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by iigs 6337 days ago
Off topic for Bespin, but on topic for their site, I just had one of those "if you want your customers to use it make it easy to play with" moments. I actually caught myself weighing the benefits of seeing it first hand vs putting my email address into another database. Then when I clicked register to fact check this comment it gave me (well, Chrome) the inferior-browser-F-U:

We would love to have you try Bespin

Unfortunately, we are using exciting new technology in HTML 5 that only leading browsers have implemented.

We want to push the Open Web forward, so for this tech preview you will have to use a new browser.

We have successfully tested Bespin on Firefox 3 and WebKit Nightly, so try one of them!

Oh well. :/
3 comments
jasonkester 6337 days ago
Ugh...

Canvas is fully supported in FF1.5+, Safari, Opera and Chrome out of the box. And you're only a short hack away from having Canvas emulation in IE5+. It's inexcusable not to build something like this cross-browser, when the underlying technology itself is cross-browser.

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gdee 6337 days ago
Well... it could be worse you know... you could get the superior-browser-F-U. Not long ago, my main bank's website told me to upgrade my FF install to IE6.
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icey 6337 days ago
What would you suggest they do if your browser doesn't support the things they need it to support?
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iigs 6337 days ago
If a browser had been tested and found lacking in some type, I'd hope they'd state the feature that they were relying on that was missing or buggy. The verbiage made it sound like Chrome wasn't tested (or they're pretty arrogant in their dismissal), but something like this would be preferable:

"This probably isn't going to work. What do you want to do?"

[Let me try anyway] [Get me a tested browser] [oh, nevermind]

I understand the behavior as it stands for things like banking or medical websites, where real life things of value are at stake and non-experts may use it, but this is demonstrating an experimental widget on a "labs" site, where the whole point is to try out weird new stuff in browsers.

This wouldn't have been so noteworthy, except that Netscape/Mozilla/FF just spent a decades fighting "browser-ism" and even have a bugzilla category for it: (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=407187 as an example)

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