Discussion on:

Building a Minesweeper-type game in JavaScript

Nice to see that you are supporting non Microsoft browsers!

I understand the concern but to be fair, over 86% of the users who come to Builder are on an IE browser of one kind or another.

Hi folks, some considerations:

1) I can't afford to loose 14% of my audience. If you can, great!

2) If you did the statistics 2 years ago, the percentual was 5%. We are getting bigger for the dispair of the lazy webmasters.

3) one of the biggest banks here in Brazil lose a great customer because it does not have Linux browsers support on e-banking. For the webmaster, less than 5% have Mozilla/Opera browser so they abandon support. They forget that some of the 5% are the biggest customers...

4) There's a judicial consumer rights dispute for miused advertising. The guy sold a web site but the product only works on MS-IE. A customer is suing the company for "bad conduct" - if it runs only on Microsoft, this is not an web product.

Thanks to the original author that will try to make it Internet Enabled not only MS enabled.

Josir

The company concerned in this article are an MS only shop on the desktop, thus both the student and the mentor had no reason to code the application to handle any other browser.

I am working on a Non-MS version to support FireFox, Mozilla and Opera and this could - subject to the guys @ Builder agreeing - be a follow up article.

Here's hoping that we will see Greg's version. Anyone writing non-standard, browser-specific code is missing the boat (or is a MS shill). By the way, you might be surprised if you knew how many people purposefully override the UserAgent string just to get around annoying checks for MSIE from web servers. Also provides a small amount of protection from trojans designed to wreak havok on MSIE users.

Anyone who codes for IE-only is killing himself. Is your non-standard HTML readable by people who are vision/sight-impaired? Does your broken code work on non-traditional devices?

Of course not. IE allows all kinds of sloppy practices (e.g., " " instead of the correct " " or better " ", placing the <meta...> tags outside the head section, or specifying elements by leaving out the form: document.theform.name instead of document.forms.theform.name), that break on compliant browsers.

As a professional web developer, I refuse to support or write broken code, because I only have time to do it right...not do it over (when MS finally updates their POS browser in 2006, or whatever).