A little too proud of Firefox?



  • Wow. Now I have seen it all...

    I realize all the FireFox fan boys out there will turn this around and say it is because IE can't support some crucial 'XYZ' CSS attribute... (thoughts of the blink tag come to mind!)

    But I do plenty of web development, and I have never stopped to say to myself, "Wow, I just cannot make my website support IE!"

    Save your pro FireFox comments, we have all heard them before.

    Just focus on the facts, like IE is the most popular browser (by far), and this site welcomes you with:

    (This obviously isn't going to work if you are using FireFox, so humble yourselves and use IE for a moment.)

    Maybe someone else has time to post an image of this, for the people who just can't bring themselves to use IE...

    I must also find it amazing that they not only ONLY support FF, but the also only support the newest version...

    ACK! Time to take Introduction to Web Development over again!

    Hopefully somebody can see the humor here...

     

    As an additional side note:

    http://www.teqlo.com/corp/careers.html

    They are hiring for a Web Application Developer! (Good thing!)

    Among their 'Qualifications' for this position:

    • Experience with XML databases preferred, especially Oracle Sleepycat DBXML, XQuery, XSLT1.0/2.0
    • Deep understanding of dynamic Web application architecture and deployment

     

    I wont go into why I find those humorous... Interpret as you wish...



  • ff


  • I think it really depends on the target audience. If I am running a business and I need the suits to see my site in all it's flashyness, I'll design for IE first. If I'm making a site to sell my Mac software, I'd damn well better make sure it works in Safari. If I'm doing some nifty new web development framework, I'll probably design for Firefox first.



  • Something tells me this wil not become a household name. Just say it a few times ... Teqlo Teqlo Teqlo Tech Low Tech Low Tech ... yeah, I want to invest in that.



  • I don't know the deal with supporting FireFox only; probably just some payback.  The REAL WTF is on the "About Us" page: Teqlo is a drag-and-drop web application building tool!



  • While I am an avid FF user (IE has market share maybe not because it is the best but because it is the default), I find developing for only a single browser not only corporatly stupid but also economically suicidal.

    It doesn't take that much to actually get most functionality in every browser and just a little more work to get the nice flash bang gizmo to work or replaced with something else.  This holds doubly true for corporations.



  • The big flaw in your whine is that these people do not even pretend to have a finished product here - they explicitly call it a "proof of concept intended for a small pool of about a hundred people to look at". If you were building a highly complicated proof-of-concept system for a small group of people, why would you waste time trying to work around all the bugs in IE's implementation of javascript?

    It's not even a 'beta' package, in a world of permanent-beta applications. It's a mock-up of what they intend to build in the future. You're lucky that it runs in any web browser, and isn't just Asok in a cardboard box with a sock puppet.
     



  • [quote user="djork"]I think it really depends on the target audience. If I am running a business and I need the suits to see my site in all it's flashyness, I'll design for IE first. If I'm making a site to sell my Mac software, I'd damn well better make sure it works in Safari. If I'm doing some nifty new web development framework, I'll probably design for Firefox first.[/quote]

     

    Your view is exactly the opposite of the 'rules of web development' that I think (I really hope) we all learned early on (Netscape vs IE5 days). The whole idea behind internet-based design is to make sure that EVERYONE can see your work.

    It simply does not speak well of the company's abilities in web application development to only cater to the new version of FireFox. The implications of WTFery are huge here.

    At the very least, I would expect a little disclaimer, that the site is best viewed in FireFox, and a whole seperate experience in IE is presented (even just raw html???). To just exclude the majority of users is WTFery at it's best. This is definitely not a company I would ever want to work for. What other decisions do they use this kind of broken logic on?

    Maybe somebody with FF should give us a rundown of WTF is going on with this site that can only be used on FF?

    Thanks for the picture post shadowman.



  • [quote user="asuffield"]

    If you were building a highly complicated proof-of-concept system for a small group of people, why would you waste time trying to work around all the bugs in IE's implementation of javascript?
    [/quote]

    When I make proof-of-concepts I go out of my way to make sure that the software will work on the MAJORITY of implementations.

    Sorry, maybe that is just me. I don't have many bosses/customers who are interested in seeing a demo of software that will only work for a small percentage of people.

    Besides that, we are talking about the main page on their website... that they use as a signature in various posts on forums/blogs.

