Tuesday, February 13, 2007

School portal - no Firefox support? Huh?

Rant: I guess when you write software and design web applications for a living you can tend toward the over critical when evaluating a website. That's what happened to me recently when the school that my son attends released a new student "portal". It's written in ASP.Net and the authors used VB as the language. Interestingly enough, the site is not exactly fancy but doesn't support Firefox.

What? Let's see, this is 2007 and there is an ever growing population of Firefox users and an ever growing understanding of how to write sites to support multiple browsers gracefully. Sure we all make a mistake occasionally and some feature may not work on every browser, and may not degrade gracefully. But when your simple menu's won't work in Firefox, that's just lazy and careless. (Sort of like how they emailed everyone's password -- to everyone. oh well...)

This is sort of like Walmart's recent decision not to support Firefox -- or any browser except Internet Exploder. What of those of us who refuse to use it because of the many security concerns? Well, I hadn't intended to use Walmart's awful service anyway.

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