Firefox continued to gain market share during the months of March and April, garnering a 6.75 percent usage share according to Web analytics firm WebSideStory. Altogether, non-Microsoft browsers accounted for a little over 11 percent of Internet users. Link >>
If you have a retail business, would you consider a door that prevented 10% if your potential customers from entering your store a problem?
Many business websites do just this - by not displaying correctly in web browsers other than Internet Explorer.
For those of you who don’t live and breath the internet, a “browser” is the piece of software you use to view web pages in. Sometimes people even call this software “the internet” because until they use it, they don’t view anything on the internet. Your computer probably came pre-loaded with Internet Explorer from Microsoft (if you click a blue “E” to get to a website, you use Internet Explorer).
There are alternates to Internet Explorer, and the most popular one is FireFox, which is free to use and has many advantages over Internet Explorer. FireFox often loads pages faster, and is safer in that most of the viruses that are passed around the internet are written to take advantage of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, since most people use it.
So what’s the big deal if someone visits your company website using FireFox? Sometimes the issue isn’t large - just some extra spacing here and there. But I recently visited a company site that was done entirely in Flash. Everything functioned just fine, but look how the site was sized in FireFox (colors and blurring intentionally added- the point isn’t to embarrass this specific company but rather to illustrate the point):
Bottom line - download and install FireFox and call up your business site. Does it look ok? If not, let your site developer know or contact me.
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Tim Bednar on June 07, 2005