Linux.com

Dear one-browser Web designers: Don't say I didn't warn you

Now it's Mozilla and Mozilla derivatives that are gaining rapidly in popularity, and MSIE that's on the downswing. Smart Web designers and site owners work to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards and aren't affected by this shift. But there are still plenty of dumb ones out there who haven't figured out that no program or technology will always dominate the market; that if they want to remain competitive on the Internet they had better be ready for things to change radically at a moment's notice, and to prepare for those changes in advance.

I'm writing this because, while shopping for a mortgage online, I ran into a SunTrust Mortgage page that told me I was using an unsupported browser. The page said:

Your browser is not compatible with www.suntrustmortgage.com at this time.

If you are using Netscape 6.x, Netscape has chosen to alter their communication standards resulting in this incompatibility. In the interim, we recommend you use one of the following browsers:

• Netscape (4.08 ? 4.77)
• Internet Explorer (4.0 or higher)
• AOL (4.0 or higher)

If you are using AOL or Internet Explorer 4.5 on a Macintosh, we recommend you download and utilize Internet Explorer 5.0 to optimize your experience on our site.

Instead of taking SunTrust's advice, I eliminated them from consideration as a mortgage lender. My income, while not huge, is more than adequate to cover the mortgage I'm seeking, and I pay my bills on time so my credit is pretty good. There are hundreds of lenders who would like my business. If SunTrust doesn't want me, no problem; I'm already pre-approved by several other lenders.

Two or three years ago SunTrust's Web people might have told themselves, "The extra cost of making a site that works with all browsers is not justified by the extra business we might get by taking that action. MSIE has 96% of the browser market. The only people who don't use it are Apple fanatics and Linux crackpots, and they probably have rotten credit."

Today, depending on whose stats you choose to believe, MSIE has slid to somewhere between 93.7% and 70% of browser usage. Numbers vary wildly by type of site. Tech-oriented sites and those catering to "early adopters" show more movement away from MSIE than sites that cater to mainstream Web users, but the trend is clear. Not only that, many non-MSIE browsers can pretend they're MSIE so their users can view MSIE-only sites, like this one for the Manatee County (Florida) Economic Development Council, and this tends to skew browser-use statistics in favor of MSIE by an unknown amount.

(I find the MSIE-only site example above especially sad because I live in Manatee County. I am not, however, a Chamber of Commerce or Economic Development Council member, nor am I likely to become one as long the group maintains its browser-bigot attitude.)

Preparing for the Internet's future

The point here isn't that MSIE is bad and other browsers are good, but that there are many browsers out there, and it's almost impossible to predict which one will dominate in three or four years -- or whether any of the current ones will dominate. For all we know, someone in China or Brazil is secretly working on a revolutionary Web browser that will be faster, more flexible, and more secure than those that are in common use, today.

In the end, the only "standards" likely to stay with us are those set by worldwide, non-corporate bodies like the W3C and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Forward-looking Web designers and Internet business people already know this, but not everyone has enough foresight to look at trends like shifts in browser usage patterns, then look beyond the immediate trends and say, "The true lesson here is that I shouldn't be preparing for increased use of one browser or another, but that I should make my work usable through all standards-compliant browsers."

I have had several companies pay me $1,000+ per day to tell them this and give them other basic advice about what does and doesn't work -- in a business sense -- on the Internet. I'm under NDA so I can't say which ones, but I assure you the companies that paid me have taken my advice and have Web sites that work well with all current browsers and are likely to work well with most future ones for at least the next four or five years.

I'm giving you this same advice for free, not because you need it yourself, but because it might help you talk a boss or colleague into making Web sites that are open to all browsers and operating systems -- and, therefore, are more likely to accomplish their missions than those that are only fully usable by people who run a particular browser, whether that browser is MSIE, Opera, Konqueror, Safari, Lynx, Mozilla, Firefox, or one of the many others out there that don't have huge market shares but have their own, devoted followings.