I'm with you on that but the reality is standards-compliant browsers aren't the end of the story. Technology isn't the only consideration. It's never just "tweaking something here in there" since there are QA-related resources the need to always be considered. A reasonable company providing consumer or enterprise services will not deploy an application and claim to support every browser-OS combo because it's "supposed" to just work. Everything must be QA-ed to limit any gotchas in production.
Furthermore, customer support is also a big issue. What will their customer support team do if someone using Opera/MacOS calls for help? It becomes a nightmare if your company needs to support hundreds of thousands of users. Again, it doesn't end with "just tweaks." :) Regards, jeff ----- Original Message ---- From: JM Ibanez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 12:07:47 PM Subject: Re: [plug] Bankard Drops Support for Firefox and Linux Jeff Gutierrez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Elijah, > > Most often than not, explicitly restricting browser/OS support mean > they know that other browsers and OSes exist :) The reason is mostly > the allocation of development and QA resources. A CIO/CTO might have > the following rationale behind the decision: > > 1. I only have a limited budget for software engineers and QA > engineers, why would I allocate 10% of my resources to 1% > (e.g. Safari, Opera, etc users) of my customers? (I use a Mac and I > don't even use Safari.) Note that with the advent of more standars-compliant browsers, developers need not to create special-case HTML/CSS (i.e. separate HTML/CSS per browser), as one can code to the standards and just fix the quirks. And cost? You get 100% of the market base; heck, with even a few tweaks (e.g. coding a different stylesheet), you can even support the mobile device market, without much additional cost. That's the big plus that these CTOs/CIOs don't really seem to get, IMHO. It's not really about browser-specific support as much as being standards-compliant enough. -- JM Ibanez Senior Software Engineer Orange & Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://software.orangeandbronze.com/ _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
