Riffing on Scoble - Live.com launching without Firefox support

Sunday, November 13, 2005

OK, this commentary is a little late, as plenty has been said about Live.com's initial lack of support for Firefox, and the problem has already been addressed. But dammit, I'm writing it anyway.

A while back Robert wrote about an MS web site with no RSS feed. His stance?

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

Robert, my version of that comment is:

Sorry, if you do a web site and you don't support Firefox today, you should be fired.

Especially if the web site is targeted at tech types, which Live.com clearly is (at least initially). Why? Because the majority of influentials (the tech type influentials, anyway) run Firefox. In fact, virtually everyone even remotely technical that I know runs Firefox these days, including my boss' boss. Hell, you probably would have been better off ONLY supporting Firefox. By only supporting IE initially, an entire group of users (and a rather important one) were disinterested right out of the gate, and getting them back on board is going to be extra work that shouldn't have been necessary.

I know that there are time and resource contraints on these projects, there's no feature in Live.com that should have been given a higher priority than Firefox support. I hope that the initial response from the blogosphere has made that clear for the future.

PS - I'm not actually in favor of anyone geting fired. Just, you know, a little dramatic exaggeration for effect. :)

6 Comments

+1. There's just no excuse. The browsers have never been closer in terms of writing a single code base in terms of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Of course there are still inconsistencies, but any web developer worth their paycheck should know the workarounds by now.

Anyone developing a public facing site should be developing for the standards from the get go and be testing every bit of UI in as many of the major browsers as they can (multiple versions too) throughout the lifetime of the project.

Drew Marsh - Sunday, November 13, 2005 7:57:00 PM

Maybe Robert himself hacked a bit of the Javascript on Live.com together. ;)

Wim Hollebrandse - Sunday, November 13, 2005 10:45:00 PM

I agree that all of the new browser apps/services should support Firefox. In terms of live.com, i definitely was dissapointed that it didn't from day one, but they said it was coming soon, and sure enough they followed through. I'll give them a pass on this since it clearly was and still is a beta.

John Walker - Monday, November 14, 2005 5:17:00 AM

Glad you posted this, Kevin. Agreed. Just another lame, embarrassing presentation for our side.

Dave Burke - Monday, November 14, 2005 5:08:00 PM

You bohemians and your crazy alternative browsers!

Jeff Atwood - Monday, November 14, 2005 7:16:00 PM

Peace, love, and Firefox, man. :P

Kevin Dente - Monday, November 14, 2005 7:43:00 PM

Comments have been disabled for this content.