site compatibility - the right way
It has become more and more obvious to western internet sites that they will need to cater to Firefox users. With reports showing that more than 1 in 10 users in the US, and nearly 1 in 3 users in several large European countries, are accessing the web through Firefox, it's simply becoming a fact of doing business on the web that the days of writing to IE are over.
In the far east, it's not quite there yet. Firefox usage in countries like China, Korea, and Japan is considerably lower. But they're not sitting around waiting. Organizations that respect their users are already taking steps to make Firefox a first class citizen.
A perfect example of this is a company called Naver. I had the opportunity to visit Naver this winter in Seoul, Korea, and was very impressed by their plans for supporting Firefox and web standards. Naver.com is Korea's largest portal/search site with about 14 million individuals using their services every day! That's pretty awesome for a country with a population under 50 million -- they reach about 45% of all intenet users in Korea.
Naver has made the decision that all of their users matter, not just the majority using IE. To find and fix all of the problems that Firefox exposes in Naver.com is a huge amount of work. But rather than throwing their hands in the air and saying they don't have the resources to identify and fix all of these issues for a very small minority of their user base, Naver has decided to take another rout. They're engaging this community of Firefox users to help them bring their site up to speed for Firefox. They've agreed to fix all of the problems that their Firefox users can discover and report to them. This partnership will allow the company and its users to work together to solve a problem they both face and it demonstrates that Naver understands the relationship that exists on today's web between the commercial services and the community that gives those services their value.
You can read more about this effort in a post by Channy Yun over at Spread Firefox.
Let me also point out that Channy is responsible for the redesign of Korea's second largest portal site, Daum, converting the entire operation to a standards-based system that fully supports Firefox.
Our user base in Korea is small, but even a small group of people, working directly with the companies providing the services they rely on, can make a big difference. Soon, the largest two players online in Korea will support Firefox. Kudos to Naver and Daum, and to their communities of users, all working together to make this happen.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
Just a quick note. There is a difference between supporting IE and Firefox and supporting web standards. The latter is something that will hold much longer than adapting your site to certain browsers. Then again, since the FF developers do a good job supporting web standards and supporting FF is pretty similar. Well done.
Posted by: Emil Stenström | February 1, 2006 1:21 PM
No comments on IE7 Beta 2 Asa? You must have been playing with it.
Posted by: SamD | February 1, 2006 2:47 PM
Yes, it is off topic. Please wait until I have my IE post up (rsn) and put your comments there.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | February 1, 2006 2:56 PM
"a standards-based system that fully supports Firefox" is an awkward phrase that would benefit from losing "that fully supports Firefox" At makes it sound like this "standards-based system" is giving way to the manner in which Firefox has chosen to support "the standards".
I'm just sayin'.
Posted by: Tyrant | February 1, 2006 3:31 PM
> Firefox usage in countries like China, Korea, and Japan is considerably lower.
One word: Ruby
Posted by: Anonymous | February 1, 2006 3:56 PM
So, if FireFox users do the work for them, they will apply the fixes. lol.
Posted by: Jerad | February 1, 2006 4:08 PM
>One word: Ruby
In Japan(IE shell browser heaven),NO.
Plus,both IE shell browsers supports Gecko.
Sleipnir
http://www.fenrir.co.jp/sleipnir2/
Lunascape
http://www.lunascape.jp/
Posted by: wis | February 1, 2006 11:14 PM
I tried out opera mini yesterday on my mobile phone (the first usable mobile browser I have used). When using that it is obvious that standards based websites are rendered *much* better. I think that soon there will be a real commercial incentive for various sites to adjust their site such that it will give a good experience on all sorts of browsers.
As a final remark I think that it is worthwhile to point out to people that standards compliance is a big part of the solution to three problems they have: getting a good google ranking; being accessible on multiple devices & platforms and being accessible for disabled people. They are guaranteed to care about the first problem, they may not yet fully understand that they have the second problem and government regulations will sooner or later give reason to also want to solve problem #3.
Posted by: Jilles | February 2, 2006 9:21 AM
It's amazing how long standards advocates have been pointing out #1 -- standards-based code with at least an effort at making use of semantics like proper use of <title>, <h1>, <h2> etc. makes your site more accessible to the search engines -- and yet there's still a huge community that's focused on SEO tricks. (And there's still a surprising numbr of sites called "Untitled Page" or "Page Title," or sites that use the same title on every single page.) A standards-based redesign gets you 90% of the way to solving so many problems, it's a wonder so many sites aren't doing it. It reminds me of a post I saw on WaSP a week or two ago about "failed redesigns" -- ground-up site redesigns that should have taken advantage of building a cross-browser, cross-device, search-engine-friendly, accessible site, but didn't bother.
Posted by: Kelson | February 2, 2006 10:12 AM
Asa, what you're describing there at Naver is no different than a beta program. This time the beta program is just targeted towards Firefox users.
Posted by: Amihai Cohen | February 3, 2006 3:03 AM
Asa, Even ICICIBank.com has started to support Firefox. Earlier it used to be fully loaded with ActiveX and was working only in IE.
Posted by: Sudar | February 4, 2006 8:41 AM
Citibank NRI India also supports Firefox now.
Before it worked only with IE 5.5 + or Netscape 4.0 +. Spoofing user agent used to work, but then they started banning Opera users completely while they silently allowed Firefox users.
Weird Huh !
There's no reference to Firefox on their site, but Firefox works greatly.
Posted by: milki | February 5, 2006 10:15 AM