Browser Wars Redux: This Time It's the Apps 170
itwbennett writes "Yesterday's release of the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader brought to mind the bad old days of the browser wars, but with a new twist: while the app works on any iOS device, it only works on computers with Safari and Chrome. Blogger Brian Proffitt knows as well as anyone that 'this isn't a deliberate snub of the other browsers. Clearly the developers of this web app had to get it to work on Safari, because that's the only vector to get it onto an Apple device. And, since both Chrome and Safari have a shared ancestor in WebKit, it makes sense that what would work in one browser would work in the other.' But it raises an interesting question: 'If HTML5 and other web technologies are supposed to be open and standardized, then will web app developers have to continually tweak their apps in order to accommodate deficiencies or advantages between browsers, or will browsers have to constantly stay in sync with each other's features just to be able to run all the web apps out there?'"
Steam (Score:3)
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Yeah, it improved the experience using it in Wine/Crossover too.
HTML5 just works in chrome (Score:2)
Take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML5)
Browsers aren't magic (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure how "running it in the browser" is supposed to magically erase all the problems that in years past were associated with running in multiple operating systems. The more power and control is given to the browser, the more complex they become, and the less likely it is that different browsers will be able to provide the same experience.
This isn't "browser wars", this is "Operating System Wars, The Sequel". The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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The more power and control is given to the browser, the more complex they become, and the less likely it is that different browsers will be able to provide the same experience
This isn't necessarily true. After all, there is the historical counterexample of Java. While it isn't particularly popular for desktop applications these days, it did manage to provide the same applications on any OS with a JVM without any serious discrepancies. It's certainly possible for this stuff to work out very well, we just don't have much faith in the browser makers, for good reason.
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Not for any app more complicated than "Hello World". Java is write once debug everywhere.
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After all, there is the historical counterexample of Java. While it isn't particularly popular for desktop applications these days, it did manage to provide the same applications on any OS with a JVM without any serious discrepancies.
Until you take anything more than a basic Java program and run it on a non-Sun (or Oracle) JVM implementation.
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I've got version 5, and it won't run the Kindle Cloud app....
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Firefox runs HTML5 just fine. The Kindle app uses Web SQL (never fully standardized, deprecated) instead of IndexedDB (standardized) so it won't work on standards-compliant browsers.
Safari doesn't support the IndexedDB standard, which is why they didn't use that, so your question should be addressed at Safari instead.
Re:Browsers aren't magic (Score:5, Interesting)
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Try installing an egress detecting firewall and watch how often Chrome phones home.
Engaging in FUD, aren't we?
In Chrome, click on the wrench icon (or on OS X, menu Chrome, Preferences). Then select the tab "Under the hood", and deselect the following options:
Th
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You are also forgetting that you have user culture with browsers that often provides you with disinformation, and unpredictable filtering. I can't count the number of sites I have to send a Firefox user agent string so my favorite browser SeaMonkey is permitted to download the page. Its practically the same engine so of course it works 99.9% percent of places Firefox does, but these means if you have done something which depends on one of the few differences, I have possibly obscured information that is n
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Re:Browsers aren't magic (Score:4, Interesting)
However current history shows this isn't true... Browsers right now are the best way to display data, WebKit, Mozilla or IE for HTML 4 strict does an excellent job of following the specs.
HTML 5 is new and not all the features are implemented yet, and right now there is some shield bashing on who has implemented the most useful set of the HTML 5 standard first. So for the developers who are blindly jumping to full HTML 5 are coming across compatibility issues, because not all browsers are close to be fully HTML 5 Compliment.
There is no Magic here. The browser runs on top of the OS and interprets the command send via files and follows the same methods to display the data. It is actually quite easy concepts, it didn't happen before because computing power wouldn't allow useful speed in doing such work without the need to go out and run some custom machine level code. Once Browsers finish their full support in HTML 5 then things will render the same again?
