[Talk] Web Browser Exclusion

[Glenn Satchell]

> From: Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net>
> 
> David J N Begley wrote:
> 
> | Has anyone had any success in convincing sites to change their exclusory
> | practices when it comes to Web browser detection?
> 
> I've certainly had almost no success with this, although not for
> want of trying.  Should anybody dream up a campaign, I'd be a
> keen participant in it.

It's simply a matter of numbers. I don't know the exact numbers but IE
had something like 80-85% of the browser market at one stage (maybe a
copuple of years ago). So Netscape and everybody else had about 15%
with Netscape the majority of that probably. Then take that Netscape's
poor handling of style sheets and the like and I think it's easy to see
why sites say "IE Only".

Yes, I agree that it's pretty poor that the site doesn't do things in a
generic enough way. But if you can easily cover 80% of the market, why
would you then spend 3 or 4 times that effort to get another 10% by
porting to other small market share browsers?

And the only way I can think of is to get the browser writers to
actually create a browser that implements the published standards
correctly, and for sites to only use the published standards and
non-standard extensions. Afterall, that's what standards are for.

regards,
-glenn