19 Feb 2008

Don't thrust Firefox down our throats

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted at 19:37:18 IST (last updated: 16 Jul 2008 @ 20:09:34 IST)
I've been noticing a new trend with worry. A lot of web designers are optimizing their website to work with Firefox and ignoring every other browser out there. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but when websites start actively *recommending* Firefox for "best results", I'm getting worried. It reminds me of a few years ago when many websites would refuse to work properly with any browser other than Internet Explorer. Worse, when plugins and extensions refuse to install in Debian Iceweasel just because it's not called Firefox (Iceweasel is Firefox rebranded in Debian due to legal reasons) it starts getting a bit ridiculous.

Now I'm not a Firefox hater, but there are plenty of other browsers out there I could use, like Opera or even Konqueror on Linux. The lack of a 64-bit version of Opera is an impeding factor here, but given a choice I would use it instead of Firefox because it just is better in many ways. For instance its built-in RSS reader is miles ahead of Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" and its rendering engine is a tad faster. That's not the point though.

The point is that I am a big believer in open standards and I think no single web browser should control them. Microsoft did it with Internet Explorer after winning the browser war against Netscape, but now that Firefox is starting to dominate the browser scene, we should watch for the same problems.

There are specifically some issues I'm concerned about, like

I believe that no website should be optimized for viewing in any single browser, even if that browser is Firefox. I am a big believer in standards compliance on the web and more importantly, interoperability and platform independence. It doesn't matter whether a web browser is proprietary or Free software, so long as it complies with accepted standards.

17 comment(s)

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  1. Here Here.

    What about disability access? We get fines if our buildings are not disabled friendly, think about our web pages!

    Comment by titanium (visitor) on 19 Feb 2008 @ 20:38:53 IST #
  2. I think the problem is that web designers got so used to designing (or breaking) for IE, that they get all "fanboi-ish" when something else comes along.

    Ideally, everyone would design for a standard and all browsers would support the standard and we can all then just relax and pic a browser we like.

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on 19 Feb 2008 @ 20:41:24 IST #
  3. Titanium geek, I'm not sure about the analogy, but I think you've got the idea. wink

    Ray, it's not just about the browser alone, but also the underlying technology used in web pages that became the problem. IE became so non-standard that web designers forgot what was the standard.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 19 Feb 2008 @ 21:05:26 IST #
  4. Not "a" standard but "the" standard. Both Hari and myself have links in our sidebars to check if our XHTML and CSS are valid. Valid as defined by the W3C standards, which are supposed to be definitive.

    Sadly, browsers and web pages both tend not to strictly adhere to the standard, leading to the catch-22 of pages having to be written non-standard to work for browsers, and browsers being non-standard to work with web pages.

    As an example, of the four people who've commented on this post so far, only two of us have blogs that are fully standards compliant... wink

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on 19 Feb 2008 @ 22:03:46 IST #
  5. I just checked my own site. Seems compliant except on my main page, one of the articles I have has a YouTube video embedded source in it, which apparently is not compliant. Stupid YouTube.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 05:01:10 IST #
  6. Dominic, that's true. But the issues I'm concerned about go beyond mere validation issue. It's about technologies which are both cross-platform and multi-architecture (and freely available).

    Drew, the default tag provided by YouTube is not compliant, but if you notice my own YouTube video, you would see that it validates. Check out the XHTML I've used to embed the video. In particular, I've avoided the <embed> tag, which is not XHTML.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 07:55:26 IST #
  7. Uh-oh, my blog doesn't validate frown. Luckily it's not b2evo but just some sloppy HTML in my posts, but frustrating nonetheless.

    Comment by Troy (visitor) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 16:32:45 IST #
  8. So long as it doesn't have obvious flaws, I would say it's not a big deal to validate correctly. Obviously I place some emphasis on valid XHTML myself, but I have no worries about websites not validating if they use technology that complies with standards.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 17:13:14 IST #
  9. Yeah, I realized looking at the tag it wasn't compliant, I'm must too lazy to go thru and change it. I think the only other thing I'm missing is the & in some of my posts where I just have &, mostly in URL's.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 19:30:11 IST #
  10. Drew, the big problem is that big websites/corporates give a damn about web standards. So they perpetuate the problem as thousands of users copy/paste the code and render invalid XHTML all over the place. confused

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 20:22:25 IST #
  11. sarcastic

    I like firefox because it gives spelling checks while filling forms...

    I dont like it because it doesn't show some unicode characters (kannada or tamil letters for example) properly...

    Comment by Shrinidhi Hande (visitor) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 21:36:05 IST #
  12. Dom: in my defence, the CSS does validate but my XHTML validation is let down mainly by a couple of plugins and having a flash video up. If you run the validator on my most recent post you will see that it's fully compliant. So there.

    All I need to do now is to write 3 more posts and push the video off the main page and I should be fine
    razz

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on 20 Feb 2008 @ 23:23:01 IST #
  13. Shrinidhi, Firefox does have its ups and downs. I wouldn't say it's the perfect browser by any means, because it does have memory leaks and occasionally does crash when used with plugins.

    Ray, I'll probably put up a small reference guide in order to explain how to embed Flash videos/content while validating as XHTML successfully.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 21 Feb 2008 @ 07:43:52 IST #
  14. Very insightful post, Hari. Hadn't noticed this myself, but now that you mention it, yes... that is true.

    Comment by Sudipta Chatterjee (visitor) on 21 Feb 2008 @ 12:56:06 IST #
  15. Thanks Sudipta. I just wanted to point out that whether a browser is open source or not, compatibility with existing standards is important.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 21 Feb 2008 @ 13:04:41 IST #
  16. Hear hear. There are bound to be other sites which say 'Opera only' and 'Internet Explorer only', so enforcing a single browser on your visitors makes in infuriatingly necessary to install every single browser on the planet and keep switching between them.

    That said, Firefox is recommended (http://moourl.com/dr04v) as a good browser for developing sites, since it is fairly standards compliant.

    Comment by Joshua Goodwin (visitor) on 23 Feb 2008 @ 01:04:57 IST #
  17. Joshua, thanks for the comment. I personally haven't seen any site that has the banner "Designed for Opera" but of course, it all depends on the popularity of the browser.

    I would actually say that Opera is more up to date with standards compliant CSS than Firefox.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 23 Feb 2008 @ 07:23:44 IST #

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