Sunday, July 11, 2004

Web sites that don't work well with Firefox

Let me know of web sites that do not display or work correctly when viewed with Firefox. You can do so anonymously, however if you ask a question your email address is necessary to get any responses.

92 comments:

Anonymous said...

The popular online store for Pokemon, www.pokemoncenter.com, seems to have problems with ordering in Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers.

Anonymous said...

Kind of a reverse gripe, I guess. I was about to download FireFox Themes using my IE browser at http://update.mozilla.org/themes/?application=firefox and check out the screwed up display. FireFox's site doesn't layout well for the current market-share leading browser. Heh heh. I like irony.

Bob in Texas

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Dang, just realized that that doesn't work in IE :-)

Use this instead:

<hr style="background: #ff9c39; height: 7px;">

Anonymous said...

http://www.bangkokbank.com/Bangkok+Bank/Personal+Banking/Foreign+Exchange/FX+Rates/default.htm
this website does not show the exchange rates for the Thai Baht in Firefox 0.9.1

Anonymous said...

www.sportsnet.ca hangs when loading with Firefox causing all other open tabs or Firefox windows to hang while something callen rnm.ca loads.

Michael Horowitz said...

I took a look at http://www.acnielsen.com and had no problems using it with Firefox 0.9.2.

Anonymous said...

the fact that update.mozilla.org does not display correctly in IE is not an example of 'turnaround is fair play'. just like Windows Update, this page has no interest to anyone in any other browser, has nothing they can use, etc. so it's just that it's mozilla/firefox-centric, not that they are singling out other browsers....

Anonymous said...

http://www.skeeterbeater.biz/

I emailed the site to politely let them know their text was invisible to potential customers using Firefox. The web designer responded that since Firefox had less than 10% of the browser market and less than 2% within the target market of this company, he wasn't worried about it. In other words, he thinks the company can afford to throw away up to 2% of its sales. I wonder if he would mind having his paychecks reduced by 2%.

Anonymous said...

Someone I put onto Firefox has found that the reader responses, at the bottom of articles on:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=66278

don't show up, at all, in Firefox 9.1. Yes, they show up in IE! A lot of sites have reader comments at the bottom of articles I hope that this is not typical!

Petrus, Toronto

Anonymous said...

About image alt text. It's not supposed to show a tooltip. Firefox in simply implementing the web standard here. Please read:

MozillaZine article

Anonymous said...

Quite a few of the pages which render badly in Firefox are due to a rendering bug in Firefox. Hit Ctrl+ (increase font size) followed by Ctrl- (decrease font size) and the page should render correctly as you have forced a display refresh. Try it on the Simtel site!

(And yes, hope that the Mozilla folk fix this bug by the time Firefox hits 1.0)

Anonymous said...

http://www.sctcbookstore.com/textbooks.asp renders okay with Firefox 0.9.x but the dropdown list for textbook selection does not work making the webpage rather useless.

Anonymous said...

ibm.com loaded in 5 seconds for me (but that's on linux, and i can't compare to ie without any win boxes in the house) Also, windows update has an extension now for firefox which opens ie when visited, again I haven't tried it, being on linux, but it had a good rating. Other than those 2, the ones I checked appeared to be fairly accurate coding flaws *sigh* (Interesting, it refused the work sigh in said arrow braces because blogger thought it was supposed to be an html tag) */sigh* Oh well, maybe someday people will learn how to code websites...
Sam

Anonymous said...

One thing to mention is that you mentioned most of the "useful" sites which require activeX are all sites which are meant to fix problems which are caused by activeX. i find this somewhat humourous.

Anonymous said...

www.hobowars.com pretty fin game, doesn't show up in mozilla firefox properly.

Anonymous said...

www.hobowars.com pretty fun game, doesn't show up in mozilla firefox properly.

Philip said...

Did everyone miss the point here or what? All those pages don't load in Firefox because they DON'T FOLLOW THE WEB STANDARDS. And, vice-versa, some pages (such as certain ones in mozilla.org) don't show correctly in Internet Explorer because Internet Explorer DOESN'T FOLLOW (all) THE WEB STANDARDS.

Personally, every site I make these days conforms to the W3 standards, with a few IE exceptions to make it still work in IE. Only because most of my audience is using IE.

Using XHTML 1.1, and CSS 1 or 2, your page will show almost EXACTLY the same in whatever web-standards-based browser you use.

Anonymous said...

