Posted on 06/23/2005 7:39:06 AM PDT by N3WBI3
One in 10 UK websites fail to work properly on the open source Firefox web browser, a study shows.
Some 100 leading consumer sites were assessed by web-testing firm SciVisum.
Websites that proved difficult for Firefox users to navigate included the government website Jobcentreplus.gov.uk and the cinema site Odeon.co.uk.
Firefox is an open source alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and has proved popular since its launch in November last year.
While most people still use Microsoft's browser, Firefox is slowly making inroads.
Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications.
Microsoft IE's share of the market dropped to 87.23% in May, compared to 90.31% in January.
Question of code
Of the websites that SciVisum tested, 3% were found to be turning away non Internet Explorer (IE) users and 7% of the sites included non-standard code recognised only by Microsoft's browser.
Companies who value their brand need to address browser issues immediately Deri Jones, SciVisum "Surprisingly, after all these years, users of standard-compliant browsers are still faced with sites that do not support their browser or with a link suggesting they download Internet Explorer," said Deri Jones, chief executive of SciVisum.
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.
"There is a certain business logic to this as IE is the most widely used browser," said Mr Jones.
Microsoft is working on a new version of IE, largely in response to the success of Firefox.
FIREFOX INCOMPATIBLE WEBSITES Odeon.co.uk Jobcentreplus.gov.uk Insurance.co.uk British American Tobacco Mansell.plc.uk Companieshouse.gov.uk Flybmi.com/cargo bssuk.co.uk Source: SciVisum Web developers who create code around the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web stand to gain more than just friends among the alternative browser community.
It will also make it easier for disabled people to use, said Mr Jones.
"Over time developers have begun to misuse the original standards created for the web to create websites that look great to you and I, but are confusing to a disabled person using a screen reader which needs to make sense of the content," he said.
Simplifying things by separating content from presentation will have a third benefit in that it will make it easier for sites to be picked up by search engines, he added.
Some improvements
The Odeon website, which is listed by SciVisum as one of the culprits, has already come in for criticism about how accessible the site is for disabled users.
While its opening page seemed to work fine using Firefox, testers were faced with a blank page when they tried to enter the site.
An Odeon spokesperson said: "Firefox users can enter the site and get all the information about cinema listings and screening times, just without the bells and whistles of the fancier site.
"Instead of using the Enter button, they should use the text-only version."
On the Jobcentreplus site, testers were unable to use the search facility, while insurance.co.uk gave the impression that it was broken despite the fact that it did actually work with the Firefox browser.
The British American Tobacco website hid most of its pages from Firefox users as the menu system did not show choices if visitors are not using IE.
Some sites had made improvements. Electrical retailer Powerhouse initially excluded Firefox users when it launched its new website design in May, but it has since fixed the problem.
And English Heritage no longer sends Firefox browser users to a non-graphical version of the site.
Firefox has been created by the Mozilla Foundation which was started by former browser maker Netscape back in 1998.
The group is an open source organisation which means that the creators of the browser are happy for others to play around with the core code for the program.
Firefox is proving popular because, at the moment, it has far fewer security holes than Internet Explorer and has some innovations lacking in Microsoft's program.
Still this is a far cry better than things were a couple of years ago, and if in the next year or two FireFox can get to 15% of the market there may be enough pressure on webmasters to put something out there that will render under anything.
Tech Ping
I use Firefox but 75% of the automated mortgage underwriting sites I use at work don't work on it.
Two words "Bill" and "Gates."
It amazing to me that IE's market share is still that high. You'd have to be insane to use it.
I keep getting those jigsaw pieces that tell me to download plugins... what a pain in the neck. So, I just close Firefox and switch to IE.. Problem goes away...
Have you seen the Campaign for Non-Browseer specific WWW site?
Heck, I am on Firefox, I even dumped outlook for Thunderbird. To many problems with ms stuff.
I'm on SBC DSL, and MSIE bogs my machine down incredibly, even when I scan for and delete all the spyware, after each session.
Plus SbcYahoo hijacks my IE homepage back to theirs whenever I change it to something else.
Enter Mozilla Firefox: My Ad-Aware rarely finds any spyware anymore, my computer runs at normal speed, I can set any site as my homepage and not be bothered, and I'm a happy surfer now. Of course, as soon as Firefox becomes very widely used, it too will be under attack by the virus and adware "Gollums" out there, so the search will be on for whatever's next.
OSS PING
If you are interested in a new OSS ping list please mail me
Surely somebody connected with Firefox is smart enough to figure this out and make it read whatever IE reads.
put me on your list
LOL I created a website that has this very problem.. I used Frontpage, and put hover buttons. When I view the page under Firefox, I see the jigsaw pieces where the hover buttons are. When I click on the Firefox-provided button that offers a chance to download the correct plugins, I get a message that there ARE no plugins.
How can a Firefox user see hover buttons? Or, should I get rid of them and just use something else?
Thanks.
Maybe one or two sites I visit in a week have some probs with Firefox, but it is extremely rare.
That is what I use when I need to, but I haven't in over a week.
That's not really the issue, though. MS and IE have added tags and "HTML" tags that are proprietary and not part of the international standard on HTML. Thus if a website usees one of those tags, only IE will read it and interpret it correctly.
Other browsers, like Firefox, try to conform to W3C standards more than trying to conform to MS. As a result, they will not read those extra tags that MS uses.
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