T Campbell's Blog

(this is weds; still haven't unpacked from america, so am on the laptop, away from the blogger cookie, and am lazy as all get out)

I sympathize with and understand your position (there are ways to do browser evangelism respectfully and usefully, and that's not on the list), but I'm not convinced that one can apply the blanket 90% assertion to webcomics readers (especially the nerdier concentrations). I'd be really curious to see what kind of figures you've gotten since Firefox went to 1.0.

Actually... hrm. That'd be an interesting 'pedia article right there -- it'd be fascinating to see how browser usage skews over different types of webcomic audiences. Perhaps this summer.
 

If your stats show that you do have 90% IE readership at your web comic, then supporting those users sounds like a good thing to me.

You can do that by viewing your pages in IE before publishing them.

Supporting your audience doesn't seem to me to require that you also surf the rest of the web in IE.
 

I was forced to switch to FireFox after having just dealth with CoolWeb, a virus. It's a browser hijack and really annoying. Don't ever get it on your computer, because it's like trying to pick off invisible leeches.

So I was pretty much forced to switch to firefox.

The ammount of smugness that I ran into got to be really annoying. So I tried this one last solution before switching to FireFox.

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/hyungk/hummer/

Maybe it was a little extreme, but I was getting desperate. :D

to find more about coolweb, http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html
 

Needing to know how a page looks in IE isn't enough reason to use that as your primary browser.

"I like it better" is, so I'm not recommending you switch, but if the only point holding you to IE is your desire to check out how your pages look, I'd advise simply that you switch and just check your stuff in IE before you publish.

Too, like Wednesday said, there are smart and good ways to encourage use of non-IE browsers, and thot page is so incredibly not one of them...

(I also agree with Weds' assertion that it's unlikely that 90% of webcomic readers use IE. I suspect "webcomic readers" may be one of the demographics in which IE is really a minority.)
 

The IE View extension to Firefox makes things simpler if you want to use both IE and Firefox: it lets you open pages in IE straight from the Firefox right-click menu.
 

And I'm with you on those redirect-sites: those are just rude.
 

Hate Firefox.

Hate, hate, hate Firefox.

(feel free to replace "hate" with something a bit more alliterative)
 

Zo how long haf you had de issues mit der computer program Mr. Gwalla? Und you mutter how do you feel about her?
 

I have to disagree with Will Frank. Making sure your product works on IE by using IE is just plain good sense.

Sure you can check IE whilst still using Firefox as the primary in THEORY, but in practice whos going to bother? An IE habit is probably more practical here.

Although personally I hate using IE nowadays. Firefox is such a comfy armchair, even if the Firefox zealots are embarassing to be seen with...
 

I've had issues with Firefox since I tried it and realized that Mozilla.org had been hijacked by a cabal and my favorite browser (Mozilla) had been booted out in favor of a Playskool toy.
 

STrRedWolf here from Stalag '99. I dispute your claim that 90% of all viewers use IE.

According to my logs of June 2005, my readership is 51% IE, 40% Mozilla/Netscape, less than 1% Opera/Safari/KHTML, and the rest robotic spider traffic (search engines).

Maybe it's the fact that the Internet isn't dominated by Windows PC's, but is also filled with Macintoshes (both 680x0 and PPC), Unix running x86 PC's, Sun Workstations, ARM-running Linux PDA's, cell phones, and more.
 

Choosing a browser should be a free choice, not a forced one.

When someone publishes content on the web that can be seen only by one browser, it is not only annoying, but insulting.

Even more when the content is not standard based.

When I see the "GET A BETTER BROWSER" message, I find it someone presumptuous. New generation browsers are without doubt safer and more powerful than Internet Explorer (IE7 included). But few people really need to use those new extentions that are absent of badly coded in Internet Explorer.

Now, when considering that people with legitimate safety consideration (i.e. not using Internet Explorer) are forbidden to enter more sites than you can imagine because the webpublisher didn't bother to test this content with a decent brower (or multiple browsers...), or even stick to current standards, you should just be happy to be on the side of unsafe internet-users able to see 99% of the sites and to catch 100% of the spywares hidden within...