I’m not leaving a comment on Guy’s blog because that necessitates opening an MSN account….
However, I had to bite on this one…
In short, Guy writes about the frustration he experienced when he tried to load his site on a non-Microsoft browser under Linux, which promptly crashed.
First off, stability-wise Microsoft’s browser still has a way to go… Things are so bad, people are writing their own software just to plug the leaks…
I won’t even start to go into all the security problems…
But the part that really got to me was checking how the site looked on the “broken linux browsers”.
For some odd reason (and I think this happens much more in Israel than other places), people don’t understand that Internet Explorer != the web. There are other browsers out there, and if you play your cards right, your code should look fine on most of them.
The idea is simple, if you write your code so that it conforms to a well defined set of standards - it will run [nearly] flawlessly on any browser. And when I say any browser I mean, even on those you don’t even know about.
Don’t take that to mean just the Firefox and Safari crowd - I’m talking about smartphones, and internet appliances (toasters?)… A pretty complex website I developed recently runs just fine on Netfront, which I didn’t even test on during development.
The problem is that Microsoft have developed a set of non-standard extensions for explorer, in an attempt to lock websites into their platform [ahem… anti-trust ahem…]. Their grip, in this regards has only recently started to loosen, with web developers starting to author sites with standard compliance in mind.
In the meantime, sadly, Israel is one of the worst places to be as far as browser lock-in goes. Even the Hebrew University suffers from this problem - many of the university’s sites won’t even load if your not running Explorer (the site which lets you sign up for courses is a glaring example).
The really sad part is that there is no real reason for this to be happening!!! Modern browsers are more advanced than Explorer, whose development has been stagnant for years. Explorer doesn’t yet support tabbed browsing, not to mention CSS2, and other modern standards…
The absurd is, that the changes that need to be made to get broken sites to work are usually minimal, sometimes as simple as a few lines of code. The problem is often-times lack of knowledge on the part off the webmasters involved… Usually, most of the work in getting a site to work on 3rd party browsers is explaining to the webmaster that there are browsers other than Internet Explorer out there.
And now to the crashing part, putting all the platform wars aside (that’s allot to put aside, but I think I can hold my breath for long enough). For some odd reason, the university seems to have a really antiquated version of Mozilla on their Linux Boxen. Modern versions of Firefox are much more stable and have far fewer display bugs.
Guy:
Maybe installing a current Firefox build will turn you into a card-carrying Linux Zealot. In the meantime I hope this is the last time you lose your work due to a crash (amen).
