I’ve had several people ask me over the course of this year, “Why does DataJoe 4 require people to use FireFox 2.0 or higher”?
It’s a great question, and the answers are plentiful. Let me forewarn you, I will attempt to not “Geek out” on you, but I can’t guarantee anything…
The first and most relevant reason is the lack of cross browser support for the W3C standards. Okay, let me backup just a little for you… The W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium. They are responsible for creating and setting standards for everything relating to the web. You can think of them as the AP Stylebook for the web. The problem is, just because there is a “Standard” doesn’t mean that everyone is going to follow that standard. The fact of the matter is, although each web browser is attempting to comply with these standards, each of them have their own way to “interpret” those standards. This can cause some major differences in the way that they display a particular page. With that said, I can honestly say, that by focusing on a single browser for the Administrative tool, we were able to significantly reduce our development time… In addition to HTML & CSS (The look and feel) standards, there are also JavaScript standards. As it turns out, each of the browsers have a slightly different view of how to interpret those standards as well. With that said, with each piece of JavaScript I write, I would have to add hundreds of lines of additional code to compensate for these differences. This was not as much of an issue in DJ3, as it used far less JavaScript that we do in DataJoe 4. Again, building on a single platform has greatly reduced the amount of time to develop and test this software.
Second, at the time we began developing DJ4, Firefox was the ONLY browser that was supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. Internet Explorer is now only available for Windows. Until just a few months ago, Safari was only available for the Mac (this changed with Safari 2.0). By choosing one cross Operating System browser, we were able to make this tool available to the majority of our clients.
Also, Firefox is open source and FREE, both IE and Safari proprietary and very guarded.
Finally, I like Firefox better. It’s more stable, it’s very easy to develop on, it has less memory leak issues, and, best of all, it has an incredible plug-in system allowing you to easily add a LOT of functionality.
Honestly, if you ask just about any web-based developer, they will tell you how much better Firefox is over the other browsers.
Will we ever support any other browsers? I’m glad you asked =)… At this time we are not planning on spend too much development time making the DJ4 Admin tool. I will say, however, the new Google Chrome browser is very intriguing. It has a better interface, a sweet set of features, and a built from scratch JavaScript interpreter that puts every other browser on the market to shame. It handles memory better, runs at least 2x the speed of JavaScript in other browsers, and it’s backed by a web GIANT. I have done some preliminary testing of Chrome with DJ4… although there would be a few compatibility issues, I will say, it absolutely ran faster and smoother. Just remember, that browser is still barley in Beta (meaning it’s not ready to be used in a cooperate world just yet).
