Re: IE only sites

On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 08:02:02 -0800, annoyances-request wrote

> Are you inferring it is NOT possible to have other browsers talking to
> IE-applications in a clean way?

> Wouldn't you agree that an API can be emulated effectively taking away the
> power from the owner?

There are two difficult choices.

One possibility is to fudge the User Agent identifier, so the server thinks
you're on IE. This is quite common practice and works well, but unforunately it
perpetrates the myth that IE is more dominant than it may be. A lot of these
stats sites also work on banner ads or image fetches, which many Mozilla users
block, so also reduing the amount that their votes count. It also renders the
User Agent identifier useless, but that seems to have been done anyway.

The menu problem mentioned is a difficult one, as it is caused by IE behaving
contrary to the published web standards. Its a bug in IE which many people have
coded for. Should Microsoft fix it, then many sites will cease to work properly
on IE. An unfortunate thing is that to demonstrate the particular bug, you have
to write wrong code anyway. The correct code for the menu works on both IE and
Mozilla, yet there exist enough sites which are not correctly coded.

I'm not aware that Mozilla provides an easy way to set the user agent string,
though searching for "Mozilla User Agent String" on Google gives some tips.
Other popular browsers such as Konqueror provide a simple interface to set this
up, even on a per-site basis. Many IE only sites work fine, or at least as well
as they do on Windows, with this little trickery.

IE really demonstrates how a bad product can be made to become dominant by
bundling. It also demonstrates how a monopoly does not have to innovate, and
completely contradicts Microsoft's claims of being the only innovators. Many new
features such as image and ad blocking, cookie blocking and tabbed browsing
appeared last (if at all) in IE. IE does not appear to move on at any rate at all.

 - Richard

-- 
   _/_/_/  _/_/_/  _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield    at    ntlworld dot com
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