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Tom Achronos
Bungie.net Overlord
twitter: http://twitter.com/Achronos
"I have no words that would do justice to the atrocities you commit to the English language, as well as your continued assaults on the concepts of basic literacy and logical reasoning."
Posted by: kapowaz
(goweb commented on the previous thread that "This is a problem with FireFox's rendering engine. Fixing it on b.net would break a whole lot of other things." I can't comment on Firefox's rendering engine being to blame (although I personally find this unlikely; Bungie.net is the only website I've ever seen in which this problem is manifest), but this is really quite irrelevent. My point was, that if a substantial proportion of visitors use Browser X, then the website really ought to work well in Browser X. If the situation was reversed and Internet Explorer was the browser with the problem, I'm sure that people wouldn't just blithely remark that it was an IE bug.
No, it isn't some grand conspiracy. Our site "buckets" your browser into three code paths - IE5+, Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape 7/Safari/Opera, and "Downlevel" (Downlevel is all the stuff we don't really support - IE4, text browsers, old versions of netscape, etc). The problem is that Firefox (and other versions of Mozilla, but not all) have a problem where they pick they wrong scrollbar as the "default". Our site has two, although one you can't see and doesn't work. Mozilla picks the inner one, and hence you can't scroll. I believe there is an open bug in Bugzilla about this. Anyway, we have investigated fixing it, and even had it working. Unfortunately, it broke many other things in that bucket, including Safari and Opera support. Since Safari and Opera were working, and IE6 is still by FAR the user agent of choice, you guys who use Firefox get no scrolling. I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but remember that many sites (like the one in that Slashdot story) are specialist sites dealing with technology. We're a bit more mainstream, and hence our browser stats reflect that.
As for the browser compatibility question, we don't include any specific functionality geared toward any single browser. But the fact of the matter is that our users generally use IE6. Even Safari gets more hits than Firefox at last check. But we never view any browser with a "cynical eye", whatever the hell that means. We even support Opera, and hardly anyone uses that.
[Edited on 9/20/2004 11:25:58 AM]