This isn't a browser war type of activity and not an OS War Especially as things work the same in Chrome for Windows, Linux or Mac... The old browser war was each side making their own special commands in complete disregard on what the standard said in hopes that developers will use it over the others and force people to use their browser. Eg. the Netscape Layer Tag, ActiveX or Java Aplets. Right now it is more of a bragging right of saying Hey we got this in first or our implementation is faster then yours. But it doesn't mean the next version your version won't be faster of have that feature... It isn't a war but healthy competition.
In a War the Consumer Looses and Competition the Consumer wins.
Mobile Browser Redirects (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just as concerned with the tendency of websites with 'mobile apps' to intentionally break their own website experience when browsing on a mobile device in order to push their native app instead. Deep links redirecting to mobile homepages are also breaking the web (from mobile at least). In many cases the web worked better on my iPhone 1 then it does today on my iPhone 4.
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Change the User id. Not sure how easy that is to do on an iPhone but I do it on my Droid running CM7 all the time for these broken websites.
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Isn't that a pain to keep switching the User Agent though? Some sites /are/ well designed for mobile, and I enjoy that on the mobile browser. I suppose some sort of menu setting or quick-action extension (see mobile firefox for android, etc) could work. But like the GP pointed out, by the time you've changed user agents, the deep link broke and presumably you have to go find it and click it again.
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Change the User id. Not sure how easy that is to do on an iPhone
I know it's possible when you jailbreak. I have a "UAFaker" icon on my SBSettings menu. I swipe the status bar, tap the icon, and try the link again. Same thing to turn it off. Without jailbreaking, I believe there are alternate browsers you can get on the App Store that will fake the user agent for you. Or you could use Opera Mini or Cloud Browse, but that's getting somewhat excessive.
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I see this a lot ... visit a web site on my iPad, get popup telling me they have a native app, and wouldn't I rather be running that.
No, go away ... show me the damned web page, and leave me alone. Sometimes the redirect they use makes it almost impossible to use the back button to get out of the damned site.
Or,
Try the Atomic Web browser (Score:2)
I only wish I could specify the setting per web site.
Re:Mobile Browser Redirects (Score:4, Funny)
I'd mod you up, but I'm using Slashdot on a smartphone.
Only Safari?? (Score:3)
Clearly the developers of this web app had to get it to work on Safari, because that's the only vector to get it onto an Apple device.
So, Apple locks out downloading/running any other web browser? How come you didn't say "Clearly the developers had to get it working on IE, because that's the only vector to get it onto a PC"??
Since Firefox works on all computers, and has a higher market share than Safari [wikimedia.org], it seems that Firefox would have been the better choice.
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I think "Apple device" means something running iOS; as opposed to an "Apple computer".
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That's not a computer.
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Oh really? You might want to explain that to the general-purpose CPU inside of it attached to a clock source, RAM, storage, and various other peripherals...
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So go write some code on it. You don't have to report back.
basic (Score:2)
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Protip: When arguing about the inability of an iPad to execute arbitrary code to an apple fan, they'll always try to trot out javascript.
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Allow me to make a car analogy.
The iPad is not a computer the same way that a golf cart is not a car.
A cart and a golf cart have the same structural elements - 4 wheels, an engine, etc. And yet, you can't use a golf cart like you would use a regular car.
It's the same with the iPad and a regular computer (be it a PC a Mac, or whatever).
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Somewhere you've gone and redefined what a car is, because a golf cart is most definitely one of them (just not approved for use on state/federal roads).
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From wikipedia:
Car: Most definitions of the term specify that automobiles are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels, and to be constructed principally for the transport of people rather than goods.
Golf Carts are not designed to run primarily on roads, ergo they are not cars.
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No, that's not what a computer is. Since you're so thick, here's what a computer [merriam-webster.com] is.
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That's not a computer.
But it is an "apple device" which was the wording used in the summary.
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> So, Apple locks out downloading/running any other
> web browser?
On iOS (which is what the story is explicitly talking about when it says "Apple deveice") that is _exactly_ what Apple does.
