Designing for Firefox
Over 100 million users have now downloaded the Firefox browser. About 16% of our own November sessions on our web site were using the FireFox browser. That means if you are trying to reach a cutting edge demographic, your site better work in the Firefox browser. Unfortunately, many sites break when using Firefox. That can translate to lost customers. It is more than an issue of your site might look bad in Firefox. It may not work at all.
The breaking primarily occurs with interactive aspects of the site: JavaScript menus, shopping carts, polling scripts, registration forms - that kind of thing. Here is a site that breaks in Firefox (courtesy of Marketingsherpa.com):
http://www.digitallife.com
Try the menus. (Also, the referencing Marketingsherpa reference may disappear soon.)
The Digitallife site works find in IE. This type of breaking when examining a site with Firefox is not unusual.
The secret of capturing that 16% (or whatever) of those entering your site using Firefox is to be sure your site works with the web standards as defined by the folks at the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C.
Here are our suggestions for doing this:
- First, check your statistics on your site to see what percentage of users coming into your site are using Firefox, or Mozilla. (Mozilla is the company that makes Firefox).
- Be sure you have a DOCTYPE tag on each of your web pages that defines the standard you are using. You can see an example by looking at the source code for our home page and looking at the DOCTYPE tag for the first line in the code. Start your code the same way.
- You can get a free program to check a web page for its compliant with standards at:
http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
Use it to verify your coding. Also, Some editors, such as Dreamweaver, do some level of validating your code. -
Download the Firefox browser (which is free) and check your web pages using it. You can download it from:
The advantages of using a Firefox/standard site:
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You will capture those users who fomerly found your site broken.
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You will get better search engine optimization. Some engines don’t index sites with broken code too well. They want sites designed for the standards, and use the DOCTYPE metatag to define what standard they should check your site against.
These two are definite. MarketSherpa also reports you will gain decreased development and maintenance costs, lower bandwidth costs, faster download times, and mobile device viewing
If you are looking at our site - we have had one blog comment on our site needing more Firefox compatibility. There are over 800 pages in it. Checking all of these and editing as necessary is a time consuming task. We will try to work top-down, but don’t expect us to check even the top levels quickly. We do want, however, to keep our users happy.