Pretty interesting article about what Mozilla plans to do to increase Firefox's market share. The biggest part is related to a discussion we were having about how Firefox does not display many web sites properly.
QUOTE
A major problem for Mozilla in growing Firefox's market share is the lingering tendency of Web authors to code their sites to work with IE. Despite the existence of Web standards as promulgated primarily by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), examples abound on the Web of sites and applications that don't work well with Firefox or other non-IE browsers.
With the successful launches of both Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail application behind it, Mozilla is looking ahead to 2005 with both of these problems in mind.
To attack the compatibility problem, Mozilla plans to hire new staff to ferret out IE-only sites and advocate standards-based coding methods to their authors.
A similar group existed at Netscape before Mozilla's spin-off, and Mozilla has continued its work using volunteers since then. In the coming year, the full-time, paid staffers will double down on the work of convincing Web authors, one by one, to code to standards.
By targeting the Web's most trafficked Web sites, Mozilla claims to have boosted compatibility on the Web not just for its own browsers, but for other standards-compliant browsers as well.
Mozilla regularly tests the 1,700 most trafficked Web sites and performs side-by-side comparisons of how they work in IE and Firefox. The group's data shows that Firefox is 98 percent compatible with Web content on those sites. That's up from 75 percent four years ago, according to the foundation.
"We're really down to just a few problems," Hofmann said.
...
One way Mozilla got to 98 percent compatibility from 75 percent was by convincing Web sites to code differently. Another was to emulate IE when faced with nonstandard pages.
That strategy resulted in what Mozilla calls its "quirks mode." When Firefox loads a page and its Gecko engine rendering engine detects nonstandard IE-specific behaviors, the browser switches into that mode and is able to render the page correctly--albeit at a more sluggish pace.
With the successful launches of both Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail application behind it, Mozilla is looking ahead to 2005 with both of these problems in mind.
To attack the compatibility problem, Mozilla plans to hire new staff to ferret out IE-only sites and advocate standards-based coding methods to their authors.
A similar group existed at Netscape before Mozilla's spin-off, and Mozilla has continued its work using volunteers since then. In the coming year, the full-time, paid staffers will double down on the work of convincing Web authors, one by one, to code to standards.
By targeting the Web's most trafficked Web sites, Mozilla claims to have boosted compatibility on the Web not just for its own browsers, but for other standards-compliant browsers as well.
Mozilla regularly tests the 1,700 most trafficked Web sites and performs side-by-side comparisons of how they work in IE and Firefox. The group's data shows that Firefox is 98 percent compatible with Web content on those sites. That's up from 75 percent four years ago, according to the foundation.
"We're really down to just a few problems," Hofmann said.
...
One way Mozilla got to 98 percent compatibility from 75 percent was by convincing Web sites to code differently. Another was to emulate IE when faced with nonstandard pages.
That strategy resulted in what Mozilla calls its "quirks mode." When Firefox loads a page and its Gecko engine rendering engine detects nonstandard IE-specific behaviors, the browser switches into that mode and is able to render the page correctly--albeit at a more sluggish pace.