Remember the good old days?

Remember the good old days of the Internet? The days when there were only a couple of browsers and everything worked well? Well, it seems that a lot changes in ten years and now we're bombarded with over a dozen different Internet browsers each with their own reasons for and against using them. But it seems that web developers are only creating sites that are optimised for a single browser- namely Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Now, I've not got anything against Firefox apart from the fact that I don't use it myself. The main reason people used it was for tabbed browsing,a nd now that Internet Explorer 7 has that particular feature, in my mind Firefox is redundant software. Yet people still insist on not only using it over IE (Internet Explorer) but they insist on optimising websites for use with this browser- that means that people that use IE such as myself can't see these site's full potential. Which is stupid, as you're clearly limiting your potential userbase by means of filtering how they view and interact with your site.

There's an Internet forum (that shall remain nameless to protect them from themselves. Or something) that develops it's site for viewing in Firefox, and as such optimises features around Firefox's functionality. This is the time of year when there's a huge emphasis on romantic gestures between wifes/husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends. A lot of places celebrate this period between Christmas and Easter with an event of some kind. This particular site is one of them, and everything seemed to be going fine. Until I realised that the event doesn't actually work if you use IE.

Putting it very simply, you have to interact with other users, gaining points for every interaction until you reach a certain number of points. You then recieve a heart that can be spent on items made especially for the event. Simple? Well, yes. At first you needed to gain 200 points (minimum gain 2) to earn a heart, and you need 96bhearts to gain all the items. After protest from a few users, it was decided that the number of points needed would be halved and the number of hearts gained doubled. That's all well and good, except that for me, being an IE user, the code isn't compatible and I'm stuck on the old mechanics. I made the admin team aware of the issue (in a very curteous and civil manner, I might add) and ended up getting the kind of tongue lashing normally reserved by a mother-in-law when a hamster's birthday is forgotten.

So after a bit of sarcasm and a few home truths the team member decided to be civil with me, and we tried to fix the problems. We got a minor difficulty sorted out, but we never managed to fix the event, with the advice given to me as "just cope with it." Which is like saying to a person with a broken neck "Well, you can walk, you'll be fine. Just don't bump into anything and don't lean down." Avoiding the problem doesn't make it better.

It's times like this that I wish we were back in the old days. I don't mean the 54kb/s days, I mean the dual browser days- you had IE and you had Netscape, and that was it. Everything worked, there were no functionality problems because they were, essentially, the same browser. I don't get it. The saying goes "If it's not broke, don't fix it." IE isn't broke. It displays web pages, that's all you need it for. You don't need a spell checker or addons or any other crap like that. You've got a word processor, that's got a spell checker, use that! And as for the addons? That's why you have an Internet browser in the first place, so you can find a site that does those things! You don't need them integrated into your browser, that defeats the point!

In my opinion the only decent thing to come out of the Browser Wars is the open availability of tabbed browsing. Apart from that? Firefox can kiss my big fat hairy ass!