Time for vendors to stop foisting IE onto consumers
In a late-night Twitter rant, CNET's Stephen Shankland uncovers a significant error in judgment by software vendors like Adobe Systems: vendors continue to default to Internet Explorer, even as consumers increasingly do not:
Why the hell do Adobe CS4 help and Lightroom geotag links launch Internet Explorer? It's not even my secondary browser, much less default.
In other words, Adobe is trying to second-guess the consumer, presumably to favor either some preconceived notion of what its customers want or some revenue or partnership arrangement with Microsoft.
In either case, vendors like Adobe need to be thinking forward, not looking backward, and the writing is on the wall that Mozilla Firefox is becoming a new standard for Web browsing.
Sure, IE still commands a 68 percent global market share, according to Net Applications, but that share has been on a steady decline for years. Firefox? It has surpassed 21 percent global market share, and it claims more than 30 percent of the market in Europe, growing in popularity nearly every month.
Adobe and other vendors needn't prejudice their applications to Firefox in the way Google has--at least not yet--but they certainly shouldn't be force-feeding IE down customers' throats. An increasing number of people don't want it and, guess what? The customer is always right.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
And you don't redesign your back end systems without a business case and a good reason to do so. ADP may have come to the conclusion it is better/cheaper/faster to stick with IE.
But something like geotag links should be fairly neutral, not requiring anything specific from the platform. In that case, it is simple to request the system open the default browser, whatever it is, and not a specific one.
It would be just as wrong if they automatically opened up FireFox if IE was the default browser.
However, you wouldn't hear the MS bashing in that case.
Unfortunately, it's not as cut-and-dried as that. You know as well as I do that there are "differences" in the browsers enough to require extra testing and development in order to claim real support (how many companies have you dealt with that have "claimed" to support your platform, only to be disappointed - how do you feel about these clients compared to the ones that simply told you "no"?)
I agree more with catch23 - in cases like these, there is always a choice to be made whether the cost expended will be worthwhile, some companies judge that it isn't. Five years ago, it was almost laughable to think that a company would lose a significant number of customers if they didn't support anything but IE for Windows. That's obviously changed now, but it still means that all those old web apps have to be upgraded/tested/redeveloped to support this other market.
There is a difference between testing all browsers and developing for specific ones. The former is good practice, the latter is the result of incompetence and is actually more work then writing to standards.
Firstly, for most major software, the programmer doesn't have the duty or even the right to make a decision on supporting specific platforms or specific standards - that decision rests with the business analyst and project manager. Whether the programmer has the skill or not is secondary to the decisions made by these two parties, and the choice to hire you as a programmer is a result of this choice, not the other way around.
Secondly, you are dead wrong that it is harder and more costly to develop for specific browsers than to a specific standard. Developing to a specific browser means you are only tied to the limitations of that one browser and the way that browser works. To develop to an open standard still means you are limited not only to that standard, but to the way every browser you want to claim support for implements that standard. As we've seen with the Acid Test, this isn't always consistent and is far from a guarantee that your software will work as expected.
Thirdly, following from the second point, while development environments like Visual Studio and Sun Java Studio may not follow standards to a T, they make the development process for some very VERY sophisticated applications very quick, very easy, and very cheap. While I won't disagree that "real" programmers stay away from these tools, business analysts and project managers love that they can have projects finished, working, reliable, and fit within the scope of the business much faster and cheaper than before. Often when the compromise question is "I can have the software for you in three months for $750k, but it will only run on Explorer, or I can have it for you in a year and it will run on all browsers and cost you $3M" the answer will come down to cost and quick implementation.
This reciprocates to the first point - supporting multiple browsers in any given application really has far less to do with competence of programmers and more to do with the business decisions of those programmers' bosses.
This is a classic case of assuming conspiracy where in fact the problem is down to stupidity or laziness.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)
This is changing (thankfully). The continued increase in Firefox, Safari and Chrome as well as increasing Mac and Linux markets will force them to eventually re-work this dependency but until it is a large enough user base they won't do it.
On my system, CS4 opens the help in Firefox without any issues.
Safari.
And Bonjour.
And MobileMeSync.
Part of the problem is that you can't fully uninstall IE on Windows, even if you set the Program Access Defaults to block access to it. Perhaps Mozilla should release a stub Iexplore.exe that launches Mozilla instead, just as Postfix includes a stub sendmail for backward compatibility with poorly written apps.
I haven't used Adobe CS4, so I'm guessing here, but my bet is that they're providing help files in a compiled html format (.chn) that only IE can read. These files are easy to setup and even if the programmer has opened the URL with the default browser (for this extension) it will still open IE rather than your default browser.
As with most cases, stupidity is more likely the cause than conspiracy.
Fortunately for me and my clients, lazy programmers do leave their mark and are quite easy to spot and dispose of.
ShellExecute(NULL, "open", "http://news.cnet.com/", NULL, NULL, SW_SHOW);
This just reminds me of those lazy gets who can't even manage to store things properly in a user's home directory when its location is an easily available environment variable.
I told the salesboy that I absolutely would not agree to buy if it required dealing with Microsoft. He assured me that it did not.
He lied.
As a last step before returning the software, I called customer service and by a fluke was connected with a young woman who knew her product. She led me through the procedure to initiate service sans Microsoft.
I am convinced that the primary purpose of this sort of thing is, as always, money.
If I had to take a guess, this person is likely getting confused by the constant dialog box that displays telling them that IE isn't set as the default browser and they are endlessly clicking "Yes" without actually reading the message......
If this is not bad enough, back end programmers have to consider Macs hosting OS X and XP/Vista. Or Psystar's Linux running OS X and XP. What choices are available then? This is clearly LAZY PROGRAMMER failure to think through WHAT type of platforms their clients use, and using the correct API call to find the "DEFAULT" browser and mail handlers.
Adobe sells a Mac and PC version of CS4. They don't combine products on the same CD anymore for TWO platforms. Therefore, they CAN assume a "pure" platform and use it's pure browser selection and mail handler.
I have been on several SW vendors's cases about this issue and I provide them the fix on how to do it and what do I get in response? YAWN or ignorance. E-mailing rants to customer service doesn't work. Have to put it in WRITING and sending it to the top level exec via snail mail. THAT WORKS. And I get responses from the CEO and CIO. Try this. If they get flooded with enough REAL paper, then they'll rethink their position. E-mail doesn't do it these days from customers.
- by Jeff_Tranberry February 19, 2009 3:38 PM PST
- Response from the Lightroom team here: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2009/02/adobe_and_default_browsers.html
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