[Glastonbury] here we stand... on a rocky shore...

[Ian Dickinson]

On 11/12/05, Andrew M.A. Cater <amacater at galactic.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > also
> > we are installing firefox quite frequently, this makes the transition
> > so much easier

> Glad to hear it. I had someone complaining at me this morning
> that McAfee _forced_ them to use IE. The only other app. that
> forces you to use IE is Microsoft's own Windows Update :)
It's more subtle than that, in my experience. There are huge
differences between the rendering engines in the (different versions
of) the Mozilla browsers and (the different versions of) the Microsoft
browsers, not to mention Safari, Opera, Konqueror, etc. Many web
designers don't have the means or inclination to test their sites on
multiple different platforms. And if 90% of their traffic comes from
IE-on-windows, it's easy to understand why the designers might
optimise to that platform and not pay too much heed to other users'
needs. Note I say understand not condone - it's very frustrating for
those of us in the minority segment, and I have no end of sites that
give me a worse user-experience just because I'm using FireFox. And I
have to say that it's *hard* to get cross-browser sites right. I
design in pure standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. I couldn't get the
last site I produced to work perfectly in both FireFox and IE 5+
(didn't even bother with IE4). In the end, I have it that it gives the
best user experience in FireFox, since I expect a larger section of
the site's future traffic will be using non-MS browsers. I haven't
tested on Safari because I don't have a Mac nor on Opera because I
couldn't be bothered :-)

Personally, I work about 60%-40% on Linux and Windows respectively.
But in fact, the underlying operating system isn't that big a factor,
since I spend most of my time in cross-platform development tools
(like Eclipse) building cross-platform apps (either web-based or
Java-based). I thinks this makes me rather an ambivalent Linux geek,
since I'd actually be happier for the operating system to be
commoditised and get the heck out of my way!

I'll save a rant about the suckiness of writing tools (including
OpenOffice and DocBook and MSWord) for another day :-)

Ian