I'm actively participating on a small scale in the anybrowser campaign. I use Opera 6.0 when I can, and increasingly I'm finding that I can't. Sites such as
I'm stating the following in these emails
We use the ASDA Supermarket online shopping for most of our grocery requirements, and the menu system chucks out a load of JavaScript errors with Mozilla or Netscape. (I haven't tried with Opera.) This is annoying as I do have IE on my home PC, but there's a strange problem with it that causes it to connect to the wrong server from time to time. The usual result is a load of 404 errors as the server it's actually connected to doesn't know anything about the file it's trying to receive. This can happen randomly, so an HTML page can load OK, but some embedded images won't.
Anyway, Mozilla doesn't suffer from this and is becoming my browser of choice, except for the sites that are stupid enough to be IE-specific.
The annoying thing is that it often takes more work to make your web application incompatible with some browsers! What I mean is, a significant chunk of web applications can and should be done entirely in CGI (or other server side magic). Bill payment, web email, lots of the major stuff. (Even Yahoo! chat has an HTML client, although it's pretty crummy compared to the Java version, the Yahoo standalone version, or GYach.) It's when people want the website to do something "special" that the incompatibilities come in.
"Special" usually means JavaScript crap. You want to automatically put the cursor in certain fields, rather than leaving that up to the user and his web browser (which will handle it in exactly the way he/she wants). You use JavaScript (and pray the user isn't blind). You want a fancy "please wait" window to pop up when the user clicks "Submit." You use JavaScript. You want to check form data on the client side. That's an irresponsible substitute for server side validation, but you use JavaScript and do it anyway.
Along the way you adopt IE as your "official" browser, and start sending hate mail to people who complain.
Notice that none of these features were useful. They're just "special stuff." Junk features that take more time, introduce more bugs, break your application for some browsers, and add nothing. I know that some JavaScript wizardry can be useful at times, but mostly it just seems to be a developer doing "something special" to an otherwise straightforward application and breaking it for me.
See alsomy previous rant on the subject.
Over the bank holiday my evil ISP sent me an email telling me that the card I use to pay for their less than ideal service is about to expire. I was told to "click over" to the their (terrible) site and update my account. I did know the card was about to expire, so I was happy it's not some credit card scam.
I dutifully "logged on" to their site, to be told that Netscape 6 isn't supported, and that I should download an older Netscape browser if I wish to continue! I don't happen to have the UserAgent tool on Mozilla on that machine, so I couldn't log in spoofed, but my Opera 6 allowed me to spoof to be IE5 and it worked okay.
I really hate bad design, and I really hate silly browser sniffing when there is no need. I suppose Microsoft have poisoned the minds of managers, who now insist on IE friendly, but non-standard designs....
