[QUOTE=DMark]
I know a guy who designs targeted email blasts for a major casino. They are quite nice, with lots of beautiful design and Flash features. He said the top brass told him, “We only care if it works on IE. Our customers don’t use Firefox and other browsers, so don’t waste our time and money trying to make the sites work for them.”
<snip>
I will admit that when I go to see the statistics regarding visitors to my websites, about 85% or more still only use IE, the next largest group is Firefox (about 10%) with Safari, Linux and Netscape occasionally showing up on the list.
[/QUOTE]
Well, your own figures are probably slightly on the low side for Firefox, if the numbers i’ve seen over the last year are any indication.
The figures compiled from various sources in this Wiki article suggest that Firefox is at least 12% overall, going up through 15% and all the way to about 25% for some sources.
Even if the lowest figure is the correct one, it strikes me that your friend’s casino bosses are pretty stupid if they are willing to forego 1/8 of their potential business simply because they refuse to take the (usually relatively simple) steps of getting their site to work in the Gecko-based browsers.
Their reticence is especially strange considering the high-volume nature of the stuff they are doing. If you only have a few hundred customers, i can sort of see the financial logic in not taking the time and effort to ensure cross-browser compatibility, but if your potential customers number in the millions, then surely the potential extra business is worth the effort.
[QUOTE=Tahssa]
May I please hijack I have a Firefox related question that is annoying me?
I switched to Firefox about a month ago. 99% of the time it is awesome, but when I got to YouTube it tells me I need to download the latest version of Flash. So I go and try to download the latest version and it starts to but then a window pops up telling me, “You need to close an appilcation before we continue: Firefox.”
Ok, no big deal. I close Firefox and then open IE and go to the Flash sight and download the latest version. I close IE and open Firefox back up and go back to YouTube and it still says I need the latest version of Flash. I go back to the Flash sight and try to download it and again it tells me I need to close Firefox before it can continue.
So I am at a lost. Has this happened to anyone else? If so how can I fix it? Thank you.
Hijack over
[/QUOTE]
Did you actually install the Flash file, or did you just download it to your desktop?
Try it again, and tell us exactly what procedure you follow, and what instructions it gives you.
Their reticence is especially strange considering the high-volume nature of the stuff they are doing. If you only have a few hundred customers, i can sort of see the financial logic in not taking the time and effort to ensure cross-browser compatibility, but if your potential customers number in the millions, then surely the potential extra business is worth the effort.
[/QUOTE]
Their philosophy is that most of their clients are in their 40’s or way above that age, they all bought PC’s chock full of Microsoft and probably have never even heard of Firefox, let alone use it.
I think it is silly, the guy who designs the sites agrees, but he admits it would take some tweaking here and there to get everything to work on other browsers, and if they ain’t paying, he ain’t doing it.
[QUOTE=Captain Socks]
How do I get tabs on Firefox?
[/QUOTE]
Not sure what you’re asking. Firefox comes with tabs as a default part of its setup.
If you want to open a new tab, just go to File > New Tab. Or you can add a New Tab button to your main toolbar by going to View > Toolbars > Customize and dragging the tab symbol to the toolbar.
You can also configure Firefox to open links in new tabs, rather than in new windows, by going to Tools > Options > Tabs and clicking the radio button for “New pages should be opened in a new tab.”
[QUOTE=DMark]
Their philosophy is that most of their clients are in their 40’s or way above that age, they all bought PC’s chock full of Microsoft and probably have never even heard of Firefox, let alone use it.
I think it is silly, the guy who designs the sites agrees, but he admits it would take some tweaking here and there to get everything to work on other browsers, and if they ain’t paying, he ain’t doing it.
[/QUOTE]
I guess that’s sort of reasonable. If they know for sure that the vast majority of their target demographic use IE, then their position makes sense.
But i don’t think you can necessarily make such assumptions anymore. I know quite a few people who probably never even knew that other browsers existed, but who are now using Firefox simply because i recommended it to them and explained why it was better than IE. Lots of Firefox users do the same.
As for your friend not doing work that they won’t pay for, that’s completely understandable. It’s not his problem if they want to miss out on market share.
Love Firefox! Could never go back to Internet Explorer. Well, I could go back to it but I definitely wouldn’t want to. With all the extensions Firefox makes browsing so easy!
My favorite add-on (ok, not my favorite, but one that I thought was funny) is the one that makes FF appear to be (either Netscape or IE), in case your company doesn’t allow open-source browsers.
BTW Captain, if there’s an extension that allows you to switch individual tabs in FF to the IE engine. I don’t know if it would allow you to run StumbleUpon, but you might try it.
Sorry, I’d link the extension for you, but I’m posting from work, which has a terrible computer (and no FF!).
[QUOTE=jjimm]
AdBlock and Filterset.G for a start.
[/QUOTE]
AdBlock Plus is better, and you don’t need Filterset.G. Other extensions to try are Forecastfox and, in general, a good number of what’s on the “Recommended Add-Ons Page” Mozilla.org runs.
[QUOTE=mhendo]
I hardly ever run across a site that doesn’t work in Firefox nowdays. At least not in my regular browsing. None of the sites i visit on a regular basis have any trouble in Firefox.
The last time i had to switch to IE in day-to-day use., i was trying to watch a video on an NBC website, and because of NBC’s partnership with Microsoft, it insisted that i use IE and Windows Media Player.
If a website works with IE and not Firefox, there’s a very good chance that it’s because the website creator hasn’t followed proper web standards. Unlike IE, Firefox actually renders HTML and CSS properly, and is compliant with W3C standards. But because IE has been the browser of (non-)choice for so many people, some web designers create their sites with only IE in mind, and fail to create compliant web sites.
As Firefox and Opera’s market share have increased (esp. Firefox), designers have started to realize that they can’t just ignore non-IE browsers anymore. If i ever run across a site that only works in IE, i send an email to the site’s owner telling him/her that i won’t be returning to the site until they make an effort to cater to more than 1 browser. They probably just bin my email, but it makes me feel better to write it.
[/QUOTE]
I had this happen fairly recently. I was trying to enter some rebate information into a company site, but the information would not display in Firefox. It worked fine in IE though and after I was finished, I e-mailed the webmaster. I got a response and they were (or at least) seemed to be very apologetic, promising to fix the problem the next time the pages were redesigned.
Don’t know whether that will happen, but it was nice that they answered.
Firefox is always my default browser wherever I am, and has been since 0.7. There’s only one site at work where I can’t use it – and that’s because it does a client pull to make sure you’re using IE. Bastages. Not even the IETab extension fools it. Other than that though, and apart from a few sites that use really bad DHTML (a protocol that just oughta freakin’ die already) Firefox has never given me any trouble.
[QUOTE=EddyTeddyFreddy]
The more you use Firefox, the less you’ll want to use IE. The only time I use IE now is when a site won’t work properly in Firefox.
[/QUOTE]
You could download IE Tab. It’s a program that lets you run an emulation of Internet Explorer in a tab of Firefox…
[QUOTE=EddyTeddyFreddy]
The more you use Firefox, the less you’ll want to use IE. The only time I use IE now is when a site won’t work properly in Firefox.
[/QUOTE]
Same.
The spellchecker is even good at realizing what language I’m writing in, unlike Word!
IE7 is actually pretty good, but AFAIR it still doesn’t have two Firefox features which are absolute must-haves for me – right-click highlighted text to Google it, and Quick Searches (I have g for Google and w for Wikipedia, both of which I use approximately eight hundred times a day).