    You act like I am trying to view a demo on their intranet... not just checking out their internet facing website...



  • The Real WTF is that the "Our site only supports" message is set to show when the browser is on a 'wrong' list. Telling fx to pretend to be IE 6 gives it, but Netscape 4.8 or Opera 8.51 don't (all on WinXP), nor does it have any issue with fx 1.5 on Linux.

    Also notice how claiming no support, the site "wants to run the following add-on"
     



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    [quote user="djork"]I think it really depends on the target audience. If I am running a business and I need the suits to see my site in all it's flashyness, I'll design for IE first. If I'm making a site to sell my Mac software, I'd damn well better make sure it works in Safari. If I'm doing some nifty new web development framework, I'll probably design for Firefox first.

     

    Your view is exactly the opposite of the 'rules of web development' that I think (I really hope) we all learned early on (Netscape vs IE5 days). The whole idea behind internet-based design is to make sure that EVERYONE can see your work.

    It simply does not speak well of the company's abilities in web application development to only cater to the new version of FireFox. The implications of WTFery are huge here.

    At the very least, I would expect a little disclaimer, that the site is best viewed in FireFox, and a whole seperate experience in IE is presented (even just raw html???). To just exclude the majority of users is WTFery at it's best. This is definitely not a company I would ever want to work for. What other decisions do they use this kind of broken logic on?

    Maybe somebody with FF should give us a rundown of WTF is going on with this site that can only be used on FF?

    Thanks for the picture post shadowman.

    [/quote]

    If my uber-tech-savvy-mac-blog (which I don't have, by the way) didn't work 100% in IE6, I wouldn't sweat it. If I had the time to fix it? Of course I would tend to it... but as it is, sometimes IE is a tiny minority of your web traffic when you serve a niche audience. That's all I'm saying. I realize that 90% of the time web designers are going to have to design for wide compatibility.



  • [quote user="m0ffx"]

    The Real WTF is that the "Our site only supports" message is set to show when the browser is on a 'wrong' list. Telling fx to pretend to be IE 6 gives it, but Netscape 4.8 or Opera 8.51 don't (all on WinXP), nor does it have any issue with fx 1.5 on Linux.

    Also notice how claiming no support, the site "wants to run the following add-on"
     

    [/quote]

     Their actual detection code is:

     

    function browserOSDetect(){
     var userAgent = navigator.userAgent;
     var ret = true;
     
     var osName = userAgent.substring(userAgent.indexOf("(")+1, userAgent.indexOf("(")+4 );


     var browserVersion = userAgent.substring(userAgent.lastIndexOf("/")+1, userAgent.lastIndexOf("/")+4 );


     if((osName != null || osName != "") && (osName =="Win")){
      if((browserVersion != null || browserVersion != "") && (browserVersion < 2.0)){
       var oDiv = document.getElementById("hiddenBrowserError");
       oDiv.style.display = "block";
       ret = false;
      }
     }else if((osName != null || osName != "") && (osName =="Mac")){
      if((browserVersion != null || browserVersion != "") && (browserVersion < 1.5)){
       var oDiv = document.getElementById("hiddenBrowserError");
       oDiv.style.display = "block";
       ret = false;
      }
     }
     return ret;
    }



  • And actually, the above comes from their utilities library, their actual in-page JS has this:

    var userAgent = navigator.userAgent;
      if((userAgent.indexOf("MSIE") != -1)){
      document.write('<div class="ieErrorMessage">Our site only currently supports FireFox 2.0 on the PC and FireFox 1.5 and higher on the Mac. Please switch to a supported browser and try again.</div>');
      }
      if((userAgent.indexOf("KHTML") > -1) || (userAgent.indexOf("Konqueror") > -1) || (userAgent.indexOf("AppleWebKit") > -1)){
      document.write('<div class="ieErrorMessage">Our site only currently supports FireFox 2.0 on the PC and FireFox 1.5 and higher on the Mac. Please switch to a supported browser and try again.</div>');
      }

     

    So I was incorrect in the last post...