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Opera is also available on iPhone and iPad. For the iDevices, there are multiple browsers which embed the Safari component, too.
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Opera Mini is available for i*, which is not really a browser running on the device; it's just an image viewer, with the images generated on the Opera servers. Opera Mobile, which is an actual browser, is not available last I checked.
And yes, if you make a "new browser" by just creating a new UI around the shipped WebKit you can have it on iOS, of course. Whether you consider that a new browser is up to you.
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Not yet, but it's coming. They already are pushing their App Store as the ONLY way to get software on your Mac
I'd like to see some sort of citation of how Apple plans to enforce this.
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You can scratch the "yet" part. The problem is that they use WebSQL (http://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/). Note the big warning "will not be developed further" in the spec.
They should have used IndexedDB (http://caniuse.com/indexeddb), but Safari doesn't support the features it needs yet.
What standards do not have incompatibilities... (Score:2)
HTML5 impressions (Score:2)
The comment that they "had" to get it working on WebKit in order to get the Cloud Reader on the iPhone/iPad is probably correct - but it also seems like Webkit has been leading the pack when it comes to implementing advanced HTML5 features. Generally these features appear to get added to Firefox somewhat later (after someone files it on Bugzilla).
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Yep. Vudu's streaming movie web app is also HTML5 on the iPad, and it does a hell of a lot more with HTML5 features than an eBook reader...
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it also seems like Webkit has been leading the pack when it comes to implementing advanced HTML5 features
Don't it though! It is like the Firefox guys are more concerned with where you put book marks and the uri text box.
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I don't think it is that bad as you mentioned.
Firefox developers did implement different things that Chrome (for example) didn't have.
Have a look at this site:
http://caniuse.com/ [caniuse.com]
Firefox 5.0 84%
Chrome 13 (from last week ?): 90%
Also have a look at the differences:
http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=firefox+5&b2=chrome+13 [caniuse.com]
Firefox 6 is planned for 3Q of 2011 and the beta's currently support 86%
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What you're mostly seeing is that Mozilla is not as good at marketing the features they have that WebKit doesn't as Chrome is at marketing the features they have.
Which is not surprising, since Chrome spends a lot more money and effort on marketing than Mozilla does.
There is also the effect where Mozilla tends to value correctness of implementation over breadth of features when it has to choose between the two, whereas WebKit doesn't necessarily prioritize in the same way.
You can't believe this is happening? (Score:2)
HTML5 is still a draft (Score:2)
HTML5 is still a W3C Working Draft standard (see http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/) and is still changing so browser developers are slow to spend effort implementing it. Even after it becomes an official 1.0 standard, some browsers may not implement parts of it for years, so some amount of browser-specific code (and occasional non-availability of some features on some platforms) will always be a fact of life when building Web UIs.
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It doesn't really matter if it is a working draft or standard.
Browser vendors will propose specifications and implement it.
Usually with a browser-prefix like with CSS3 features: -webkit or -moz
This is to get in the field- and implementation-testing. If everyone has seen how it works, it will be made a standard otherwise it will be changed and deprecated.
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We've tried to do the plugin architecture for years.
They are trying to add some of those abilities to the browser as native features.
Which allows for much better integration.
So... they should have installed webkit (Score:2)
Sounds like the developers used webkit to render but didn't care if webkit was already present.? Why didn't they just optionally install webkit?
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Why didn't they just optionally install webkit?
There's a WebKit extension for IE, called Google Chrome Frame. I haven't heard of one for Firefox.
IndexedDB vs WebSQL (Score:5, Informative)
Good lord slashdot, I was hoping to see informed technical discussion like that slashdot of old instead of scaremongering gossip over motives for the Book Store compatibility. It has nothing to do with Apple controlling Amazon, or browser wars. The HTML5 database storage spec is not fully standardized, and so chrome and safari both implement the WebSQL spec while Mozilla has chosen to go with their own IndexedDB spec.
