discrimination

[Al Gordon]

On 7/13/05, Stephen R Laniel <steve at laniels.org> wrote:
> 1) Complain like you did, and keep using your non-IE
> browser. The website will see more and more hits from non-IE
> browsers over time in its access logs, and will have to
> respond appropriately.

When I started reading some of this thread, I was thinking "How can we
make web content developers actually see that there are people out
there running browsers other than MSIE?". Obviously, the data should
be in their logs, if they actually bother to look at them.  Something
that sprang to mind was, perhaps, a system where IE-only sites could
be reported/listed, and non-IE users could do two things:

a) easily and quickly file a complaint/request to the website
maintainer to move to a more open platform and

b) provide a link to the site, so that non-IE users can click through
and have their browser of choice actually show up on these sites'
logs.

Is anyone aware of anyone doing something like this?  It seems like
something that could be implemented fairly easily.

> 2) Use something like the User Agent Switcher for Firefox to
> make the site think you're using IE. Quite often you don't
> *really* need to be using IE -- they're not making heavy use
> of ActiveX, say -- but the site pretends that you do. As
> soon as you change the user-agent string in your HTTP
> request, the site lets you through.

This, of course, would be counter to what I'm talking about above.  It
may be adding to the problem to inflate IE usage stats by having a
bunch of browsers out there pretending to be MSIE.
 
> I've found, after years of using Linux, that the only sites
> that really give me trouble for not using IE are ... sites
> run by Microsoft, like windowsupdate.microsoft.com. That
> site doesn't come up much in my Linux work. I never find
> myself *needing* IE.

For the most part, that's my experience as well.  Where this really
becomes a problem is in corporate environments, when the vendor that
provides your company with support requires ActiveX just to use their
web-based support tools.  I've heard of plenty of IT departments that
are trying to move away from IE, but just can't, because of this.

-- 

  -- AL --