Forum Moderators: open
When i was checking analytics i noticed under browsers that FF was still only 15 % compared to IE at 80 %. I expected FF to be a lot more popular by now, just wondering what others are experiencing.
I think the idea behind the web was to make it easy for just about anybody to create pages, not requiring a programmer's level of skill.
The web is comprised of about 8 billion pages now; if all pages had to be standards - compliant, there would be about 1 billion pages on the web.
Any company that created a browser that refused to render non-standard pages would go out of business in about 10 minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I've done things that weren't standard, still do on occasion. Not because I can't do it properly, but because I have the option to be lazy, rather than spend the time fighting with something that isn't working right and fixing it properly.
And for that matter...6 billion less pages online wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing!
And you don't have to be "tech savy or a genius" to figure out what "<div> tag is missing closing </div> tag". means, or whatever the error happens to be.
But the garbage I see, that gets rendered properly...wow, sometimes it blows my mind.
[edited by: encyclo at 10:12 am (utc) on Sep. 11, 2007]
[edit reason] no links to personal sites please [/edit]
IE6 41%
IE7 30%
FX 1.x 18%
Safari 5%
FX 2.x 2%
Opera 1%This is for a non-techie site (selling steam cleaners)
optimierung says:
For a techie site the situation is totally different:IE: 44% (IE6: 27%, IE7: 16%)
FF: 33% (2.0.0.4: 25%)
UserFriendly says:
My site is also pretty tech-based:IE: 49.17% of unique visits;
FF: 39.72%;
Op: 4.45%;
Sf: 3.04%.
For what it's worth, stats for a corporate events equipment site I did are:
IE6 50%
FF2 22%
IE7 15%
FF1.x 11%
Opera is zero and Safari was just the agencies I have sent my portfolio to.
The message? If you are designing sites for clients who want to make money, make sure they work in IE and FF. If your site is for techie folk, and you are of the same opinion as swa66:
Perhaps us webmasters need to band together and start a more aggressive promotion of Firefox.
then design just for FF - that's your prerogative.
As for me, there's no way I'm going to tell a client that the people who view his website (including him) view it the wrong way, and the problems they are reporting to him are because they are not enlightened enough.
I am a web designer, not an evangelist. I don't care how people look at the sites I design. I care that they can see/hear them properly, and that is where standards come in. If you code according to standards, cross-browser compatibility issues become less of a headache and the job of the web designer is a lot easier.
Well there's a few reasons, some which apply to me:
Nubmer one: Firefox 2.0 wasn't an automatic update, and it never asked if you wanted to update. A regular user would have to stumble on FF's website to know that there's a new version. Only now that 1.5 is no longer supported (or possibly a bit before, since I think it was a bit preparatory) are users getting informational messages that they should upgrade their browser.
Number two: 2.0 offers nothing really new. I upgraded to 1.5 quickly, Because as far as I remember, it was one of the awesome-est versions of FF. It added more support for many new web technologies, such as SVG and CSS.
Number three: 2.0 changes some things visually. I like the current look, and I'd have to waste a bit of my time to revert back to the old appearances and layouts.
Number four: 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' -not something I follow much myself, but I do to an extent, especially on old/'fragile' systems. "My current browser version works fine, why should I risk trying a newer version that may cause a conflict with my system, or some other problem?". This is definately the case for some other things like Windows Media Player and Windows Vista!
Number five: Some extensions become no longer supported. This may be hackable, but it may lead to bugs, and the more complicated ones probably aren't hackable. Also most users don't know about the hacking anyways.
Why people didn't upgrade anything under 1.5? no idea, since I don't think any of those apply to upgrading anything under 1.5
My blog is just under 50% FF and the same for IE. This is because there are a significant chunk of users who come there to look for my Wordpress themes and plugins. They mostly use FF.
The lesson is that most visitors use IE, so IE must work well on your site, but a lot of webmasters and bloggers (who can give you those invaluable links) use FF so you better keep them happy as well.
FF has two major problems. A poor bookmark system (I can remember raising Mozilla bug reports about it years ago), and poor fonts for the Chinese language. In FF, a Chinese site with small fonts can be virtually illegible.
Huh? I am a reqular visitor of Yahoo Hong Kong. The Chinese fonts on Firefox look perfectly legible to me, almost the same as on IE. But Firefox can render Hong Kong specific characters whereas IE6/7 can't. And with the Firefox extensions AdBlock and FlashBlock, I don't have to be bothered by flashing ads.
The fonts on Yahoo China also look the same on Firefox as on IE. I do bilingual English/Chinese websites, and I have no legibility problems with Firefox.
The Personal Toolbar on Firefox is the main attraction for me. All my bookmarks are up front just a click or two away. If IE had a similar feature, I might use it more often.
There are many websites I am required to use for school, banking, work etc. that require IE. FF won't work and I tried for kicks and giggles. I have never been in a situation where FF was required and IE didn't work. From where I'm standing FF isn't worth the trouble since the only benefit I can see is that I could say that I use FF. Big whoop.
I have yet to stumble upon a site that was worth using and didn't work in both IE and FF. My bank's included.
I have yet to stumble upon a site that was worth using and didn't work in both IE and FF. My bank's included.
I think that's especially true nowadays. In the past it seemed acceptable even for big firms to have tag-soup websites which only worked in the latest version of IE, but this doesn't seem to be true any more. I haven't come across any mainstream sites lately which didn't work in FF.
I would imagine that accessibility legislation has at least something to do with this.
I have yet to stumble upon a site that was worth using and didn't work in both IE and FF. My bank's included.
Why should they invest a lot of money so that a few people can use FF?
That makes no sense? What money needs to be invested?