The book store will be ported to firefox shortly as both DB implementations basically accomplish the same thing. It came out for Chrome and Safari first because Amazon wanted to circumvent Apple's in-app purchasing requirements on the iPad and that meant working with webkit first. Down the line I am sure that browser makers will eventually converge on either IndexedDB or WebSQL and that will become part of the HTML standard but for now the discrepancy is explainable purely in terms of using a non-standard technology that browser makers are still experimenting with and trying to shake out.
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Given that SQlite is in public domain, I don't see why not make it the reference implementation, nor why MS wouldn't also use it.
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Defining source code as the standard description tends to backfire incredibly hard if bugs are found. That's why no standardization body accepts it, and generally requires 2 independent implementations of the standard to iron things out.
Furthermore, if you already had a database backend that isn't SQLite (prolly the case for IE, not the case for Firefox) then it's just stupid duplication.
Lastly, I suspect there was no reason to stick with arbitrary current SQLite quirks for a standard that is hoped to endur
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IndexedDB is not "Mozilla's own". It was co-developed in the open with Google and Microsoft.
law of the compatibility clusterbuck (Score:5, Interesting)
After forty years of following technology, I assure you that wherever there's a land rush in progress, a compatibility clusterbuck is sure to follow. Early mover advantage is a broken window [wikipedia.org] for everyone else. It's not actually the nature of the standardization process to be out in front of the gypsy caravan waxing behind the Spanish Galleon of zeitgeist redux. As much as we complain about this, the gypsies are a tribe of legendary endurance, hardship, and snark (as often featured here on snarkdote).
Standardization is the introverted naturalist's account of rats, cockroaches, raccoons, ravens, seagulls, and urban deer: what's left behind after progressive forces have eradicated the dodo, pillaged the cod fishery, and turned most of the polar bear population into shaggy rugs of bravado.
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Standardization is the introverted naturalist's account of rats, cockroaches, raccoons, ravens, seagulls, and urban deer: what's left behind after progressive forces have eradicated the dodo, pillaged the cod fishery, and turned most of the polar bear population into shaggy rugs of bravado.
New .signature!
Who said poetry was dead? :)
grnbrg.
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Early mover advantage is a broken window [wikipedia.org] for everyone else.
The Broken Window fallacy is about the idea that the economic activity required to replace destroyed property can be counted as a net benefit to society. It is a fallacy because that activity does not create new wealth; instead, it represents an expenditure of resources and effort merely to return to the state before the property was destroyed. If the "window" was not broken, that effort and those resources could have been spent on moving society ahead, rather than regaining what was lost.
In your example (r
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Jon Katz, is that you?
HTML5 is still in draft (Score:2)
The 11th draft of HTML5 was released this month http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html [w3.org]
Features, not browsers (Score:2)
How about, instead of sniffing for the browser types you (think you) know support what you need, sniff for the features you need directly? That way your app will work just fine with any browser that supports what you need, and if it doesn't support what you need you'll be able to tell the user exactly what his browser's missing so he can fix it (it may be he just needs to update his browser, or install a plug-in or optional feature he hasn't gotten around to yet).
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How about, instead of sniffing for the browser types you (think you) know support what you need, sniff for the features you need directly?
What makes you sure they're not doing that? It could be the case that Trident and Gecko don't support some HTML DOM feature that WebKit supports.
A Glorious Day (Score:2)
Really, this sounds like a great thing for browsers and the internet. When developers write things to a standard (HTML5) instead of insane-crazy-time (whatever the hell internet explorer 6 renders), everybody wins. If browser authors want market share, they are forced to pick up features. Even the IE behemoth appears to be realizing that some HTML5 may be critical to its long-term survival.
In the old days the problem was that IE had a monopoly, and sucked, so people wrote crap for IE and it continued the
Standards vs. Implementation (Score:2)
Pretty silly to complain about HTML 5 "standards" when the real problem isn't with the standards, it's with the implementation of those standards. That's why we have tests such as Acid, of course.
