What browser do you use?

[Richard M]

Originally Posted by Jerrek

Then don't come to me for business. I do not specialize in writing software for minority markets. I don't write software for Mac or Linux. I just can't be bothered to. My business focus on Windows and IE6.

I find that very disturbing and against everything the W3C is trying to achieve.

[Jerrek]

Originally Posted by Richard M

I find that very disturbing and against everything the W3C is trying to achieve.

I really couldn't care what they say. They don't have any right to tell me how I should run my company. I founded my company with the intent on delivering quality applications for Windows (32-bit applications), or Internet Explorer 6 (when I'm writing web applications). At this point, I have more than enough business to keep me busy for a while. I may want to expand later, but I serious doubt that. I'm not about to go into a minority market. I am targetting the majority, not a minority (mostly geeks who hate Microsoft and think its l33t to fiddle with Unix).

If W3C or Mozilla or Opera or Mac or Linux wants me to develop for them, they need to give me a very, very good reason to do so, and at this point a minority market is a big negative rap on the sheet.

[ic14]

Oh well jerrek..... It proves everthing i thought about you.

I know i shouldnt have said about IE being crap and all... but it still isnt very standards friendly.
And any browser i use has to be. Whitch is why i use FF

[MadGamer]

I didn't mean for this thread to be an argument all of a sudden i meant it to state what browsers people use and why

[philip.j.fry]

Originally Posted by Jerrek

I founded my company with the intent on delivering quality applications for Windows (32-bit applications), or Internet Explorer 6 (when I'm writing web applications).

This is but just out of personal interest, but what kind of apps do you produce and what languages do you tend to use?

Originally Posted by Jerrek

(mostly geeks who hate Microsoft and think its l33t to fiddle with Unix).
If W3C or Mozilla or Opera or Mac or Linux wants me to develop for them, they need to give me a very, very good reason to do so, and at this point a minority market is a big negative rap on the sheet.

For monetary purposes sure, it's a far bigger market with MS, for my (academic) development purposes it's easier for me to use a *nix environment...horses for courses.

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by Jerrek

I really couldn't care what they say. They don't have any right to tell me how I should run my company. I founded my company with the intent on delivering quality applications for Windows (32-bit applications), or Internet Explorer 6 (when I'm writing web applications). At this point, I have more than enough business to keep me busy for a while. I may want to expand later, but I serious doubt that. I'm not about to go into a minority market. I am targetting the majority, not a minority (mostly geeks who hate Microsoft and think its l33t to fiddle with Unix).

If W3C or Mozilla or Opera or Mac or Linux wants me to develop for them, they need to give me a very, very good reason to do so, and at this point a minority market is a big negative rap on the sheet.

You're coming across as someone who is more incapable of cross coding, not unwilling.

[Jerrek]

Fascinating Bifta that you know so much about by coding skills.

philip:

For Win32 applications, I have Delphi 7 Enterprise. Best development suite ever.

For web applications, I use php or asp depending on the client's choice as a scripting language, Java for UNIX executables, and Delphi for IIS ISAPI DLLs.

I don't write applications for UNIX (gnome or kde or other xcrap), and I don't care to design web pages for Opera/Firefox/Mozilla/other browsers. It is not my business at the moment.

As to what kind of applications? Past projects include directional drilling mapping software to provide directional drill operators to map, in 3D, the path they want to drill, and to provide them with azimuth, force, angle, and other settings. [Technical specifications given to me by the client. I didn't know anything about directional drilling until then.]

Current project is a point of sale system for restaurants, because the current stuff on the market is complete crap. And they are selling this 4-hour VB-made crap for $5,000 a piece. I can do better than that and cheaper. I already have a client that owns a restaurant chain helping me out. My plan is to sell it, and then pay 15% of the price to each person that manages to convince a restaurant to use my software. Release date is summer 2005. This will be my first commercially published software product, and I'm hoping this will make my company boom a bit.

