One in 10 websites fail Firefox users

September 2005

One in ten websites fail to provide full and complete access for visitors using a non-Internet Explorer browser. They risk alienating customers and suffering serious revenue losses.

Internet Explorer is currently the most commonly used browser, but its market share is slowly falling. W3schools.com report Internet Explorer's market share as 74.7% in August 2005, compared to 80% 12 months before and 83.3% in 2002. One quarter of your visitors are not using Internet Explorer! Common alternatives are Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Galleon and Lynx.

Web testing specialist SciVisum tested 100 well-known UK sites using Firefox and compared site compatibility with recognised web standards.

Three per cent were just turning away non Internet Explorer (IE) web browser users, and seven per cent of the sites included non-standard code recognised only by Internet Explorer - with the result that these sites lost 25% of visitors they'd worked hard to get.

Websites that turn away Firefox and other browser users include Jobcentreplus and the Odeon. Other sites like British American Tobacco and an insurance site of Lloyds TSB www.insurance.co.uk use non-standard web coding which only Internet Explorer can recognise.

SciVisum recommends developers to develop code to the CSS2 web standard, the official Cascading Style Sheets 2 specification devised by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Using CSS allows authors and users to separate formatting and presentation (how things look) from content (the words you use). CSS standardises web authoring and site maintenance. Non-standard code limits a website's audience and alienates users of different web browsers.

"When webmasters design first for Internet Explorer and not standards-compliant browsers, they so often end up restricting user access to the website which has detrimental affects for a company. Surprisingly, after all these years, users of standards-compliant browsers are still faced with sites that do not support their browser or with a link suggesting they download Internet Explorer, a browser they had presumably chosen not to use," said Deri Jones, CEO of SciVisum.

Firefox reported 50 million downloads since its launch in November 2004. Firefox accounts for almost twenty per cent of the browsers in use by the public today. Industry experts say it is still increasing, and with the huge range of extensions and plug-ins, as well as greater security than Internet Explorer, it's certainly gaining fans quickly.

In Germany, where Internet users have been more willing to adopt alternatives to Microsoft, Firefox is already up to 24.2 per cent. This rapid growth, which shows no sign of slowing down, has been attributed to Firefox's ease of use and its security features.

"Companies who value their brand need to address browser issues immediately. This means ensuring all international standards such as CSS1 and CSS2, which are intended to help web developers separate content from presentation and to make sites more accessible to those with disabilities, are adhered to," said Jones.

Guilty websites

Odeon (http://www.odeon.co.uk), a major cinema chain has received criticism for months for accessibility issues - even now its' opening 'splash page' seems at first glance to be working fine but click on the 'enter' button and Firefox users are offered a blank page.

On the Jobcentreplus (http://www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk) home page, Firefox users find that the 'Job search' button opens a new page, but the user can't perform a search, because the first choice "Select a Job Group from the list" is an empty box.

Online Lloyds TSB insurance site http://www.insurance.co.uk, does actually work, but it looks like its broken - menu items have 'missing images' icons in Firefox, but not IE.

FTSE100 company British American Tobacco did have a website (http://www.bat.com) that effectively hid most of it's pages from Firefox users; their menu system didn't auto-expand to show sub-menus which it does for IE users. Visitors had to guess that small icons next to the visible menu choices will reveal the hidden content. I'm glad to say that BAT have updated their website in the light of SciVisum's findings and their site now runs the same for both browsers..

Most improved

Electrical retailer Powerhouse Online's new web design at http://www.powerhouse.co.uk went live in May 2005, and it now no longer excludes Firefox users or any non-IE browsers. Likewise, English Heritage at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk no longer forces non-IE browsers to a non-graphical version of their site.

Recommendations

To solve compatibility problems a web design company can easily identify any non-standard code lurking in their site. Use the W3C compliance validator or Firefox Validator extension to check any web page.

SciVisum made a number of broad recommendations to improve access to websites:

Insist your website developers check pages using standards-compliant browsers including Firefox first - not just Internet Explorer
Move your site design to cascading style sheets (CSS) - these will make your site more accessible to the disabled, and will simplify the site development itself through separation of content and presentation
If you're planning a total site redesign, do consider some of the now very feature rich Open Source content management systems - several give you pretty standards compliant websites out of the box - consider Plone (www.plone.org), Mambo (www.mamboserver.com) and several others
When planning or upgrading 24/7 monitoring of the core user journeys on your site, ask your test house to explicitly report on any non-standard IE/Firefox issues they come across.

SciVisum undertook the web browser testing between May and June, 2005. All information in this release is correct at the time of issue.

Leanne Smith is a founder of Sleek Services, a popular web solutions service that builds intelligent websites for intelligent people. For more articles or to see what an intelligent, high-traffic website can do for you visit www.SleekServices.net.