  • [quote user="MasterPlanSoftware"]

    [quote user="djork"]I think it really depends on the target audience. If I am running a business and I need the suits to see my site in all it's flashyness, I'll design for IE first. If I'm making a site to sell my Mac software, I'd damn well better make sure it works in Safari. If I'm doing some nifty new web development framework, I'll probably design for Firefox first.[/quote]

     

    Your view is exactly the opposite of the 'rules of web development' that I think (I really hope) we all learned early on (Netscape vs IE5 days). The whole idea behind internet-based design is to make sure that EVERYONE can see your work.[/quote]

    Sometimes, you're on an extremely tight schedule, and really don't give a shit about "EVERYONE".  Welcome to the real world.  We've got these crappy things called "budgets" and "deadlines", which always come before the "rules of web development".  Sometimes, your site just needs to communicate something to a very specific set of people.

     

    Not every book is written for the layman, and not every website is written for the entire world.
     



  • [quote user="merreborn"]

    Sometimes, you're on an extremely tight schedule, and really don't give a shit about "EVERYONE".  Welcome to the real world.  We've got these crappy things called "budgets" and "deadlines", which *always* come before the "rules of web development".  Sometimes, your site just needs to communicate something to a very specific set of people.

     

    Not every book is written for the layman, and not every website is written for the entire world. 

    [/quote]

    I would argue the contrary, if I am on a tight schedule then (in every case I have ever been involved in..) it is much easier to develop for IE than anything else .

    Again... 'Get something out the door' doesn't mean excluding the majority of your users to me... but maybe you think differently...

    If you develop web sites exclusively for FF (no support for IE) on a regular basis because your company insists on 'budgets' and 'deadlines'... then please post another thread, I think we would all like to hear about this experience. It would surely rank high on the WTF meter.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    [quote user="merreborn"]

    Sometimes, you're on an extremely tight schedule, and really don't give a shit about "EVERYONE".  Welcome to the real world.  We've got these crappy things called "budgets" and "deadlines", which always come before the "rules of web development".  Sometimes, your site just needs to communicate something to a very specific set of people.

     

    Not every book is written for the layman, and not every website is written for the entire world. 

    I would argue the contrary, if I am on a tight schedule then (in every case I have ever been involved in..) it is much easier to develop for IE than anything else .

    Again... 'Get something out the door' doesn't mean excluding the majority of your users to me... but maybe you think differently...

    If you develop web sites exclusively for FF (no support for IE) on a regular basis because your company insists on 'budgets' and 'deadlines'... then please post another thread, I think we would all like to hear about this experience. It would surely rank high on the WTF meter.

    [/quote]

    I don't think that Merreborn was saying that Firefox was the default target, necessarily. When you are a developer that uses Firefox and you are developing a site for a demographic in which the majority uses Firefox, what sense would it make to develop for IE? You don't understand that different audiences have different tendencies.

    Also, I would argue that if you're on a tight schedule it is probably easier to develop for Firefox than IE.



  • Well I have FF2.0 on the PC and it doesn't work for me.I meet the specs, but the cruddy site still won't load!

     

    What I get it:

    msgbox - "Your browser does not have a flash plugin, please download from the Adobe site."

    msgbox "Your browser has Flash version 0, please upgrade to Flash version 8 from Adobe."

    (I must have installed version 0 in the 2 seconds between messages)

    msgbox - "Your browser does not have a flash plugin, please download from the Adobe site."

    (oops I uninstalled it again)

    msgbox "Your browser has Flash version 0, please upgrade to Flash version 8 from Adobe."

    (no wait, i reinstalled version zero again apparently, just to be sneaky)

     Then I get a page come up with two frames, both of the Adobe homepage, one frame an inch high, the other filling the rest fo the page.

     

    That site is clearly made by TEH AWESOME WEBMASTAR!!!!!11oneoneone



  • I like the site's behavior on Linux (yes, even smaller subset of computer users). It displays a message telling me to upgrade to Flash 8 (would if I could) two or three times while loading the page, but it appears to contain no flash content!

    I have the FlashBlock extension, so I would see rectangles with flash icons in them if there were any, even if it really required flash 8.

     
    Also, in the site's defense, it does say "Currently" supported, so it's possible that they made it work in FF first and are now working on IE support.
     



  • [quote user="MasterPlanSoftware"]

    Sorry, maybe that is just me. I don't have many bosses/customers who are interested in seeing a demo of software that will only work for a small percentage of people.

    [/quote]

    You seem to have difficulty comprehending what a proof-of-concept is. This is not a product demo. This is not a product at all. This is a sketch of what the product might do in the future, after they've created it. A proof-of-concept is what you do before anything else, before even drawing up a specification or designing the system - it's part of the feasibility study that you do to show people that it would be worth spending money on developing the thing. It's something that you bash out in a week or two. Porting it to multiple platforms would be both a waste of time, and just plain stupid.

