If a site is giving you trouble, suspect your browser first. Just this morning we received this from a client trying to use the custom database web-app that we built for her:
I don’t think it’s my computer, because it only happens with the database – but when I try to check the info link on each member, odd things happen. The first few times I click on info, it opens with no problem. But by the 3rd or 4th person, it starts taking a very long time for the link to open, and then pretty soon, it just freezes up. I’ll have to literally shut down IE and then go back and restart all the programs I use (twitter, facebook, etc…) and start over.
image courtesy niponwave.com
Our advice to her: Break the IE habit.
Internet Explorer, due to monopolistic market activities, is the default browser for most people despite its notorious (and well-earned) reputation for poor web standards. And while it has gotten better in the two major releases since the piss-poor IE6, IE remains a faulty browser that requires a host of hacks. Web designers regularly curse IE, and this should tell you something. For instance, javascript, that basic necessity on the web, has intermittent problems with IE (undoubtedly the cause of our client’s issue above).
All due respect to my Microsoft friends out there, but y’all know it’s true. Over drinks at a Seattle conference two years ago a Microsoft wife confessed that several developers in her husband’s division (Sector? How doth mighty Microsoft call out its minions?) felt that creativity was more important than web standards.
In a browser? I sputtered into my drink (and it was an expensive Cosmo).
She just shrugged.
I applaud creativity, but adherence to web standards is a far more important goal for a browser. IE’s problems are the inevitably unfortunate result of its overwhelming market dominance. Microsoft placed IE on every PC for years, and 95% of the market share just got comfy with it.
Break out of your comfort zone. Firefox is better.
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And thus ends my browsers rant. But just to show that it isn’t only browsers, that this corporate saturation approach wasn’t only Microsoftian insidiousness, I present you with Adobe Illustrator. Nearly as dominant as Photoshop, Illustrator used to be for, well, illustrations. FreeHand was the far better application for designing with text, vectors, masking, and multi-page documents (a concept Adobe still won’t accept). But Adobe saturated the college market. And by 2002 no design student emerged from school without a dependence upon Illustrator. FreeHand, the far better tool, died. That Adobe finally resorted to buying FreeHand and killing it should demonstrate the lengths corporations will go to to make sure that their product is THE product, regardless of whether it is worthy of total world dominance.
FreeHand was better. But it’s dead. You can still save yourself from Internet Explorer, though.
I’m going to venture to say this does NOT end your browsers rant, but with good reason. There will always be people out there who refuse to upgrade. Oy.
AND, even though it is not supported, I hold on to — and use — my copy of freehand with a vice grip. It is FAR superior than illustrator, I agree.
Love Firefox! Would never go back.
Google Chrome is my new friend.
I always use Adobe illustrator at work because i work in an animation studio. this is really a serious tool for the graphic artist.,–