I will say, however, that the implementations of the browser standards for HTML 5 and CSS3 are SO much better than earlier rounds of the browser wars. At least it's not a complete nightmare as before. Where you find problems are in edge-cases such as websocket and threads for which there is really no workaround p
Browser Wars will never be over (Score:2)
The expectation that HTML5 would end compatibility issues is not only unrealistic, but completely ridiculous. Vendors and developers have extended, misunderstood, incorrectly implemented and violated standards since the web began, and a more complex and more powerful standard only offers more ways to do so.
1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, ..., 2009 called.... (Score:2)
They want royalties on your browser wars/standards argument.
You can deposit it in the account of one honorable Nelson Malambe, somewhere in Nigeria. Check your spam for the address and account number.
-R
(sorry for the double post, I accidentally posted as an AC.)
Both, somewhat. (Score:2)
It's not as bad as it sounds...
Yes, web developers do need to support multiple browsers. It may be worse with HTML5, but when I was a full-time web developer, it wasn't bad at all -- I spent maybe an hour a week fixing crap so it'd work in IE7 (we dropped IE6, thankfully) and everything else Just Worked -- we'd develop in Firefox (since it had Firebug, since this was before Chrome was as cross-platform as it is now, and before its dev tools could really match Firebug), and maybe once or twice a month there'
IOS Appstore rules (Score:2)
I'm a big Apple fan in most things, and a big fan of Amazon; they've got me locked into their store unless they behave really badly. I think Apple went too far telling Amazon et all 'no app for you if you have a handy link or interface to YOUR
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Yep. How is this any better than the days of horrible 'web apps' that only run IE6?
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Indeed. This seems a specific solution to a specific problem, and working on Chrome is simply a byproduct of that. Perhaps at some point they'll want to broaden their market, but for the moment, this is more an issue of the closed nature of the Apple app market than anything to do with a new browser war.
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And you have cut out a tremendous amount of your potential audience. That is some smart business-sense.
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Tremendous? I think not. Latest stats show IE6 usage is now under 4%. Not wasting resources on a small and declining platform is excellent business sense. Even Google has stopped supporting it.
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The fortune 500 I work for services other corporate clients, as well as the public, and IE6 is still substantial in the corporate world. In any case, I imagine an individual that does not consider IE6 a browser also lumps 7 and 8 in there too, but maybe not. Why is IE7 any better of a browser than IE6? It was a POS too.
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As a web developer, let me say that IE7 and IE8 are hundreds of miles removed from IE6. Sure, they don't support enough web standards, but they also don't horribly break formatting for the standards they do cover. It's 100 times easier to make a modern site work on IE7 and IE8 than it is on IE6, especially when counting for all the hacks you have to do to work around specific rendering bugs.
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Sure IE7 and IE8 are a hundred miles removed from IE6, too bad they're still a million miles away from being in the league of FF, Opera and Chrome. Even IE9 has given me problems supporting HTML5 and CSS3 that none of the others have.
As a web developer, I would be happiest if MS just remotely deleted all instances of all versions of IE and replaced it with any of the real browsers; the world would be a better place. As a web user, I would be happier too, if I hadn't already moved away from IE and already we
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Being pragmatic, I tend to develop for Firefox first, doing only things supported on IE7. I tend to get by with almost no hacks or IE-specific CSS. You can't do that if you support IE6 at all. You don't even get transparent PNG support.
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Sure, that's why companies that make clunky inventory systems and such still support IE6, and those who do almost everything else don't bother.
And if you think that IE6 and IE7 are remotely similar in capability, there's no way you have ever actually tried to support both of them ;)
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Actually, I just looked again, and it's under 3% now.
But in either case your analogy doesn't make sense. It's more like if 1 out of 30 customers at your restaurant walked in without a shirt on, and you told them to go put one on and come back.
And also, your understanding of profit margin is off, as well. If I sell 1 widget for $100 and make 4% profit margin, I make $4. If I sell 2, I make $8. The number of customers doesn't matter on the MARGIN, it's still 4%. Either way, you made a profit, and are not
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If he'd said IE without a version number, you'd have a case. But IE6 accounts for roughly 3% of my traffic, and from what I hear that's more or less the norm.