    Since there appears to be some difficulty in grasping this, here's an analogy: it's the difference between a real kitchen, and one that you see in a showroom. And complaining that the one in the showroom doesn't have running water.



  • It is mildly silly to have a public web site (we're not talking about a proof of concept or anything here, it's their public web site) that:

    1. Doesn't like IE, even though everything appears to work perfectly well on IE it yells at you for using that browser

    2. Will prompt you to install flash if you don't have it, even though it doesn't use flash

    Assuming you're trying to get an audience and money, you at least want your public face to be visible to as many potential users as possible.... I would think.



  • I normaly browse with IE6 at home but when developing I'll have IE6, FF2 and Opera 9 running.  I point all three at the dev server and then each time I need to check something I'll just do a quick refresh in each browser.  If I'm on a tight deadline then I'll avoid the things I know for sure are going to spaz any of the browsers out i.e. certain js/css.  It doesn't show alot for them to develop a "concept" site but then narrow it down to just one particular browser.  A few months ago I would of wondered how they would of handled the situation where one of the end clients comes back with "it gives me this message in IE ..." but after working at the last clients place for a while I know how it would go:

    It starts with the developers or marketing people spewing out a bunch of techno babble that the non-tech clients can understand.  The non-tech clients not wanting to look like computer illiterate fools would nod their heads and agree to whatever was being said.  Along the way the "IE is crap because bla bla bla" conversation will crop up.  "We all use FF, it's ultra perfect and has non of the flaws IE has.  It's only on v2 because they wanted to add more cool functionality to it, not because it had any bugs of it's own".

    This company managed to convince several companies to force their hundreds (thousands if you combine them all) employees to use FF to view their internal and external sites.  All the other devs use FF religously.  When I pointed out the system was totaly broken in IE they just didn't care and I had to put up with the endless "IE is pants" rants which I think is funny since I'm the only one who constantly tests in multiple browsers including FF.



  • I see your point and I would think they would work hard to at least make their main page work for people using IE, but everyone else also has valid points.

     You would code for your target audience and then try to make it work with the other browsers.  I am primarily a Linux user (except when I am at work unfortunately) so if I were to make anything it would be coded for Firefox, and if I had the time and found the problems dumb it down so it works in IE.

     Also for my Linux based blog and website, I am using a CMS so it works across the board but if a part didn't work in IE I really wouldn't care.  Most of the target audience won't/can't use IE so why does it matter to me.

    Still, it would be a poor business decision to not allow IE for a company that is trying to market an online service like that, but hey, its their bottom line.

     



  • [quote user="MasterPlanSoftware"]

    [quote user="merreborn"]

    Sometimes, you're on an extremely tight schedule, and really don't give a shit about "EVERYONE".  Welcome to the real world.  We've got these crappy things called "budgets" and "deadlines", which always come before the "rules of web development".  Sometimes, your site just needs to communicate something to a very specific set of people.

     

    Not every book is written for the layman, and not every website is written for the entire world. 

    [/quote]

    I would argue the contrary, if I am on a tight schedule then (in every case I have ever been involved in..) it is much easier to develop for IE than anything else .

    Again... 'Get something out the door' doesn't mean excluding the majority of your users to me... but maybe you think differently...

    If you develop web sites exclusively for FF (no support for IE) on a regular basis because your company insists on 'budgets' and 'deadlines'... then please post another thread, I think we would all like to hear about this experience. It would surely rank high on the WTF meter.

    [/quote]

    Sometimes your hired to make your proof accessible to the specifications of others available online for whatever testing purposes. It seems like you have a much bigger issue with fire-fox in general and your "expert web design opinion" then merely the fact that their proof is made for fire-fox at this current time.

    AMD-Intel anyone? :D

     



  • [quote user="mallard"]

    I like the site's behavior on Linux (yes, even smaller subset of computer users). It displays a message telling me to upgrade to Flash 8 (would if I could) two or three times while loading the page, but it appears to contain no flash content!

    [/quote]

    Seems to work fine for me with Seamonkey 1.1b and Flash 9 beta 2 on Linux. I have no idea what they're using Flash for, though.


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