The Xena Blog

More than you ever wanted to know about MSDN Subscriber Downloads

Xena and Firefox, Opera, &c.

The current Xena Table of Contents uses a system called Deeptree to render layers of organized content and references a description page for each content item.  It was written, I believe, in around 1997 and is largely unchanged from then.  I think you can even look it up as a code sample on MSDN Online - for the time it was pretty slick.  However, it uses DHTML to collapse the menu items, which was dropped by everyone but Microsoft when we *ahem* "extended" the standard.  (As a disclaimer here, I won't publish any comments regarding the right or wrong of DHTML or Java support, both sides had their issues).  When the site was designed, however, I don't believe anyone planned on this happening and so the site works fine for IE browsers, but pretty much tanks for anything else.  The use of ActiveX to do checks and updates for File Transfer Manager is also a cross-browser issue, we handle it poorly today.

As we started work on Xena 3.0 about a year ago, one of my priority 1 requirements was to make the site fully cross-browser compatible.  Funnily enough, the operations team (who tend to be pretty focused) told me that losing Deeptree wasn't required, because 99.5% of our client browsers were IE.  I was able, however, to make the point that this could possibly be the case because we only support IE (after explaining that "support" is different from "can be accessed") and so that might possibly be a factor.  The net-net of this is that cross-browser compatibility for Firefox, Opera, and IE will be included in the update for all major site functions.

Comments

Phil Scott said:

Great news! You can tell the operations team I would be one of the many people that ONLY use IE. In fact, the only shortcut to IE is labeled MSDN Downloads because it is the only reason I use IE anymore.

Thanks for sticking up for us non-IE users, Andy.
# November 17, 2004 12:00 PM

James Geurts said:

Cool! Thanks for making it cross-browser... Any idea when the new system is "scheduled" for release?
# November 17, 2004 1:41 PM

Dave said:

That is great news. Most Microsoft sites work well with Mozilla, but the subscription download site doesn't which is amusing to me, since developers are more likely than the average user to be using Mozilla/Firefox. Developers use the 'more cutting edge' technology if only to trial it.

I imagine the 99.5% is because 90% of developers get to the front page using Mozilla etc, but spent 0.5% of their time browsing the site before giving up and switching to IE :) It would be interesting to see the stats after the site is made standards compliant.
# November 17, 2004 1:58 PM

Andy (MS) said:

I really, really can't promise a release date, though we are targetting the Whidbey/Burton launch for our rollout (and my, won't that be a fun day). Getting the TOC fixed is a matter of time, budget, and priorities as with any project. I get a few e-mails every quarter saying basically, "Microsoft has $70B in the bank, you should spend some of it fixing your site". Welllll, yes, I guess that's true, but they unfortunately neglected to leave me the company checkbook. We did get some major budget approved for the Xena 3.0 project, however, and we're basically making all of the updates that I think should be made, within reason.
# November 17, 2004 2:30 PM

Sean Timm said:

This is great news! Thanks, Andy! Per my previous comment on a prior post, I am one of those users that inflate your IE stats, too.
# November 17, 2004 8:37 PM

Black Fox said:

Great !
# November 18, 2004 1:14 PM

Michael Greene said:

As an MSDN subscriber who hates to use anything but Firefox, thank you.
# November 18, 2004 10:33 PM

Andy (MS) said:

Funnily enough, there is a huge contingent of MSDN customers who hate everything about Microsoft. I really try my best to support all of my customers, but it's tough not to roll your eyes when someone sends a three page customer support escalation complaining about Micro$oft WinDoze and then asking for a free xbox to go with their grey-market subscription. Anyway, we're getting out of some entrenched MS-only technologies and moving towards things like browser standards, XML, etc. for the Subscriber Downloads site.
# November 18, 2004 11:50 PM

Sun said:

Well, my case is even wierder. I would use the MSDN subscriber's download from Linux, if only I could...

Yes, there are some people crazy enough to pay for a MSDN subscription, despite the fact that their main OS is not an MS one. It goes without saying that I don't use IE whenever I can avoid it.
# November 19, 2004 3:37 AM

nivenh said:

i'm another guy who would LIKE to use firefox to get at it, but as another poster said.. you can try, but once you get tired of browsing the fully expanded tree in firefox, its back to IE to do it in 2-3 mins vs. 20.
# November 24, 2004 12:07 PM

Richard said:

And another one - I'd love to be able to use the download site with Firefox, but it's nearly unusable - so I, too, use IE for this and nothing else.
# November 29, 2004 12:32 PM

Opera User said:

let me put in my vote for opera support for the cause. not everyone uses Internet Explorer. and not everyone is amazed by Firefox as well.
# December 8, 2004 9:49 PM