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POKE 53280,0: Pete Brown's Blog

Silverlight, WPF, Woodworking, .NET Programming, CNC, Nature, and other topics.

Pete Brown writes on a number of topics including Silverlight, WPF, .NET, woodworking and working as a consultant in the DC area. On most forums, Pete goes by the name Psychlist1972. Pete has worked at Applied Information Sciences (AIS) since 1996 where he currently performs as a lead architect and project manager.

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Anti-Internet Explorer Site Code

Everyone loves to hate Internet Explorer. Microsoft was originally late to the browser game, but eventually won out over other browsers. Think of that what you may, but I have to admit that the competition at the time was made up of some pretty crappy browsers. It wasn't until the battle was pretty much lost that the alternatives started getting interesting.

The IE folks sat on the browser for a while giving time for a real competitor: FireFox to come into being. FireFox is a pretty good browser and is very developer-friendly. It's far from perfect though.

That all said, someone needs to update their site code and FUD text. It doesn't even take into account advancements in IE7, which has been out for some time. I use Firefox as well, but not as my default browser and crap like what you see below just gets under my skin.

Part of being a good citizen site on the net is respecting the user's choice in browser: that means supporting IE, FireFox and Safari (and of course Opera and other common browsers), but it also means not doing obnoxious things like popping up "your browser sucks" messages on the page and forcing an extra navigation step because you have some sort of an agenda.

image

After all that, the site works just fine in IE7 even though it is pretty butt-ugly in any browser :)

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Posted: Thursday, April 03, 2008 7:25 PM by Pete.Brown
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Comments

Herman said:

I myself only have a small FireFox banner on my site. All the CSS features that crap out in IE6 are just disabled. I only spend a small amount of time to fix it, but I make sure it looks more than acceptable in the end... it just looks better in FireFox, Opera and IE7 as well.
# April 4, 2008 3:11 AM

Tom said:

Agreed that this is extremely lame, and I would probably leave that site thinking "these guys are jerks" rather than click the continue link. But at least there is continue link. How many sites have just flat out refused to work with anything but IE over the years? Having to resort to a useragent modification extension is much more of a pain than clicking an extra link. And how about the sites that didn't care what browser you were using, but were obviously only ever tested with IE? I'm glad those days are (pretty much?) over. Certainly, Microsoft's recent attitude here has been very refreshing.
# April 4, 2008 10:00 AM

Pete.Brown said:

@Tom I totally agree. The opposite side of the spectrum with IE-only sites is very annoying. The silly thing there, though, is it is often ignorance not some explicit choice that leads to that.

I'm looking forward to IE8 and its default strict mode. That will be painful for many at first, but can only help over the long term.

Pete

# April 4, 2008 10:16 AM

SteveO said:

Yeah FF is just a superior browser, has been ad will continue to do so. IE will be in catch up for ever probably. This is just a way for the ABM people to voice their opinion. Do I care? not really when they give the link to continue with crappy IE.
# April 4, 2008 4:07 PM

Emad Ibrahim said:

That is annoying but I have to say both browsers have problems... IE is fast but not as configurable and extensible and doesn't do a good job conforming to standards. Firefox is slow as hell but I cannot live without it... del.icio.us plugins, greasmonkey, firebug, etc... You also have to remember that everytime you download firefox from that link, the owner of the site makes $2 through adsense... So there is a financial gain to promote it which is why I have FF banner ads on my site - well I also like the browser.
# April 6, 2008 1:56 PM

Chris Knight said:

Yeah, the AWStats page is annoying. But I think what it highlights is just how lame MS have been with IE development and the treatment of Web developers as second-class citizens. The IE Developer Toolbar is still a joke both in terms of efficient client-side debugging and when comparing it to something like FireBug. Hopefully with the new features coming online with IE8, the story for Web developers will improve.
# April 8, 2008 8:15 PM

Pete.Brown said:

@Chris My guess is that it isn't so much ignoring as it is "not my job". Microsoft is really huge, I can easily see how, say, the IE team would consider it the dev tools team to provide dev support in the browser. The dev tools team does most everything in visual studio (javascript debugging, for example) so they probably considered it the IE team's responsibility.

Either way, from what I saw at MIX, IE8 will help catch up a little to Firefox - assuming they don't cave and dumb things down or default to IE7 mode.

Pete

# April 8, 2008 8:49 PM
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