Re: Design Change Requests -- MIDRANGE-L

But, what rankles me is that IBM is supposedly a big supporter of opensource technologies, Linux in particular, and since I run Linux on mynotebook and about 99% of the time I am booted to the Linux side thatleaves me stuck when I hit a site that is IE only. That is just silly.My company develops open source applications and we eat our own dog foodhere. We run Linux. We use Apache and Tomcat for web serving (somestill IIS) and we write apps that are cross browser compatible. Wedon't do it because it is easier or because IE is the most popularbrowser, we do it because we say we embrace open source technologies andwe put our money where our mouths are.

Come ON IBM! Either eat your own dog food or bail on saying that opensource is stated business direction. Firefox support should be a given,not a future enhancement.


Pete Helgren


michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I use FF (95%, 5% IE) at work and Safari (95%, 5% FF) at home. I also
have a laptop that's only used for IBM type work (WDSC, iSeries Access,
VPNs to iSeries) that has both IE and FF, but I rarely get on the Web
from that machine. At work I'm protected by really strong virus/spyware
protection, at home I have a Mac.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: Design Change Requests
From: "Jones, John (US)" <John.Jones@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, January 10, 2006 12:30 pm
To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Considering we're discussing an IBM site for submitting DCRs, I would
like to know the browser usage breakdown among IT professionals.  My
guess is that within the IT circle you'll find IE with around 70%,
Firefox around 24%, and the remaining 6% to be Konqueror (sp?), Safari,
Opera, Netscape, etc.

I use FF 99% of the time.  I only use IE when the site doesn't support
FF.  Luckily, that gets rarer every day.

--
John A. Jones, CISSP
Americas Information Security Officer
Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc.
V: +1-630-455-2787  F: +1-312-601-1782
john.jones@xxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 11:20 AM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: RE: Design Change Requests

From: Ingvaldson, Scott

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp :

As of January 2006 IE 6 has 61.3% of the market and Firefox has 24.8%.
In my mind that makes it less than "obscure."  It should be as easy to

support two or three versions of the #2 browser as it is to supportthe

31 flavors of IE and its associated patches.

But I digress.

The site you point to is pretty skewed.  Other sites show IE with close
to a 90% market share, while others point to a slowing in the growth of
the Gecko engine (Mozilla/Firefox/Firebird).  I'm hardly a Microsoft
advocate, but still I realize that far more than 2/3 of people use IE.
Even the site you list clearly states:
----------

Why so high Firefox figures?

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies.
These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the
average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it

comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

These facts indicate that the browser figures below are not 100%
realistic.
Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used
by at least 80% of the users.

Anyway, our data, collected over a two year period, clearly shows the
long and medium-term trends.
----------

The trend is that use of the Gecko engine is indeed rising, no doubt
helped by the rampant security flaws in IE.  At the same time, your
statement that "it should be as easy to support two or three versions of
the #2 browser as it is to support the 31 flavors of IE" is a bit off
the mark.  It seems you haven't run into some of the more frustrating
inconsistencies between Gecko and IE, most of which don't raise their
ugly faces until you start doing advanced DOM programming.  For example,
events are bubbled completely differently in Gecko and IE.  Another
particularly nasty bit is that the keycode in the keystroke event is
read-only.  That really makes certain things difficult.

In any case, the inconsistencies between Gecko and IE are much greater
than the inconsistencies between IE versions, and it's purely a business
decision as to which to support.

Joe


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