Response to Tobias Mayer (IE)
Discussion started on Twitter, moved to http://bit.ly/12BV5Q
My response:
Hi Tobias,
Thank you for getting this discussion going. I believe discussions help to improve things.
Here are my 2 cents in a larger then 140 char format:
a) A surprise for everyone, I use IE AND Firefox. Firebug is a great tool. If you don’t know what it is and your doing any CSS work, your missing out. IE is integrated better for .Net work. Yes, I know I can browse with Firefox but I find that IE has less hickups. So I use both. I think it raises my quality.
b) The different design models that Microsoft and Mozilla are following ensure that Firefox will be the winner, if not today, if not tomorrow, then the week after, imho, so this problem might go away.
c) As Ian Barber mentioned, many people are inside firewalls and only have IE6 at their disposal. Two points to emphasize here: 1) IE6 is the real problem. IE 7 and 8 don’t cause pain or waste “50% of life”. 2) Can / should we help these people. Should they help themselves and demand an upgrade from their tech departments?
d) I build sites for certain audiences. If the audience was Mozilla, I probably wouldn’t even test it in IE. Sometimes my clients have been inside intranets using only IE6. I have given them value sooner by only making the sites work in IE6. Not so hard if it doesn’t have to work in Firefox as well.
e) You should be very concerned about accessibility. Javascript is not so wonderful in this department. Investigate screen readers and have people who have vision concerns (lots of the population) check your site. Have someone over 60 look at your website. Ok, I’m off subject a bit here but good things to know.
Important point is that I build sites for a target audience. I match my designs and compatibility to my target audience. If there was a movement that caused all browsers to magically work the same, wow, that would save us all some grief, agreed. But, that’s not reality. What if I made a new browser that did lots of cool stuff but ignored standards totally. Would I get some users, yeah if it was cool enough. We’ve seen this with Flash. For those of you who have flash only please try browsing on a phone. The thing is, different people (Microsoft, Mozilla, you and me, our clients, W3C and other standard bodies including government and corporate) all have different goals and objectives AND target audiences…so we view browsers differently.
Where does this leave us? I don’t know. You can find lots of friends for Microsoft bashing. I recommend Java, Linux, and Apple forums to get started but I won’t join in.
Maybe you will get a movement started to get everyone to work a certain way.
My view is that this is a perception issue.
You have every right to restrict your site to certain audiences. They have every right to not go to your site. That’s it really. Do you want them to visit? Are you willing to do the extra work? Is it worth it? Maybe, maybe not.
