What percentage of people access the Internet through a device that does not have Internet Explorer 6 installed?
Daniel
A quick-and-dirty peek at the stats for the last 200 visitors to one of my busier domains indicates that, of IE users, more than ten percent were still using IE5.x. (And one diehard was using MSIE4.5 on a PowerPC.) You’d be surprised at how many people are still running Win95 boxes with minimal upgrades. If their e-mail still works and they only have a few habitual websites that they check, why bother to install new software? It may be reasonable to assume that people who use another browser will be less likely to have an up-to-date version of IE installed – especially people who use linux or mac OS.
A lot of publicly-accessible computers are running pretty out-of-date software. The thing is, even if it only inconveniences one out of every fifty people, (which is an extremely conservative estimate) it’s a ridiculous and trivially easy-to-avoid fuck-up, given the importance of the site’s accessibility.
Well couldn’t the Windows users just close out Firefox and open up Explorer? I have Firefox on my machine as the default browser, but Explorer is still there if I need it (and I sometimes do).
Apple OS X / Safari web browser: Made in America! Surely FEMA should support that, no?
If you got it to work on Firefox first, wouldn’t it also work using Internet Explorer?
Bullshit. I’ve created database-powered websites on Macs that worked on any browser. The scripts were all server-side. The browser didn’t matter. You didn’t even need Javascript enabled.
Those were the good old days, when the Web was simple and stuff worked.
Not necessarily. Sometimes you have to break the standard in IE’s own special way to get things to display right.
By the way, why is this?
Yup. I got in using Opera. But I got in to find this…
Oh, come on. If you do client-side scripting which interacts with the HTML DOM, it is not automatic or trivially easy to make it browser-independent. I have recently been evaluating dozens of PHP-based photo album packages, and most things with non-trivial client-side UI code are either 1) broken in the less popular browsers, 2) limited in functionality in the less popular browsers, or 3) full of code that detects the browser differences and does things differently.
No, making things cross-browser is not rocket science, but yes, it does take effort. (indignant protestations from armchair web programmers who could do it themselves in 30 minutes notwithstanding)
Unlike running FEMA, this is something the people second guessing have actually done. Some – those with laptops perhaps – have done it from an archair.
If I was building an important website, why would I need “client side scripting which interacts with the HTML DOM”? Fuck client-side DOM. We don’t need a customizeable “my.fema.gov”. Just stick up a form. Run all of the operations off the server. There’s really a lot you can do with HTML and Perl and a database.
Thanks, ntucker. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one out there that’s found this to be true.
And to everyone else - give me a fookin’ break. ASP.NET and DOM and ActiveX are all valid development tools, even if they’re not as browser-independent as PERL and HTML. There are valid reasons for an organization like FEMA to have chosen some of them, even though they may be regretting it now. And taking a Web site that’s based on one of them - even if it’s just a widget that doesn’t work with non-IE browsers well - and making it work on a variety of browsers isn’t something that someone can do overnight. It takes time. And effort.
Yeah - a lot. But creating a professional database-driven web app that must be supported by multiple developers and provide full functionality and not be a maintenance nightmare isn’t one of them.
You wouldn’t. It’s simply an example of something that takes effort to make cross-browser. To refute the silly argument that you really have to “try hard” to make your site IE-dependent.
As an example, when vBulletin first added the little menu popups to the bar across the top of the page, they didn’t work on the mac browsers (who knows, maybe they still don’t). Why do you suppose that is?
I call bullshit. Are you seriously arguing that the beginning of the current crisis was FEMA’s first notice that they needed to have a Web platform developed, tested, and available for deployment?
Again, the relevant software is one of the infrastructure tools that should have been created and ready to go before the immediate need arises. This is like making excuses about how hard it is to write a 50-page paper in one night, when the student knew that it was going to be due a month in advance.
For heavens sake, there were hurricanes last year. Did they use something then, or just drive down the streets emptying barrels of cash?
That would be because the developers used Microsoft’s non-standard Java SDK, which deliberately sabotages Java’s cross-platform capability with MS-specific classes, methods, and variables.
You’re reacting to this single comment, right?
The only quibble that I would have with that is singling out ActiveX controls – I’d replace that with “client-side script.”
Really, there’s no way that a page designed to take form data and update a database can justifiably be made browser-dependent. It doesn’t make any sense. Nobody’s arguing that it’s difficult to make a page that doesn’t render or behave differently on different browsers, so it’s kind of silly to protest that it happens all the time. Everybody knows that. That’s not the same thing as making a page entirely browser dependent, though. So VBB’s little javascript menus didn’t work under all browsers at first. So what? It was still coded in such a way that you could use the board – because the basic functionality was there. The regular HTML menu, after all, is much easier to produce than the drop-down menu – and both of them simply pipe the same data to the PHP script. While I wouldn’t say you would have to “try hard” to make a page that did everything important on the server side browser dependent, you do have to take the time to write browser-detection/redirect script. It takes an effort – and possibly more effort than it would to simply approach the problem sensibly in the first place.
Java as a requirement is just stupid.
Just now, I looked at the FEMA application page with IE6 W/Javascript, to take a look at the source to see if I could figure out what the hell they were using client-side scripting for that was so all-fired important. Honestly, I’d really like to know what they’re doing with IE6-specific Java that couldn’t be done in 15 minutes with standard HTML.
I still don’t know, because I was redirected to the page that says:
That’s great, considering I got there using Internet Explorer version 6 with JavaScript enabled. Fucking morons.
The client-side vB problems are due to Microsoft’s Java SDK? Are you sure you’re qualified for this discussion?
And I assure you, this took effort and extra testing on the part of vB’s developers that would not have been required if they simply didn’t worry about non-IE browsers.