Tim Barcz

How can you ignore non-IE users?

I've been swept up in the recent happenings of Rocketboom and the leaving of Amanda Congdon from the popular vlog.  In a recent post on her blog, Amanda talks about giving an interview on the MSNBC show "Scarborough Country".  So I went out the the Scarborough Country website to see if the interview was up on the web.  While the Congdon video was not yet up on the site, I was attracted to another story.  When I clicked the link to view the video, I encountered a page that told me, "To use this product,  you need to install free software."

  If you haven't guessed yet, I'm browsing via Firefox and apparently http://video.msn.com doesn't much care for Firefox.  It probably has something to do with the fact that Firefox doesn't support ActiveX usage.  My question though is who cares?  If you're a national news outlet (or in the case of MSNBC, desperately hoping someday the public views you as such), how can you ignore non-IE users?  I'll admit, when I first started in web development, I had the luxury of ignoring non-IE browsers due to our applications being intranet applications and we could issue such a requirement.  Nowadays though, to not support Firefox or Opera, would probably mean I'd soon be looking for a new job.  There are too many users out there not using IE.  It used to be a throwaway amount, it's not anymore.  A recent article pins US Firefox usage above 15%.  In Germany over 39%.  Australia, 24%.  The article points out that in the united states, IE usage has dropped below 80% and worldwide it hovers at around 83%.  Worst case, MSNBC and sites that adopt it's exclusionary topic, are ignoring 20% of the worlds populus.  Best case, they're ignoring only 17%.  That still (with rounding ) is 1 in 5.  If 1 in 5 people come to your site and it doesn't work for them, then you may need to rethink your goals and are you accomplishing them.  In the case of MSNBC and their attempt to bring me news, I would say they failed, since I did not open IE and load up their site once I encountered their friendly error page

P.S.  I loaded up, Foxnews, CNN, ABC News, and CBS News, all of which worked fine.  Not suprisingly, NBCNews.com redirects to MSNBC