Sites bow to Microsoft's browser king (News.com)

To be fair, the sites could be saying "We're only interested in the browser that people use." It's depressing, as a Mozilla fan (on my Linux and Mac OS X machines especially), to view the awstats reports of various sites under my control and see, consistently, 95% MS Windows/IE. I'm afraid the only reason it's that low is that my co-developer and I use Mozilla/KDE to manage our sites and we therefore generate about 1% of the hits... So when push comes to shove and the project has to get out the door, can you blame designers for targeting the 95%? Afterall, the remaining 5% can probably fire up IE if necessary, so how much audience does one really lose by targeting IE?

I don't like it, but I think I understand it.

I think a website designer allways should try to make his website
accessible for "any" browser.
Some visitors have handycaps that will limit their choice, e.g. for
blind people a text based browser is a good solution.
Most of the sites "best viewed withs IE 5.4.3.2.3 or better, with flash
and javascript at a resolution of 800x600 with microsoft font errors etc."
are not accessible. I think it is wrong to exclude certain groups
of users without propper reason.

Chel van Gennip
http://www.serg.vangennip.com

Quite coincidentally, I quit the CFIB today over this same issue. The Canadian Federation of Small Business told me, as someone posted here, to just "use Microsoft IE instead". This really means "re-tool your entire IT infrastructure to use our approved vendor or go away, jerk." For us, this would mean buying a new machine, licensing the Microsoft O/S, installing it all on our network, securing it, and all for what? In the CFIB case, so I can view a list of categories presented in MSIE-only DHTML. A friggin list of catagories for only $699. I hit the ceiling and walked out. I don't need to be spending dues to fuel a microsoft marketing wing.

Why am I so sensitive? Well, you tell me. Let's say you go into your local bank's small-business loans office and a clerk half your age says "sorry sir, but our software is all 7-bit ASCII and you are from the Czech Republic. If you want to do business here, you must get your name legally changed." Afterall, that's only a $200 fee in most places and everyone else (almost) has only 7-bit letters in their name!

That scenario, of course, is bullshit: Any bricks and mortar business with any such exclusivity policy would find themselves in deep doodoo, possibly even in court. Ditto if the grocery store said "Only US-made cars may park here" or the coat-check threw your overcoat back at you because it lacked some proprietary collar loop.

So why are we so eager and willing to forgive and accept this exclusivist bullshit from websites?

And it is bullshit (pardon my saxon). HTML was specifically designed to be portable and I have seen no examples of stunning IE-specific DHTML so compelling that it justifies $699 cash outlay to Dell just to see it. HTML 1.0 is plenty expressive enough to show me a dropdown list of 20 catagories. "We are fixing it" is not an excuse: the proprietary requirement should never have been deployed in the first place. If your carpenter builds you a non-standard door only some people can fit through, you fire them, hire a real carpenter, and re-do the doorway.

Ok, ok, yes, I remember the browser wars. I remember testing Sympatico on no less than a dozen different platforms and versions, and I remember how much I hated the whole interoperability business. I'm also guilty of deploying www.teledyn.com when I knew full well MSIE 4.x would upchuck on font sizes in anything but px (I did eventually fix it, but never really missed the ms traffic I was supposedly losing). My point is not that anyone is more perfect or not, but only that we should not be so ready willing and eager to forgive in the digital what we'd despise in the real world, and that we are not going to change any of this so long as we silently sit back smug in knowing that "it works for me and to hell with those we leave out". If your own site goes weird for some obscure browser, don't insult the complaintant; try to step around the iffy code. When you hit a site that could and should be standards compliant, demand that they do or make good on your threat to walk away.

We have to take a stand somewhere. If we just shrug our shoulders and sheepishly hand the keys to Internet access to proprietary interests, then we deserve whatever we get. Yes, I expect the CFIB won't even notice the loss of my paultry dues just as Jim Clark won't bemoan alienating a 15% market share, but at least I know where I stood the day the free Internet closed up.