[mart44]

Another member of the minority here. Firefox is used all the time except for the odd site or two that seem to be written for IE only. When these crop up, there's a useful Firefox extension that puts an option into the right click menu called. 'View this page in IE'. It will even open a link in IE if you know in advance that it's an IE only site.

I suppose alternative Browsers will always be in the minority but a significant number of people throughout the world do prefer to use them. This number may be small percentage-wise but must still run into millions. Looking at it that way, this is quite a market to disregard.

I think if I ran a commercial site, or any sort that I wanted to be popular, I'd certainly require it to be cross-browser friendly. I have read a few opinions here and there on the Internet of people saying they just won't go back to a site that doesn't work properly with their preferred browser. Some people feel quite strongly about the issue. Not being cross-browser friendly could even mean a loss of business for companies that don't cater for the minority. I'd say any possibility of that happening would be something to care about.

[Stuart]

People, if Jerrek wants to develop for a certain browser/platform combination (and risk having his apps stop working if people stop using that browser as happened with Netscape), that is up to him.

Surely the pressure should be on Microsoft to bring IE closer to the w3c standards?

Originally Posted by scastle

People, if Jerrek wants to develop for a certain browser/platform combination (and risk having his apps stop working if people stop using that browser as happened with Netscape), that is up to him.

Surely the pressure should be on Microsoft to bring IE closer to the w3c standards?

Very true. And not so long ago we rejected a potential supplier because in our perception they were in bed with M$ and not sufficiently committed to developing fully standards-compliant web-enabled apps. That means they missed out on about £20,000 worth of business. As an international company (and a major plc) we simply can't afford to have a web presence that sections of our audience might not be able to access. It's not our job to tell them which browser to use (I loathe splash screens with 'optimised for XXX' or 'works only with xxx').

If enough purchasers of software solutions become aware of the issues, and the advantages of designing according to standards to reach a maximum audience, then maybe the pressure will mount on M$.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by towny

Nevertheless, these guys: www.litepc.com are selling an app that allows you to completely remove the parts of Windows you don't want, including IE.

Yep, I know about that product.

I also know that if you remove IE (the whole thing, not just the browser interface, which is AFAIK what litexp does), then you will cripple Windows networking, and stop windows being able to run other apps, such as Outlook and Windows help.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by towny

Very true. And not so long ago we rejected a potential supplier because in our perception they were in bed with M$ and not sufficiently committed to developing fully standards-compliant web-enabled apps. That means they missed out on about £20,000 worth of business. As an international company (and a major plc) we simply can't afford to have a web presence that sections of our audience might not be able to access. It's not our job to tell them which browser to use (I loathe splash screens with 'optimised for XXX' or 'works only with xxx').

If enough purchasers of software solutions become aware of the issues, and the advantages of designing according to standards to reach a maximum audience, then maybe the pressure will mount on M$.

All true. Also, in some major industries (the Oil Exploration industry being one I know of) use of Microsoft stuff is severely frowned upon for various reasons (security and scalability being two). Anyone who doesn't develop to standards is missing out on some potentially huge customers.

Originally Posted by scastle

Yep, I know about that product.

I also know that if you remove IE (the whole thing, not just the browser interface, which is AFAIK what litexp does), then you will cripple Windows networking, and stop windows being able to run other apps, such as Outlook and Windows help.

I think what we're coming up against here, in that case, is the question, where does the browser end and the OS begin? A computer needs TCP/IP and other networking protocols in order to connect to the internet, and od other stuff, but it only needs a browser interface if it wants to access the www (a simplification I know, but you get the idea). There was an internet before there were web browsers.

So, is that part of Windows that deals with TCP/IP etc really part of Internet Explorer, simply because Microsoft says that it is? I suggest the answer is 'no', because there is ample evidence from other operating systems that there is no necessary link between your web browser and the inclusion of TCP/IP protocols in the OS.

