Lead story on the BBC’s technology news page is about a review of web sites carried out by a company called SciVisum. In it they say that one in ten web sites don’t work properly in Firefox.
This is a problem that I often come across when persuading people to switch to Firefox. If they find that one of their favourite sites doesn’t work in Firefox, then there is often a temptation to blame Firefox, rather than the site itself (which is where the blame really lies).
This is largely because web developers are used to testing their sites just using IE rather than so-called standards-compliant browsers, which only use code ratified by the World Wide Web consortium.
In my book, anyone who works like this doesn’t deserve to be called a web developer.
Then there’s this quote from SciVisum’s chief executive Deri Jones.
“There is a certain business logic to this as IE is the most widely used browser,” said Mr Jones.
This is a point of view that should have been forgotten many years ago. Non-IE users can make up 10% of your visitors (and that’s a number which is increasing). Do you really want to ignore that proportion of your potential audience?
Creating a web site that works just as well in all browsers isn’t hard. If your web developers are telling that it is, then your web developers are wrong. Employee someone else who knows what they are talking about.
I would slightly refine this argument to say “know your audience”. A friend of mine had a website done which doesn’t work on the Apple Mac, which is a disaster since it’s a site for creative types who happen to use Macs, so they make up a large part of her target audience. On the other hand, if you know for some reason that your audience will be overwhelmingly using IE, it may well not make commercial sense to do full browser testing.
I remain astounded that developers actually write for IE, as opposed to writing for W3.org’s standards. What can Firefox (and co) do but adhere to the laid out standards set for web design? If I ever hear that complaint in regards to Firefox (that it doesn’t render a page properly), I point out that this is due to the page being written for IE users, not correctly.
I was happy overall with the tone that the BBC pitched for their write up – it focused on the benefits of designing to standards:
“… Web developers who create code around the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web stand to gain more than just…”
And if you look at our original SciVisum Firefox Study 2005 release, we also included some sensible advice for designers to start with standards based browsers and only tweak at the end of development, for IE and any other curiosities.
As web site testing people, we find a host of ways that organisations leave their visitors high and dry – browser compatibility is just one of many.
Hopefully Microsoft will release a fully standards compliant IE7 and the lost productivity of browser incompatibility will go away for good…here’s to wishful thinking!
Deri
http://www.scivisum.co.uk
Web application testers