A short time ago I came across a website, while using the Firefox extension StumbleUpon, which advocated blocking Internet Explorer users from your website. And then, ironically enough, I recently came across another website, also while using StumbleUpon, that advocated blocking Firefox users from your website.
While at first glance, this seemed to be a simple “whose is bigger” kind of fight, I soon came to realize it ran much deeper. Both groups have some valid concerns, and both groups seem to believe in their cause wholly. But why would anyone want to effectively block a large portion of their potential customers and readers?
Advocates of blocking Internet Explorer claim it’s because of the inferior code rendering engine employed by Internet Explorer. And I, as a web developer, can definitely understand that. IE has a great deal of bugs when rendering code; a lot of commands that work in every other browser will not work in IE.
For example, take the following code:
<html>
<head>
<style>
#centercontent{width:600;
Height:600;
Margin:auto;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id=”centercontent”>
Lorem ipsum yada yada yada
</div>
</body>
</html>
In any browser except Internet Explorer that would display a 600x600 pixel square content box in the center of the screen, with the words “Lorem ipsum yada yada yada” written inside. But, in IE, it would display the same box on the left side of the screen. This is because it doesn’t properly render the box using the “margin” property.
In order to get the exact same box in IE, you’d have to use this code:
<html>
<head>
<style>
#iecenter{text-align:center;
}
#centercontent{width:600;
Height:600;
Text-align:left;
Margin:auto;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id=”iecenter”>
<div id=”centercontent”>
Lorem ipsum yada yada yada
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
That may not seem like that big of a deal, and it’s not, most developers do it without thinking now. But, that is just one example. There are many other instances like that in which IE requires a lot of extra code, just to display the exact same thing that would work in any other browser.
But, according to the opposing group, Firefox is not without its faults. The problem with Firefox stems from the use of the Adblock extension. Basically, the Adblock extension removes all ads from a website. For the obvious reasons this hurts the revenue of website owners. The only way to block Adblock users is to block Firefox completely.
So who do you block? I say neither.
Although I dislike having to write the extra code required to make my websites display properly in Internet Explorer, I don’t feel as if I have to place to say who can and can’t visit them. If web developers don’t feel like they should have to write extra code, then they shouldn’t. They should simply leave the code how it is, and let IE users deal with a page that does not display properly.
I will not block Firefox users because they make up such a large majority of my traffic. The StumbleUpon extension is my number 1 traffic source, and its users make up about 80% of my traffic. In total, Firefox users are about 90% of my readers. Blocking all of them, just because of the small portion who use Adblock, would hurt my revenue much more than it would help.
In addition, I again do not feel like I have the right to block users, simply because they choose not to view the ads on my website. The internet is all about free information, and I’m willing to give up a portion of my profits to uphold that.
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