Upgrade to Firefox 4? Are You Kidding Me?

In the late 1980's, as I was about six or seven years into my professional career as a programmer, I sat in a job interview. In that interview, I was asked the question, "How do you feel about standards?" Giving the question a very brief moment of thought, I replied, "They're essential." I feel strongly about standards to this day. But every so often, I encounter a system that just seems to have pushed standards aside. Other times I encounter a system that shows its developers are clearly lacking in support of standards. One such system is Pearson eCollege, the course management system used by my employer, Cedar Crest College.

Web standards today, although changing, are pretty well defined. As a web developer, I pay close attention to the standards, and as such I experience very good compatibility among the currently supported browsers. True, Internet Explorer presents the greatest challenges when adhering to the standards, but since the release of IE7, a developer can maintain compatibility without too much trouble.

Web developers will often implement code to check for the browser version. The only legitimate reason to do this, in my opinion, is to check if a user is running a browser that is too old for the features required by the application. When I include such checks, I typically look to see if the browser is IE and the version is under 7. Otherwise, it's pretty safe to assume that the browser will support the features my application needs.

I have generally not checked versions on other browsers because the currently supported versions of the other major browsers have a high level of standards compliance. I wouldn't say that a version check is unnecessary, and I commend developers who are quite thorough in checking browser compatibility beyond that which is most problematic; Internet Explorer. And I find it very appropriate when I see that an application checks to see that the browser version is one that is currently supported by its maintainers.

So, when I am accessing an application using Firefox 6, the latest support version, why would an application tell me that my browser is unsupported? Granted, the application may have yet to be tested on the latest browser version, so perhaps at most a warning to that effect might be in order. But to tell me I am using an unsupported browser, then recommend that I use Firefox 4.0? Are you kidding me? Mozilla declared end-of-life for version 4 back in June 2011.

This indicates to me one of three things about Pearson's web development team for eCollege: 1) they don't understand web standards, 2) they are developing for a specific browser product (IE, I would suspect), or 3) they are lacking in resources. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the product.

It was not until the very day of this writing that Pearson eCollege has removed the error message generated when using the most current version of Firefox; some three months after Mozilla dropped support for Firefox 4.

When you're in the web application business, it's important to keep abreast of the latest web and browser technology. That is not to say that your application needs to employ the very latest techniques. But rather, you need to know what's out there, you need to adhere to the standards, and you need to support the computing platforms that are current. The whole point of the web is that the applications are independent of the users' computing platform, with the only condition that the platform be one that currently has active support.

Finally, you might be wondering how that interview proceeded after I answered the standards question with "They're essential"? My interviewer, who was quite pleased, replied, "That's the right answer." He hired me.