"Reaction [beta]"
Open Addict blocks Internet Explorer users 19 Jul 2007
Popular open source advocacy website Open Addict, is now blocking Internet Explorer users from viewing its newly designed homepage. It seems that owner, Rich Morgan, has become tired of catering to IE's various rendering bugs:
"I've blocked Internet Explorer from viewing our front page and will implement that code on the rest of our site as we roll out the new format.
"The reason, which you can read for yourself if you fire up IE and browse the front page, is that the dynamic menu code and other formatting issues looked like pure crap or didn't work at all with Internet Explorer. Everything looks and works fine with Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, etc...but not IE and I'm sick and tired of hacking and tweaking things because IE has rendering bugs and doesn't adhere to web standards like better browsers.
"What's the big deal? Well, believe it or not, most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE. This could hurt out traffic potentially, but I'm just fed up with IE rendering issues. So if you're an IE user, I hope you're not offended by any of this - it's nothing against you as a user. Just please install and use Firefox or Opera if you use Windows. Better yet, use Linux and all of your dreams will come true."
This seems like a strange strategy to us. Why would a site that promotes "openness" want to close itself off to the majority of Internet users?
And what if things were the other way around? Say Microsoft decided to block Firefox and Opera users from accessing its site. I'd bet that Open Addict would be up in arms.
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5 comments so far
Rich Morgan 20 Jul 2007 02:46 PM
Thanks for taking the time to state your opinions on this issue. Our site is about advocating Open Source software, which IE is not. It's a gross oversimplification to state that we're simply about "openness". And there *are* many sites which only allow IE to be used (for whatever programming issues) at the exclusion of every other browser. I'm not doing that here.
Finally, and I guess this is just the activist in me, I'll make some sacrifices for things I believe in. You may or may not agree with me, but I believe in what I'm doing. If I lose some traffic, fine. The right thing(tm) is sometimes difficult and controversial to do.
Thanks again for your analysis.
-Rich
Simon Griffin 20 Jul 2007 03:28 PM
Rich: Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment - it is greatly appreciated.
Point taken re: my use of the term "openess". It was an oversimplification. However, I still think that the point I was making is valid. As I understand it, a core principle of the open source software movement is participation and I feel that by blocking IE users, you're going against that.
I admire the fact that you're prepared to take a stand on this issue of Web Standards, but would point out that IE compliance is no longer the headache it once was. The older and buggier versions of IE are dying out (v5.0 and v5.5 represent less than one percent of the browser market according to recent stats); while IE7 does a pretty good job of supporting standards overall. (IE's conditional comments also provide a fairly neat way of catering to IE6's glitches if you're so inclined). Maybe there's a middle ground to be found, whereby you support only IE7-plus?
residential drug treatment center 23 Dec 2007 04:15 AM
I don’t really know what to say, but in my opinion Internet Explores is the worst browser ever. I am using Firefox and I am more than satisfied and me choosing it has nothing to do with what company created it.
Drug rehabilitation 4 Feb 2008 03:47 PM
Firefox is offering so many features, who'd use IE anymore?
Christmas Trees 12 Feb 2008 02:18 AM
I'm done using IE anyways. It is always giving me this errors and I don't get it, why it it so hard to fix them? Look at Mozilla, not only it works like a charm, it's already at it's 3'rd version.