Web Browsers

Creating a new site and then doing all that's necessary to support it and attract customers is very time consuming. Some things that should be treated with importance can be missed. Such was the case with Web Browsers. Now that the site has been up and running for just over 3 months, it was time to deal with checks and tests that were deemed not as important at the time. Imagine our consternation when we realised that anybody ordering products using Firefox could not complete the purchase because Firefox could not find the secure checkout site! A bit of investigation, and we found that the oblique characters (\\) in the redirect to the secure site were the 'wrong' way round. Why was this missed? Because Microsoft's Internet Explorer compensates for it, whereas Firefox does not. It's strange, because if you enter a URL directly into Firefox with the oblique characters the wrong way round:
http:\\www.bodystockingavenue.com
as opposed to:
http://www.bodystockingavenue.com/
it works.

Anyway, the problem is fixed now and so apologies to anyone who encountered this problem. There are still some display issues in Firefox, but nothing that prevents anybody from navigating the site. These are also in the process of being fixed, as it appears some of the tags that Internet Explorer is happy to accept are not recognised by Firefox. I think Safari will probably have the same problems, but hopefully fixing the site to display properly under Firefox will also satisfy Safari (the new kid on the block!)

Why is it necessary to support these other web browsers? Because they are becoming more and more prevalent. On looking at what has been used to access our site since it was opened, Windows XP is the most used platform with 69% of the share. The rest comprise other versions of Windows along with Linux, Unix and the Mac. On breaking down Windows XP to the browsers that were used, 84% were Internet Explorer and 14% were Firefox. The remaining ones encountered were Opera, Netscape and Mozilla (a variation of). This does show that Firefox, above all, is important, because it was also the prevalent browser used when a platform other than Windows was used.

So, anybody out there thinking of, or in the process of creating a web site, make sure you keep Firefox in mind as well as Internet Explorer.