# Computer Software Question

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-software-question/320870>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 9, 2005, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-software-question/320870 "2005-09-09T20:13:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![spingears](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@spingears](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spingears)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2005, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-software-question/320870/1 "2005-09-09T20:13:28Z")

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OS is Windows XP-Home.  
Using Mozilla Thurnderbird 1.0.6

A small popup reads:  
“The version of your browser is not supported. Please use Internet Explorer version 4 and above.” It is labelled as being from \<[http://www1.stat8.com](http://www1.stat8.com)\>

Is this peculuar to certain sites?

Or What?

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**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2005, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-software-question/320870/2 "2005-09-09T20:17:57Z")

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It is peculiar to that site or at least the standards that site uses. There are standards that web sites SHOULD use to make themselves accessible to all modern browsers. However, some sites are designed to work only with IE and that’s just the way it is. I haven’t encountered that many problems using Firefox but they do exist.

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**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2005, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/computer-software-question/320870/3 "2005-09-09T20:26:04Z")

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> [@Shagnasty](#):
>
> However, some sites are designed to work only with IE and that’s just the way it is.

It’s not even that they are designed to work only with IE, but rather that they are not designed to work with anything else. Our (growing old and obsolete) intranet site at work is like this. Everyone here has IE, so we don’t bother making it work with anything else. Turns out to be a pain because we exploit some features of IE. I recently had to upgrade part of it to work with everything, and man, was that a pain.