title: Red Hat chooses Firefox link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/red-hat-chooses-firefox/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 507 created: 2008/06/10 14:46:02 created_gmt: 2008/06/10 14:46:02 comment_status: open post_name: red-hat-chooses-firefox status: publish post_type: post

Red Hat chooses Firefox

Just noticed today that some of Red Hat’s web site isn’t viewable with IE, most notably the “News Blog” at http://www.press.redhat.com/. At first I was surprised, then gratified. As an administrator of a mostly proprietary stable of software, I’m often frustrated by the lack of compatibility between many commercial applications and open source browsers like Firefox. Closed source developers appear to code to, and for, Microsoft only.

Of course good software development, particularly for web applications, should aim for compatibility with all available browsers on the market. Tying people down to one particular vendor is a disservice to all. Unfortunately some vendors make this difficult, by creating proprietary hooks that break compatibility in an effort to force everyone to just give up and “standardize” on their products.

While I think that some web standards could use a little loosening up (take a look at a typical web page in the w3c’s Amaya “standards only” web browser to see what I mean) and vendors to show some discretion in their zeal to adhere (the annoying refusal of the Firefox 3 team to make changes in the latest issue to allow connections to sites protected by nonconforming SSL certificates), a line has to be drawn somewhere. Proprietary features that force adoption of nonstandard methods would be where I’d put it.

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