Yahoo's latest messenger has a cool new feature: "radio stations" that are tailored to your whim, so that after "training" it with your preferences, you can then listen to only music that's the right kind. It works, by and large, for me, and I'm moderately eclectic.

The downside is, much of the configuration and status is displayed by going to a page about your "radio station".

In IE, this shows you how many tracks, artists, etc, you have voted on.

In Firefox, although you are logged in to Yahoo, it does not recognise you as having created a "radio station" - if offers you instead, the option to create a new one. You cannot get past this point. You can recreate the station as much as you like, but it will just return you to that page.

Also, list of preferences on the create page are "collapsed" under each heading in IE, but in FF they are expanded, and cannot be collapsed.

Anonymous said...

Suntrust Bank just changed bill-payer and won't work with Mozilla.

Wachovia Bank still works (I think) but John Harland's check re-order only works with IE.

How stupid are these companies?

Anonymous said...

mail.yahoo.com

Many of the buttons in Yahoo Mail do not work with Firefox. There is an alternate link for most. I am completely unable to download a file attachment. I wrote Yahoo about the problem and got no response. That is pretty bad considering I pay for my email account.

Anonymous said...

I have often used Yahoo mail with Firefox and had no problems. Even back with Firefox 0.8 it worked fine for me. Michael

Anonymous said...

http://www.nathean.com/home/welcome.htm

Wow. That's one seriously IE specific place which looks like the dog's dinner in anything but good ole IE.

Anonymous said...

http://www.arrl.org works in all other Mac OS X browsers, but here all I get is a blank page

Anonymous said...

Here's a site which gives problems:

http://vauxhall.co.uk/trafficnet/index.jhtml

In Foxfire the following comment is added to the content of the page:

"A newer version of Shockwave must be installed to display this content. Please update your Shockwave installation. Visit http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/ for downloads."

The above message is added even when the latest version of Shockwave is installed and visibly working.

IE does not show any such message.

Is this this problem caused by Firefox, or by an error in the webpage's JavaScript?

(Posted by David Ash)

Anonymous said...

========================= =========================

I just recently came across this site and a particular post. In regards to the July 20, 2004 post about MovieTickets.com not working in Firefox when visiting through myway.com. The problem is myway.com (not movietickets.com) having a different URL for ie and non-ie browsers.

For example, today, Dec. 7, 2004, on myway.com:

http://movies.myway.com/movielistings.jsp?n=5&z=33181

"Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason", 7:25pm

in IE, the link is:
https://www.movietickets.com/purchase.asp?afid=USBUL&house_id=4981&movie_id=43468&perfd=12072004&perft=19:25

in all other browsers:
https://www.movietickets.com/purchase.asp?afid=USBUL&house_id=4981&movie_id=43468&perfd=12072004&perft=12:7

perft in IE is listed as "19:25" and perft in other browsers is listed as "12:7". Myway is obviously doing some kind of browser detection and then putting incorrect data in the URL. Why? I don't know. Anyway, myway has been contacted and should be fixing their problem.

MovieTickets.com is tested thoroughly is all major modern versions of browsers and several platforms (win98, win2k, winXP, Mac OS X, Redhat Linux, and Knoppix Linux; IE, Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, AOL, MSN, Safari, Camino, Konqueror, and Epiphany).

If anyone is having other browser compatibility issues with MovieTickets, please forward these issues to:
browsercompatability "at" movietickets.com (replace "at" with @ symbol).

thanks.

========================= =========================

Anonymous said...

If you're using the paid site Quick Arrow (http://quickarrow.com/) you'll not be able to view it with in other browser other than IE. I've complained to them that our company is moving to Firefox and we'll soon be asking sites to conform or we'll move on. We specifically mentioned our concern with security.

The response we received said that they were happy with MS's security and think they're moving in the right direction.

To be clear, you might be able to enter their site however actually using the software which they sell in an ASP model, does not work.

Anonymous said...

No images display on this website. http://www.lnt.com/sm-mohawk-palladio-duvet--pi-1782015.html

I've had this problem with several other sites which all display fine in IE.

Anonymous said...

It will not allow you to move the rocks around in
http://www.teamsandtastic.com/RockStacking/RockBalancing.htm
I wonder if it works with my own site: http://www.sticksite.com/ but I won't get Firefox now.

Anonymous said...

