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.
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.
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.”
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!).
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.
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.
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).