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at my institution we dropped ie6 this years because the percentage of web browser visiting us with it were below 2% however they accounted for 35% of the complains directed at the web team. So you mostly have whiner and people with pirated software on ie6 so why would you want to serve that kind of clientele is a mystery to me.
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Um, because 4% or even 2% of browsers could represent 100% of your revenues. Do you collect analytics on the business impact of that segment? Maybe firefox users are cheap asses and linux users even cheaper and even though they may represent more percentage wise, is it best to develop by percentage of usage only?
In any case, I am not sure how you jump from 35% of complaints indicates that the 2% is made up of pirates. How do you know that even .1% of the 2% represents the 35% of complaints? Way to generaliz
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We sniff for SP2 or win2000 by looking at the presence of SV1 in the end of the user agent string and almost half of them don't have it. This is strongly correlated to pirated copy of windows.
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We sniff for XP SP2 by looking at the presence of SV1 in the end of the user agent string and almost half of them don't have it. This is strongly correlated to pirated copy of windows.
Fixed that for me
I don't know why I typed or windows2000.
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We dropped support for IE6 last year and I can honestly say it has made our life so much easier. We were spending a large portion of our time trying to get our pages working in IE6 for what turned out to be 8% of our clients (and it was dropping), so we force them to an "upgrade page" that links to the IE7 page on microsoft's site. We haven't gotten a single complaint about it either, which is just icing on the cake.
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So? He may not WANT to be bothered with those customers.
He has a right to choose who he sells to, I believe.
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But if those potential customers possibly represented 50% of your revenue, then I would say it is retarded. How are you going to know if you do not service them and collect analytics on their business impact? That is retarded.
Are you not sure he has a right to sell to who he wants to?
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Tremendous? 2004 is over, buddy, and IE6 is just shy of 10% of the market. And that's mostly in china. If you're designing a website targeted towards non-eastern nations, dropping IE6 and 7 is given. IE8 is less terrible than the others, but is still a horrifying browser to code for. IE9 is actually fairly good. As for the rest, firefox is great, and webkit. Opera usually renders pages similarly to webkit.
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How about you go for facts instead?
Yeah, he's losing around 2% of the market, probably composed of old people, with old computers, or chronically stupid people.
"tremendous amount of potential" indeed
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp [w3schools.com]
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I disagree. With the developments of where browsers seem to be going, that is to be a platform for an OS like experience, there will be plenty of reasons to create platform specific versions of application. There are always reasons to not spend money on development for a browser that represents miniscule percentages of usage. Businesses make money not for altruistic reasons like developing for something that is non-existent in the grand scheme of things. For instance, are you going to accommodate Opera?
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In Firefox 4.0.1 it fails with "J is undefined" Here is the offending code: "";C=1;var a=window.applicationCache;if(z[n.APP_CACHING])z[n.APP_CACHING](C);a.swapCache();J.addEvent("KindleApp:AppCacheUpdate")}function d(){K="";C=1;E&&!E.getItem("cached")&&E.setItem("cached",1);if(z[n.APP_CACHING])z[n.APP_CACHING](C);N&&(N=!1,J.addEvent("KindleApp:AppCacheSuccess"))}function B(a,c,q){var s=J.startMetrics("Store::TOSOpen"),b=a?z[n.STORE_OPEN_STATUS]:z[u.STORE_OPEN_STATUS];F||(F=!0,KindleT
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I highly recommend a pastebin service [pastebin.com] for such things. Not only do they not eat your code at random, but they keep things nice and not blobbed up, and even support syntax highlighting!
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But now it just lags behind Webkit.
As pointed out in several other posts, the Kindle Reader is actually broken because Safari's WebKit lags behind in STANDARDs implementation instead of vendor-specific extensions.
think it's a complete waste of time of Firefox to come out with a mobile browser that only works in like two different handsets!
This is more than 2:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/platforms/ [mozilla.com]