Steve: Developing on the Edge - WinXP SP2 is good for Mozilla
Steve: Developing on the Edge
Thoughts on development, Web-services, technology and mountains.
22Jul
Thu2004
WinXP SP2 is good for Mozilla

I am of the belief that WinXP SP2 is a good thing for Mozilla?

Why so? Doesn't an improved, less horribly insecure version of IE mean that people have less incentive to switch? True, but...

Have a look at this MSDN article on changes Web Sites need to make to work with SP2. It essentially says:

  1. Stop using ActiveX
  2. Stop using Popups
  3. Stop relying on the user agent to act on extension instead of content-type

These are all things that you need to do to a web site to make it work well with Mozilla. To date, if a site (especially a corporate one) didn't work with a Mozilla-based browser, you could complain and get told "we only support IE". Now, you can complain that their site doesn't work with IE WinXP SP2. Which means they have no get out clause: they need to fix their site.

The best bit: you don't even need to be running IE6SP2. If a site doesn't work firebird on linux, just complain that it isn't working and that you have SP2 on your system.

That is why I think WinXP SP2 is a good thing for the Mozilla product suite.

Comments

On 23 July 2004 at 18: 48 Marius Scurtescu commented:
In most cases IE only sites are using either broken HTML or IE specific tags/JavaScript/CSS. For these cases this new recommendation does not help at all.
Marius
On 26 July 2004 at 21: 31 Steve Loughran commented:
Yeah, CSS is the enemy. And fancy IE-only scripting the other. But in both those cases, I am happy with mozilla and opera being able to do bug-for-bug compatiblity if needed. It's the elimination of ActiveX that will be the first step to a proper web (again).