When you set about removing IE from Windows, you can just remove the browser inteface, or you can go wild and delete anything with the name 'IE' on it from the entrie OS. If you do that, as you say, you're in trouble. But this is not a technical problem - it's a conundrum created by Microsoft's marketing department. They would have you believe that IE is part of Windows simply because they choose to brand the bits that deal with TCP/IP etc as 'Internet Explorer'. A classic case of smoke and mirrors.

If you can remove the browser interface - as you clearly can - then you have achieved exactly what Netscape and others long argued for, which is the possibility of a rival browser supplier gaining exclusivity on the desktop (ironically, exactly the same argument is behing the current spat with the EU over Windoze Media Player). And, with the browser interface gone, surely it becomes irrelevant that M$ chooses to 'brand' that part of Windows that deals with networking as 'Internet Explorer', or locates it in folders with that name?

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by towny

I think what we're coming up against here, in that case, is the question, where does the browser end and the OS begin? A computer needs TCP/IP and other networking protocols in order to connect to the internet, and od other stuff, but it only needs a browser interface if it wants to access the www (a simplification I know, but you get the idea). There was an internet before there were web browsers.

So, is that part of Windows that deals with TCP/IP etc really part of Internet Explorer, simply because Microsoft says that it is? I suggest the answer is 'no', because there is ample evidence from other operating systems that there is no necessary link between your web browser and the inclusion of TCP/IP protocols in the OS.

When you set about removing IE from Windows, you can just remove the browser inteface, or you can go wild and delete anything with the name 'IE' on it from the entrie OS. If you do that, as you say, you're in trouble. But this is not a technical problem - it's a conundrum created by Microsoft's marketing department. They would have you believe that IE is part of Windows simply because they choose to brand the bits that deal with TCP/IP etc as 'Internet Explorer'. A classic case of smoke and mirrors.

If you can remove the browser interface - as you clearly can - then you have achieved exactly what Netscape and others long argued for, which is the possibility of a rival browser supplier gaining exclusivity on the desktop (ironically, exactly the same argument is behing the current spat with the EU over Windoze Media Player). And, with the browser interface gone, surely it becomes irrelevant that M$ chooses to 'brand' that part of Windows that deals with networking as 'Internet Explorer', or locates it in folders with that name?

I do agree with you actually. I was being very picky.

I think MS bundled the TCP/IP stuff in with IE because at the time it was originally specified (IE this is), Windows didn't use TCP/IP for networking by default, so the rest of the Windows OS wouldn't have much use for TCP/IP (and remember, Microsoft at that time thought that the Internet wasn't really worth bothering about). Obviously, that is not the case now.

I actually think that TCP/IP is as much part of the OS as the functions used to write to disk.

On a related note, While I do not think that Microsoft should be forced to remove IE, I do think that they should be forced to include other browsers (in a similar way to Mac OSX including IE and Safari), and allow users to choose which browser they use.

[Richard M]

Originally Posted by Jerrek

For web applications, I use php or asp depending on the client's choice as a scripting language, Java for UNIX executables, and Delphi for IIS ISAPI DLLs.

I don't write applications for UNIX (gnome or kde or other xcrap), and I don't care to design web pages for Opera/Firefox/Mozilla/other browsers. It is not my business at the moment.

I find it laughable that you say that you don't write apps for Unix/Linux and don't support the open standards of the web when you code in PHP, a language born on Linux, which is open source and is designed to coexist with the latest in web standards such as XML and XHTML.
The language you're using is a total contradiction to what you have been saying in this thread.
IE's standards support hasn't been updated since 2001.
That makes your work three years out of date.

Also, CSS2 has been a W3C standard for 6 years and IE doesn't have a clue.
It's great viewing what CSS can really do in a compliant browser, like the links below:
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edg...al/glassy.html
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/tests/css2/

EDIT: Actually, I've had enough of that browser, I'm going to start serving up my pages with no style at all to IE and a message explaining why.
At least then I'll be able to concentrate on making my site look good.