Ebay - what a heap of crap

Exactly how do you optimise a site for IE?

 

Without going into specifics, IE has a different way of rendering
the html page than other browsers, such as Mozilla.

This means that, while you can get a good comprimise between
the two, it's very difficult to make a website look identical in
both. It's just the nature of the beast.

The web designers/developer/programmers have made a
decision to make their interface look the best in one
particular browser. My guess is that they picked the one
which has (at least) the biggest market share, or maybe
the one they find is used the most to view their site.

I would be surprised if this is an "ebay thing" as, being one
of the world's top 5 used sites (probably #2 behind Google)
I expect they know a shit load about keeping servers up
and running and working successfully.

If you're looking for suggestions, may I recommend installing
Windows XP sp2 with IE6? If you're not willing to do that,
how about using an alternative auction website...

 

If it is rejected because of browser type, there is a nice little addin to
lie about the browser.

If they will not work with my browser due to ignoring standards, why
should I visit them/buy stuff off them ?

Their loss.

 

Can't argue, don;t use IE.

But some proof of the statement would be nice

 

YTC#1 wrote

I used to do that with Opera but then half the time the pages won't show
because they are ms compliant.

I have adopted the policy of I don't go there unless I *have* to[1] and
then only with a non ms browser.

Ho yuss.


[1] ObOpera: I did learn from my bank though that it is something to do
with it sticking rigidly to the rules regarding secure cookie handling
that makes it unsuitable for on line banking and they are eager to
discuss the matter further with Opera to sort the matter out as we[2]
represent about 11% of wannabe online users as far as the bank is
concerned.

[2] As a percentage of total bank users unserviced/able by online
services we are growing. Which says more about Opera than I have ever
heard elsewhere I reckon.

 

Firefox has an efficiency setting which delays its first attempt to render
the page until a brief period after the page starts to arrive. This is in
the hope that by then, it will have enough information to do the job right
the first time.

Some objects arriving later, such as images without explicit size
attributes, can necessitate a complete re-rendering. This can be slow, look
jerky and is a bit naff, especially on slower PCs.

However, on fast PCs it can give the impression of being sluggish to finish
the page.

Fortunately this and a few other handy settings are all adjustable through
the about:config page. A quick Google will bring up all sorts of things to
play with to improve the speed of Firefox on fast PCs.

Alternatively, there is now an extension called FasterFox which does all the
tweaking for you and offers some other goodies too, such as link
prefetching.

 

I've been having a look at the extensions pages for FF. Quite neat, some
of them.

Coo... I'll have this, and that, and that, and one of those, and that
one there...

 

I have had no problems with mozilla/firefox with online banking for the
last few years.

 

Cool

 

Personal experience only as a web application developer. I have to
test all code in both IE and Firefox. IE just seems to render pages
faster.

 

Can you now try it with the fasterfox as suggested elsewhere in the thread
?