If you're talking about an intranet website, then yeah, it costs money to develop it to work in both IE and FF...though, I'd argue, it's simpler just to code to the standard and it shouldn't require more than a minimal amount of work to make it work in all browsers.
Second, if you're talking about a company's internet presence, they lose money not catering to the majority of browsers. If I want to buy something, and your site doesn't work in FF, I go elsewhere. I don't even check to see if it works in IE...it might, but it's not worth my time, I'll go to one of your competitors.
Third...if you're referring to installing FF so your staff can use it, that doesn't cost money, just don't install it. But don't stop staff who want to use it from using it.
I don't see this "cost" you're talking about.
Second, if you're talking about a company's internet presence, they lose money not catering to the majority of browsers. If I want to buy something, and your site doesn't work in FF, I go elsewhere. I don't even check to see if it works in IE...it might, but it's not worth my time, I'll go to one of your competitors.
It's not an opinion that you'll lose potential customers if your site doesn't work in THEIR browser of choice. That's fact.
[edited by: Gibble at 4:24 pm (utc) on Sep. 18, 2007]
It's not an opinion that you'll lose potential customers if your site doesn't work in THEIR browser of choice. That's fact.
When I started there 6 years prior, IE was the defacto standard. Most of the websites, internal, and external were IE specific using several IE specific "advantages".
As time went on, more and more people started using alternatives. Phone calls start coming in, and you spend a lot of time (and money) telling people to use IE, and them complaining anyhow, OR, you do things properly, code to the standard and tweak it to work in each browser.
Ultimately, the latter won out easily. It was far more economical to do things right the first time, than put up with the hassles and complaints of angry students, prospectives, alumni, faculty, and staff. Especially when you have programs that run entirely on Mac or Linux...if you supply the computer lab...shouldn't your sites and web applications work on them?
So, what kind of an image were we presenting, if we are supposed to train the workforce, yet our own staff to a shoddy job? Why, if I was planning to study CS there, would I want to? What kind of image does that website give for the CS department?
I can't think of a single "feature" of IE that would be worth using instead of something that works in all major browsers.
I can't think of a single "feature" of IE that would be worth using instead of something that works in all major browsers.
I'd really be interested in an online classroom system that was 100% compatible with all browsers.
In either case, still shoddy work on their part, and not something I would recommend for purchase.
Seriously, how pathetic would it look, teaching a linux/mac course, but forcing the user to use a PC with IE to take the course?
In the past it seemed acceptable even for big firms to have tag-soup websites which only worked in the latest version of IE, but this doesn't seem to be true any more.
I bet there were some real challenges for a lot of them when it was still new. I am a very basic web designer, but I can imagine what it would be like in a big corp, with a vast custom site,typical package or cms, incorporating lots of java interactivity, tables, maybe frames, and possibly made with Frontpage, and being told to make it FF compatible.
There must be lots of old threads here from corp employees scrambling for help with all kinds of FF issues, and few around that had solutions.
Seriously, how pathetic would it look, teaching a linux/mac course, but forcing the user to use a PC with IE to take the course?
I also never said that FF issues weren't passed on to the vendor and that the vendor wouldn't try to accomodate FF users. Even so, the system is older and was built with IE in mind. Almost all of the users use FF. The syllabus says to use IE. IE is free and it seems reasonable to expect students to use it.
Or operate a business that isn't wheelchair accessible just because they make up a small portion (if any) of your customer base
That's kind of an off base analogy. You ARE required to create an ADA compliant site if you do business.
Regardless, FF will often make up anywhere from 5 to 25 percent of your customer base (for non-tech commerce sites). Why would you ever want to ostracize a potential sale? It's not like it really takes that much more work to code the standard properly. Hell, use IE CSS hacks if you need to, but any browser that takes up more than 1% of your traffic should be listened to (considering you get 1,000 or more hits a week or so).
I mean sure, if you work at a place that only visits IE compatible sites, then who cares, but we are talking about user bases here, not isolated incidents.
From where I'm standing FF isn't worth the trouble since the only benefit I can see is that I could say that I use FF. Big whoop.No. There'd be no reason for anyone to change browsers if IE didn't suck and FF wasn't a god browser. IE has more security flaws, doesn't support web standards, isn't as easy to customize, can't customize as many things, there is a significantly smaller variety of add-ons in IE compared to FF, FF renders pages faster in general, and loads faster in general (I'm saying this from my experience on over 10 different computer systems, it is not something that should be treated as fact necessarily), FF updates more often, and has all sorts of useful features, and support for things like SVG. I probably missed some points too.
Also, I don't have anything against somone choosing Opera either, as it has similar functionality resulting in good performance, and a good browsing experience as well.
[edited by: Xapti at 4:53 am (utc) on Sep. 19, 2007]
There must be lots of old threads here from corp employees scrambling for help with all kinds of FF issues, and few around that had solutions
I think for a lot of us who have been working in the web dev industry for a few year, this is exactly our bread and butter, sorting out old sites which didn't work well cross-platform, because most corporations sooner or later come around to the realisation that this is the best way forward.
In my experience 3rd party software vendors are the absolute worst offenders for this kind of thing. On several occasions I have had to do battle with companies who provided badly-coded apps which didn't work cross-browser/platform.
Sometimes if you get together with other people who have bought the same package, and provide legal information about why they need to conform to standards, you can apply pressure more effectively!
But FF is actually slower. Previous versions of FF took 2 operating system cycles to refresh graphics memory, while IE does it in 1 cycle. I haven't checked the latest version of FF but it's probably the same.
I like to think of browsers as automobiles. IE is a solid family car which will take you more or less everywhere. FF is great on a well-maintained highway, but it can't handle bumpy roads.
