Re: [Hampshire] Website Compatibility

On 26/03/2008, Dr Adam J Trickett <adam.trickett@???> wrote:
> Sadly yes. Many intranet sites and some internet sites are so
> badly constructed that they don't actually work unless you have a
> specific browser and verision thereof (often but not always IE).
> Most of the time when you hear this it's just lazy design/sloppy
> coding, if you get your browser to lie about it's identity it works fine.

[Replying to Adam's email, but really I'm responding to the general
tone of the responses on this list ]

Presumably if the site you were visiting only worked in Firefox, you
and the majority of other respondents on to this thread would feel
just as strongly that it was "badly constructed" and lobby for IE and
Safari support?

At work we have internal systems which make heavy use of AJAX, usually
to optimize repetitive tasks. Initially IE, Firefox and Safari were
supported. Web browsers are a particularly unforgiving platform to
develop complex, usable applications on and it wasn't long before the
bug reports started coming in, with titles like "Foo tool doesn't work
on IE", "Bar editor crashes Safari" and "Baz spins forever in
Firefox". I even recall someone showing me something that was broken
in IE 5 on Mac OS.

Many of the developers use Firefox as their usual browser. Recent
versions of Firefox also run AJAX quite well, so the result was that
there were more bug reports for Safari and IE. At the time, Firefox
was also the only browser which ran on both our supported desktop
platforms. The business users and project staff who regularly review
outstanding bugs and decide their priority noticed how much time was
being spent fixing these bugs and testing on three separate platforms.

I forget which browser was dropped first, but we ended up only
supporting Firefox for this application. In this case it was a fairly
straightforward decision: the developers could support one browser
well or spread our efforts across three.

Public sites are a different matter of course. Intentionally blocking
any browser but certain versions of IE from a public website is daft.
You are excluding 10-15% of users and presumably crawlers as well. A
more sensible solution is to have a help page explaining politely to
your users that you only test for certain browsers and if they're
having problems they might want to try using one of those first.

I don't disagree with what I believe to be your main point: that
everyone should strive for cross-browser compatibility, but I reject
the implication that anyone who doesn't manage to achieve perfect
cross-browser support is some kind of idiot. Anyone who has tried to
even make a simple site display correctly across the big three
browsers knows otherwise.

Regards,
Graham