A Post on Web Browsers

the majority of people are at work, and the majority of corporations use IE and thus the majority have no choice what they use, but when I go home I use firefox to look at your site.

Go after the head and the body will follow. Not sure what that means but implore the corporations to change.

My previous employer used IE as its default browser. I surruptitiously installed Firefox and took some minimal steps to make the installation not casually obvious (like not changing IE's status as the default), and just used it. While I could theoretically have gotten in trouble, I was betting on two things to keep me safe: 1) I was pretty much the only one there who had any idea what was going on with the computers, and 2) they weren't about to fire me if they could think of any reason not to.

But you're right, Holton: most corps still do use IE, because even if what you're using is flawed, insecure, buggy, and otherwise problematic, it's almost always easier to keep doing what you're doing than find a better way.

I am with you on that one. The thing is, like Holton said, it is a corporate America issue. The problem is that Microsoft strategically seeks out key IT people in corporate America and cuddles up to them with free trips to Redmond and some really great swag. So much so, that up until the last month the company I work for did not even review their webpages in any other browser.

What this Microsoft cuddling leads to is a total disregard for anything other than what is Microsoft centric, which, using the company I work for as an example, can leads to some rather embarrassing errors when viewed in another browser.

I do agree that Microsoft has some serious standards issues, but it is even worse than a standards issue because what they do is assume they know what the code was suppose to do and they try and fix it for you. The result is that your page might look okay in IE, but when you view it in any compliant browser it is totally hosed.

Example: Up until a week ago most of the external pages here at work, which used flash were so poorly coded that they actually showed script mingled in with the content.

Nobody knew what these pages looked like for several months, because the developers who wrote the code only had IE on their boxes. Dang, I wish I could upload a screen print to show you just how bad it looked. I’ll send you one if you want.

I still think those numbers are incorrect. I'm still looking at over 95% IE usage with Firefox making up 2-3% with a lotta uniques a month. And we're talking a very general site.....

We develop our "stuff" to work with IE as a primary and Mozilla if we have the time. Seriously, in my area we're very standards considerate, we code xhtml/css/508, but IE is the corp's official stance.

Then again, we're making an even bigger push for standards since we have a ui/usability person on staff and i'm (more or less) the css/xhtml czar...pushing everyone away from tables.

Here Here!!!

I was looking at my own web stats today and saw a similar trend. Lucky for me 75% of my unique views came from FireFox. I believe this has a lot to do with the webdev section of my website which is really only visited by fellow students at AiSeattle. They are all on Macs and it's drilled into our brains that you Develope on FF, then "as you said" hack IE to work right.

/me yells from the bandwagon

I love Firefox and use it about 95% of the time, but I do have a question:

In IE to download an audio or video clip from a link you can right click and select "Save Target As." I can't find a similar feature on Firefox so I usually have to use IE for this purpose. Is there a simple way to save a link target with Firefox?