John Gruber is talking about the web becoming the dominant application deployment platform over at Daring Fireball. He rightly points out the (severe) usability implications of web-based apps, and goes on to opine that these implications don’t matter—web applications are becoming dominant despite these implications—and that web apps are easier for an organisation to maintain. No rollout procedures. And he’s right. However, rarely for Gruber, he’s wrong further down:
Most email web apps (e.g. Gmail and Yahoo Mail) run on any computer with IE, Safari, or any Mozilla-derived browser. Most weblog web apps (e.g. Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern) run in every browser I’ve ever tried. These apps are effectively usable from any Internet-connected computer in the world…There are certainly exceptions — banking sites come to mind — but for the most part, web apps are being built to run in any modern browser, not just IE.
That’s true for apps that are on the web, true. And those are the apps that home users will use—Gmail or Yahoo Mail to read their email, WordPress or Blogger to write their weblog. Even banking sites are getting better. The issue here is corporate apps; real bought software. A high proportion of enterprise-class applications now come with a web front end as well as or instead of a native client. And you know what? Damn nearly all the ones I’ve seen are IE-only. I rail against this every time we look at an application at my company. I always, always ask the sales team whether the front-end is cross-browser. And most of the time it isn’t. Corporate users don’t use Gmail (well, they do, but they do it in their lunch hour or while the boss isn’t looking). IE’s blatant incompatibility, and enterprise developers’ coding for that incompatibility, locks corporate desktops as surely into Windows as Microsoft Office does. I freely admit that there are some things that IE does which other browsers do not: I’ve been advocating switching to Firefox (or previous incarnations) at work for well over a year now, but we can’t do it until we get seamless authentication where the user isn’t asked for a username or password when accessing our intranet. Those things, however, while critical, won’t solve the problem if they are fixed.
I wonder if perhaps we need the opposite of Dean Edwards’ IE7, some JavaScript which emulates all things IE in Mozilla, implemented as a Firefox extension. Then you just install the extension and suddenly all IE sites work. It’s not as if IE is a moving target at the moment. It would be good if we could, in some way, detect whether the site you’re viewing is expecting IE—if they use JavaScript, we can look for accesses to document.all, but we could also try and detect IE-style CSS or IE-style HTML —and switch in the extension’s changes if that’s the case. Still wouldn’t solve my seamless authentication problem, but it’d be a neat way of getting Firefox to support the sites that it doesn’t currently support without polluting the browser itself.
It’s a bit short-termist, though. It reduces the pressure to fix IE-only sites even further than already.
If “I don’t need to worry about anything other than IE, because most people use it” becomes “I don’t need to worry about anything other than IE, because most people use it and Firefox supports the quirks anyway”, we’re doomed to following IE’s wobbly footsteps from now to eternity.
That’s why the Mozilla people are flatly refusing to emulate IE in the browser, and I agree with them. They believe that “people won’t support Moz until it gets market share; it won’t get market share until it works with our corporate web apps” isn’t a good enough argument, and, again, I agree with them. But it is not an argument entirely without merit. The idea behind this extension is that if you choose to take the other side of the argument, you can do so. I’m not suggesting that the extension be supplied with the browser, but that (if, for instance, you’re a company with a lot of IE-only web apps) you can switch to Firefox on the desktop and install the extension on all your users’ machines, thus making the switch possible.
I shout daily at the developers at work that have caused me to install the “View this in IE” extension. I thought if there was one place that wouldn’t force Microsoft products on their workers, however, sadly …
Your idea has merit. Once the users are used to working with it at work, and get to understand and appreciate that it is better than IE, when they get home, they will be more likely to install it on their home PC. Slowly market share will rise. It could be a vital extension for me because I can’t abandon Windows at work because some web apps I use require IE.
Those ignorant ASP.NET “WebForm” Guys…
Would love to see an IE emulator capability in or in front of Firefox. As it is, unknowingly or not, the good folks at Mozilla are essentially helping and encouraging, if not forcing, IE to hang on to its market share.
This is very sad.
An extension would be great! Yeah…granted Firefox’s DOM is compliant, but you have to remember corporate wisdom…if it costs money, don’t do it. Updating IE sites to work with other browsers would cost $$$, and would target the 5% of their users that use Firefox. You got to look at it in both perspecitves…or else Firefox will never be able to make it in the corporate world.
I swear I saw an extension somewhere, which had the ability to identify firefox as ie.I think a similar feature was built in to an opera version i tried a long time ago. i have never been to site which actually won’t work with alternate browsers, they just say it requires ie.
Yes there is an extension for this sort of thing, I’ve had a look around and found it.
It’s called user agent switcher by a guy called Chris Pederick and is currently on version 0.6.6.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=59
Hope this helps
Graham: the user agent switcher makes Firefox tell lies to the site it’s viewing by claiming to be IE. It does not implement IE-only functionality in Firefox, sadly.
I am not a WEB developer, but I am technical. I switched to MAC and firfox because I was tired of the security issues in the windows world. Now as a result of that switch I am forced to Parallels desktop in order to be able to do my job. One reason I have to have it is because there are WEB apps I have to run that will not run on fire fox. Most of my co workers would love to switch to mac, however they watch me have to use IE for the most important applications in our business ask whats the point of spending the time, effort and money to switch if they still have to run windows? It makes there life more confusing. I would agree if you want to take market share away from IE you need a product that can run IE dependent apps. until you have that IE wins!!!!!
As I don’t have easy access to a PC, a Firefox module that emulated the quirks of other browsers (particularly IE) would be really handy in web development.
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regards
fluflaken