March 24, 2004

Every Customer Counts

In a recent streamingmedia.com article about using the Windows Media ActiveX control in Mozilla, I said:

Powerful new browsers like Apple's Safari and the Gecko-based Netscape/Mozilla family are enticing users with their seductive features and blazing performance. Thankfully, the widespread adoption of standards by all the browsers has made it relatively simple matter to write Web sites that work seamlessly on any browser and operating system.

Typically only novice developers create IE-only Web pages. Coding to standards is just plain smart, as well as being good for our industry. Don't forget - our industry literally exists because of the open standards upon which the Web was built.

It's nice to see the sentiment echoed, more eloquently, by Jim Rapoza in eWeek: "Every Customer Counts"

Also guilty are the many Web sites that either work best—or only—with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

This is laziness, pure and simple. There is no feature developed for IE that cannot also be developed using open standards. And for Web site developers and operators, open standards provide a whole host of integration benefits beyond customer inclusion—and at no additional cost.

He's right - if a product or service I'm evaluating doesn't function cross-platform and cross-browser, that's a show-stopper.   Being locked in benefits the vendor, but does nothing for me except restrict my choice to run my business on whatever tools I want to.  To give up my choices for strategic reasons is one thing; to give them up because the vendor is either ingorant or lazy is irresponsible.

Why use anything other than IE?  Here's 15 reasons why Mozilla is more productive and more fun (and narrowing it to 15 was hard!).

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