Why Firefox Only in Alpha
A few people e-mailed us or blogged1 their extreme displeasure at our “Firefox-only-religious-zealot-Microsoft-hating-open-source-crazies” browser policy for the alpha.
We tried to clear this up once already2, but we seem to have done a poor job of it.
So here it is one more time - I hope this is more clear:
- When developing a web application, supporting only a single browser makes it much easier to test and support your application.
- From experience, we know that it is easier to make a web application that already works in a Gecko browser (like Firefox) work in IE or Safari than vice versa.
- Firefox has some great development tools (the Web Developer extension, JavaScript console, Venkman, etc.) which save us time and make development easier.
Once we have our core functionality working in Firefox, we will take the time to bridge whatever delta may exist between our Firefox tested code and what is needed to work on additional browsers.
Thanks for understanding.
- Not picking on anyone, just a recent example. [back]
- Twice actually. [back]
Oh, come on Alex. Just admit it. You guys hate Microsoft and want to promote Firefox as much as possible.
I kid, I kid.
I think that Microsoft has done it to themselves. Their years of tight-fisted, strong-arming of web users is coming back to bite them. Hopefully IE7 will be more standards compliant, so that y’all won’t have too much trouble porting FeedLounge over.
No hard feelings. Thanks for the willingness to knock guys like me on the head a time or two before we get it.
I wonder if really-rich-apps like Feedlounge are going to mark a shift in users’ browser-expectations. You guys are quite rightly viewing the browser as a runtime environment and have developed a platform-independent application which is more than can be said for most desktop apps. Designing for IE is designing for Windows only and when you’ve got the choice, why limit yourself?
Users still view the browser as a rendering tool in which any errors are a result of the designers insufficiencies rather than the browsers’ varying spec-interpretations. Getting javascript to work in multiple browsers is not the same game as getting CSS to render correctly though, it’s a whole different ballgame.
When javascript apps have reached and possibly surpassed desktop-app functionality I hope these expectaions may change. Users might start to realise that requesting that an app work in Opera is requesting a Java app debugged and released for linux. It’s nice to have them both but whether it’s worth doing depends on the market and is a feature-request not a right.
Now I’m really curious. I wanna see if this thing’ll work in Opera spoofed as Mozilla. I’m pretty sure it would.
At the moment, the interface won’t load in Opera. Looks like Opera doesn’t like some of the AJAX code.
As a web developer, I completely understand your situation.
When design a more dynamic/DHTML site like this, it’s definitely understandable to first support a browser that actually implements the standards then fix up stuff in the more non-compliant/non-standard browsers.
Programming Tutorials
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting