The Firefox 5 Minute Challenge, the marketing material developed by myself and a handful of volunteers over at SpreadFirefox that is available in 17 languages, has finally been finished. Unfortunately its completion was delayed a little, but thanks to Charl van Niekerk, there is now a reasonably good stylesheet written for it. It’s not perfect; there are a few issues that need to be worked out, especially with the images and the way some things are positioned, but it’s good enough for now. So, what are you waiting for? Link to the challenge, and send all your visitors that are still using IE over there and help make up their mind to take back the web!
Category Archives: User Agents
Firefox 1.0
For those of you that have been asleep for the past few months, and haven’t heard, Firefox 1.0 has just been released! This really is one of the biggest events in the history of the Internet, and the Mozilla site is struggling to handle the load. At the moment, trying to get to mozilla.org is slower than a standard issue, spyware infested copy of Internet Exploder. Firefox is as fast as ever, it’s just the server is overloaded. If you haven’t got Firefox 1.0 yet, get it via the FTP server, you’ll have a better chance.
As reported by MozillaZine, this milestone release of Firefox features a brand new start page. It’s not hosted on the mozilla site, it’s on Google – a smart move based on the amount of traffic (Google have got plenty of bandwidth to share). The new start page is also quite well designed from a marketing point of view: it features the most useful service available on the internet – a Google search!
It’s clean design is certainly a big improvement over the Firefox Product page, which is aimed more at users that don’t have Firefox yet. This one emphasises what a user actually wants to do: get on with browsing the web. It also features a short description about common keyboard shortcuts for new tab, bookmarks, history and search, which shows they’ve really thought about what a new user needs to know. They’ve also added links to a few of the important mozilla pages at the bottom for Firefox Central, About Mozilla, Mozilla store and how to get involved.
However, the page has been written in typical Google tradition, with no less than 51 validation errors and no DOCTYPE specified – it really takes advantage of what Firefox is good at… parsing, interpreting and guessing how to render junk built for IE! </sarcasm>
It really is a shame since part of the message about spreading Firefox is to be able to build with standards, yet the first page thust upon new users doesn’t really help with spreading that message.
Don’t Support IE
Recently, Charl van Niekerk posted his comments about dumping IE, and I totally agree with everything he said. This site does not, and will not support IE until such time as IE supports the standards – like that will ever happen!. If you haven’t already, fire up IE and take a look at this site. You should notice that it degrades somewhat gracefully. The content is fully accessible, though it’s not quite as visually appealing as it is in Firefox and Opera.
Here are my reasons, especially for web developers like myself, to stop supporting IE and allow websites to noticably degrade in IE and other older browsers. Most have already totally given up on Netscape 4.x, so it’s about time we did the same for IE.
The target audience for developer sites like this is, of course, web developers. If web developers start to find that the resources they need to learn and improve their skills do not work in IE, they will be forced to use alternative browsers. Of course, many developers like us already know about the plethora of bugs and serious lack of standards complaince in IE, but as can be seen by the stats at W3Schools, around 70% of web developers (well, of those that are just learning) still use IE. It is these developers that we need to convert to better alternative browsers, and the sooner the better.
By converting the developers, they will learn more about standards compliant, and interoperable code. They will notice the severe flaws in IE’s implementation. They will be forced to make sites that work properly in non-IE browsers, since they’ll be using one themselves. As more sites adopt standards, and stop locking out non-IE browsers, we will have a better chance of taking back the web!
The Firefox community may be aiming for a 10% market share within 12 months among the general population, but among web developers we need to work harder. I want to aim to completely reverse those stats on W3Schools. Let’s aim for 70% market share for non-IE browsers, including Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Omni-Web and Mosaic (just kidding), etc… So join us! Remove the countless IE hacks from your stylesheet, except the ones that are absolutely necessary to maintain accessibility. Indeed, there is even a single hack in my stylesheet that simply prevents the menu overlapping the main content. Let’s send a message to those that build the sites! Let’s give them a reason to switch!