Browser Compatibility Policy

It is important to preface this discussion by saying that we are neither Microsoft groupies nor Microsoft bashers. Instead, we try to be realistic about being a computer services company in the Internet age, and we try to stay constantly aware of the fact that we are small and have limited resources.

It is an undeniable fact that Microsoft dominates the computer industry. Whether you like it or not, they literally own most of the desktop environment you are using to read this. From the operating system, to the applications, to the browser technology, Microsoft owns such a large percentage of the market that they have been taken to court and accused of being a monopoly. Without getting into the legal or emotional aspects of this, it is also undeniable that the Microsoft products are at least of “acceptable” quality, and in most cases better than that. If I am a small businessman trying to make a living in the computer business, why would I fight this? And how much effort should I go to in order to accommodate non-Microsoft technology? Good questions.

On our web site, approximately 91% of the visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer. For general use and access, the only issue we have had to date has been with our Commence Newsgroup where we made a decision to call one of the sections Tips&Tricks – and Netscape users could not deal with the ampersand in the section name.

On the business side of our web site, where we offer database support to our customers, we have not yet had a non-Microsoft user (this whole issue has come up because of a prospect environment, making the decision even more difficult). I suspect that corporate IT departments across the US and Canada have standardized on Microsoft Internet Explorer at a rate even higher than 91%.

In any case, we had a prospect raise the issue with us, and along the way we discovered that…

	Netscape browsers cannot deal with spaces in any way in URL addresses; since we make extensive use of query strings containing text data, we have many spaces and other special characters. Good programming techniques would ALWAYS encode this data, but since IE is so forgiving, we had lots of links to clean up.
	Table formatting beyond the basics cause trouble for Netscape; in the logo heading at the top of each of our pages, we use a style code to get a colored line at the bottom of a table; Netscape will not display it at all.
	Font selections seem difficult for Netscape, but since I am using FrontPage for all our development, it is difficult to say exactly where the issue is; suffice to say our carefully crafted pages in Netscape don’t look much like the way they were designed.

So our current development scenario would have to change significantly. Before implementing any new feature, we would need to test it out for compatibility with one or more other browser versions, even before we decide if it is worth using. Do we have to test with multiple Netscape versions? Or with any other browsers? Then once we implement the feature, it would again be necessary to do thorough compatibility testing.

As a small company, we simply cannot afford to do this. The benefits are not worth it, and to be honest, we simply disagree with any corporate decision to embrace non-Microsoft technology for something as standard as a browser, let alone for something as important as a Word processor or an Operating System. So we apologize if our decision causes any inconvenience, but currently - that’s our position. And thanks for listening.