a cod­ing wuss. That said, I also believe sites should be coded to func­tion prop­erly (not nec­es­sar­ily look exactly as wanted, i.e. CSS issues) in any browser, espe­cially if you want to make money off of the site. If I were try­ing to buy some­thing at a site while using FF, and say, the shop­ping cart were to crash (after they “advised” me to use IE), I would take my busi­ness elsewhere.

I don’t really have time for crap like that, do you?

by Chad on July 22, 2004 at 1:33 pm. Reply #

I don’t think the solu­tion lies on to forc­ing browser choices on any­one even if it’s for their own good — that would be much like some Best Buy dude nag­ging me into buy­ing a Mag­navox TV when I’ve been fine with my old Sony all along, and will rather buy another Sony again over time.

Those old enough to remem­ber the Web Stan­dards Project early steps might remem­ber a ban­ner ad along these lines (If TVs didn’t fol­low stan­dards). The real prob­lem here is MS refus­ing to play fair and along with every­one else; instead of tweak­ing up their browser to fol­low a com­mon set of rules which would make all our lives eas­ier, they just choose to play the bully guy and defy every­one else, by doing noth­ing — and since they already got 95% of the world’s PC mar­ket share, why should they bother over the other 5%?

Unless they don’t lose some­thing like 20% or so, MS is not going to move its ass, and even then they’ll just con­cen­trate on churn­ing more agres­sive mar­ket­ing to lure new clients, not on web stan­dards — because of the “my way or the high­way” mind­set that has been char­ac­ter­is­tic of MS and oth­ers (i.e. some guy from Texas that hap­pens to be a Pres­i­dent) for so many years.

I’ve finally had my two oblig­a­tory cups of cof­fee, thank good­ness. And yes, slow day at work.

by beto on July 22, 2004 at 7:17 pm. Reply #

This is in response to the first com­menter. I’ve actu­ally con­vinced many peo­ple, non-developers and devel­op­ers alike, to use Fire­fox, not only to sup­port web stan­dards, but to have a bet­ter brows­ing expe­ri­ence. For web stan­dards, I tell them the truth — it makes your web­site more acces­si­ble to more peo­ple, saves you money on band­width bill, makes it easy to update the site for future changes, and so on. It’s very easy to sell some­one on web stan­dards, whether they have their own web­page or not — as long as you use plain Eng­lish to explain it to them.

This gripes page is con­cise and infor­ma­tive. While it doesn’t present any solu­tions, and these prob­lems have been known for a while, some­one is just voic­ing it louder. Of course we all know the cul­prit is Microsoft, so the only thing we can do is bend our knees, lower our head, and move for­ward, one step at a time.

I’ve got­ten my room­mate, who has used AOL for the past 6 years, daily, to switch to Fire­fox just recently. Imported her book­marks, address book to Thun­der­bird, and unin­stalled AOL. She has not looked back, and asked me why I didn’t do this sooner. She’s lov­ing the tabbed browser, the pop up block­ing, the ad block­ing (Fire­fox Help FAQ has code you can put in your user­Con­tent file), and increased secu­rity. She has gone from get­ting new spyware/adware every week, to none in months.

My next con­vert? My grandma. :)

Kar­tooner, you can actu­ally leave out the http: part out of an URL. Same with www. I’ve taken to typ­ing URLs out as a href=”//kartooner.com”. Less typ­ing, and even less band­width in the long run. :)

by Matt Burris on July 22, 2004 at 7:41 pm. Reply #

Matt: You know, Grandma should have received top billing over your room­mate. ;)

Also, thanks for the tip. To be hon­est, I never knew you could do that! I’m always learn­ing and for good rea­son, it broad­ens my skills.

by kartooner on July 22, 2004 at 10:43 pm. Reply #

I’m impressed…lots of heavy duty com­ments on your Fox­fire arti­cle. Keep up the good work and ‘learning’!

by Dad on July 23, 2004 at 1:02 am. Reply #

While we are at it in browser talk, MS appar­ently unveiled an “IE Blog” as a PR chan­nel between the IE devel­op­ment team and the rest of us. As expected, it didn’t take long to be lit­tered with com­ments trash rang­ing from the “Eff j00” kind to the sim­plis­tic, use­less “IE Bad Fire­fox good” stance. How­ever, things seem to be now more under control.

If they are really lis­ten­ing, that can only be a good thing.

by beto on July 23, 2004 at 12:25 pm. Reply #

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what unfolds. Will this be a bit more infor­ma­tive than the Google Blog? Or, will it just be another watered-down PR chan­nel, in this case vague and indirect?

by kartooner on July 23, 2004 at 1:12 pm. Reply #

MS have indeed opened a blog at the url above. The lay­out is done in *gasp* tables.

by Root on July 24, 2004 at 9:06 pm. Reply #

Tables? Oh, the hor­ror. *cue 1930s ser­ial radio theme*

by kartooner on July 25, 2004 at 12:53 pm. Reply #

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