Sites that function only in IE
Another interesting Blog entry I found today was on Wired’s blog and no not the big IE 7 will break the web one, which I thought about writing about but just am getting sick of this. It was about all the sites that still give you that pesky page that “This site requires Internet Explorer“. It wasn’t really the article that was interest but the comments that people left sharing what sites don’t work for them. It’s truly amazing to me that there are so many services that require this still out there. I run into this problem when paying for my car. What’s worse about that is that they don’t even tell you that the forms don’t work in other browsers you just find out because it just doesn’t work in Firefox.
It turns out that it’s a lot more sites then I thought more well known sites and services that is. The main reason being that all other browsers don’t support ActiveX, because its Microsoft’s technology. With most of the sites listed its all form functionality and why would all these sites need ActiveX to create the functionality of their forms when there’s other technologies out there, which are better cross browser. I know plenty of other sites that do the same exact type of forms and functionality but don’t use ActiveX. One commenter named Jerry states it perfectly,
Of course, one would hope that it would only be used where necessary (virus scanning sites, ms update, games) and not where it doesn’t (financial institutions, government websites). There are alternatives out there for sites that need/should cater to everyone such as government sites. Java works fine in most places as does Flash now that there is the Flash Player beta for Linux. Not everyone likes flash or java, but many people dislike ActiveX as well. There is not one platform that everyone likes, but if you write to one that is cross-platform, then at least people can access it and still hate it rather than not access it, hate it, and hate you for not even giving them the opportunity to use their site.
November 13th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
hey dan!
can you diagnose my IE7 problem?
http://danklyn.com/
November 14th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Sent you an email about this Dan. It all has to do with Firefox and other standards compliant browser giving you more wiggle room when float content that expands past the outer containers width and since you used the > selector for the width IE 6 didn’t get the width for the right box. I sent you a technique using positioning that fixes and renders the same on all browsers.