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Thu. July 8, 2004, 08:24pm PDT
The alternative browser rant
I posted the following on a forum concerning the future of Internet Explorer and the browser world in general.
I'm a web developer for Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. We're a Mozilla campus for the simple reason of security. Up until the release of Moz. 1.0 we were a NS 4.x campus simply because our tech guys didn't want to deal with the security issues the come with IE and Outlook. We are a Windows campus as well which means the faculty and staff do have the choice to use IE but our training goes toward Moz for their web and email needs. From this we recently redesigned the main PLU.edu pages and created a CMS to create pages that adhere to W3C standards.
I also have direct experience training faculty and students to make webpages from code (still the best way to get the best code -- WYSIWYG has never cut the mustard as far as code goes) and by using XHTML and CSS they have no trouble knowing what's what in the code. Aside from that, I have friends and family (girlfriend, parents, siblings, co-workers, etc.) that do care about the browser their using and have switched to FF because of their concerns over security and having a browser that's lightweight and just plain works. Given the chance and a willingness on our end to teach to the audience (not go over their heads), people do care about this stuff. By cramming anything down someone's throat they develop an aversion to it.
FireFox has been nothing but a champ on my WinXP PC since it was called Phoenix. Myself and my co-workers all run it non-stop during our work days and have little trouble getting around the 'net. What IE needs is a shot in the arm. We don't wish it to fail we just wish it to make progress toward opening up to the millions of people that use other browsers that would like any website (despite market share and numbers) to just plain work. A user will sure care when they've made the choice to switch to a different browser or OS and they come across a site that uses some proprietary ActiveX feature that disallows their use of that site.
As a freelance web developer I write my own, clean code, check everything in a Moz-based browser, then see how I need to mess with my XHTML, standards-compliant code to get it to work with IE. Also, the adoption of anything new in IE will come extremely slowly considering that we're still a couple years from Longhorn and probably 3 or 4 years until it becomes the no. 1 OS. So, for web developers using IE, they're stuck. The web will go no where tech-wise unless we all move forward together. I design to standards so my sites are flexible and easily upgradable when a client wants a redesign. This saves money/is good for everyone involved. And, to anyone who says all CSS-based sites look like minimalistic blogs, see the CSS Zen Garden and shut your graphic design hole.
So, be a good user and follow the directions at the bottom of the page that urge you to get Firefox. Rant complete. Continue...
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