Here is another site that is IE unfriendly:

http://www.co.bexar.tx.us/civilservice/civilservice.htm


Even when you use Windows IE (note: IE for the Macintosh is not compatible), they don't use SSL to encrypt Social Security numbers of job seekers. I don't buy the "AOL and Netscape Instructions" page ( http://www.co.bexar.tx.us/civilservice/AOL/aol.htm ). It only proves that they are in Microsoft's back pocket!

Anonymous said...

http://www.wlir.com does not render the windows media player object, and therefore I can't stream that site from the web page.

A previous poster said www.wcbs880.com does not work with Firefox. As long as you indentify the player location under MediaPlayer Connectivity, it works fine.

Anonymous said...

Here's a State Government site that not only doesn't work with Firefox 1.01, it actually seems to kill the Firefox browser itself! It locks up Firefox (including all other tabs) and you have to cntl-alt-del to get out of this mess.

The site is the Minnesota State Government Dept of Veterans Affairs.
(The top item on the page reports proudly "Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs Web Site Adopts New Look and Feel".)

The url is http://www.mdva.state.mn.us/

Can anyone confirm that there is a problem with this site*, or is it maybe just my machine?

[Not just HTML errors--WC3 validation reports a bunch of these--I mean actually locking your browser type errors.]

Anonymous said...

I tried http://www.mdva.state.mn.us/ on a Windows 2000 machine and it caused Firefox v1.0.1 to loop forever, burning cpu. All I could tell was that the page uses Java.

Anonymous said...

Well, spitting out websites that doesn't look good or work in Firefox is not a way of showing that Firefox is not working correctly. It's proberbly a better way of showing that theres is alot of bad webdevelopers out there. Pages that does not render correctly are mostly caused by uncorrect coding. I think both browsers (IE, Firefox) has its problems and benefits.

Anonymous said...

On the website http://p223.ezboard.com/btherushchronicles the news scoller located on the left floats above and oustide of it's window. Also, the link button backgrounds have collapsed around the text.

Anonymous said...

Since a few days ago, I can no longer sign in to ebay or paypal (e.g. signin.ebay.co.uk) but it still works OK in IE6.

Also, when viewing listings in ebay, if there is no picture, Firefox renders the pop-up description of the non-existant picture over the main one, making it a mess, whereas IE puts a little photo icon with popup in a yellow box.

www.powerhouse.co.uk simply tells you that you must have IE!

Anonymous said...

The games on www.def-logic.com run nicely in Internet Explorer, but in Firefox most of them run at half the speed--unplayable.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately since IE is the predomanent browser out there many sites design only for it. There obviously is no realistic way to test for every browser, hence the reasons for standards and, in my opinion, why IE is wrong. I think a better effort here would be to gripe about web designers that don't follow standards, rather than gripe about websites that don't work in firefox.

Now a gripe about one of your gripes. You mentioned about the expired coupon on Dell's site. Well of course no pop-up came up, but you should have seen a bar across the top of your browser regarding that. And FF is acting as designed. I don't believe this is a legitimate gripe. Further, ANY pop-up blocker (even ones used with IE) would produce the same result. In short, it's not a FF gripe, it's a Dell web site design gripe.

Anonymous said...

Usefull info for website designers who want to support as many browsers as possible. Also a major griping session about bugs in IE !! Can be found at http://www.howtocreate.co.uk just look for the Browser Problems section.

Anonymous said...

One for all website at http://www.oneforall-int.com/index.html

Select product support > universal remotes > Pick a remote (eg one for all 3) > Click FAQ > Select a keyword > click Go > Get a blank Frame in Firefox, works in IE. Looks like a bug in the HTML though so not Firefoxes fault perhaps.

Anonymous said...

On the website of the Minnesota Social Services Association (http://www.mnsocialserviceassoc.org/), all the links are dead in Firefox. They work in IE.

Site appears to have been built (I won't say designed) with MS Publisher-- possibly the problem is there.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Cannot get to Yahoo portal site at all with Firefox 1.0.6

Anonymous said...

I notice that Huntbar, Searchmyway, XXX Toolbars don't work well in Firefox.
And could someone tell me how I can get IE (and Active X I just got to have Active X isn't it s standard?)
installed on my Linux and FreeBSD boxes so I can use my above friendly toolbars?
Thanks for your help.

Anonymous said...

How about this for a bit of a turnaround.
My machine at work was a bit out of date, still on i.e. 5.0, thought it about time to update. Went onto www.microsoft.com/uk , it starts to display, then gets ditched for a small bit of javascript relating to ecustomeropinions.com, incredible!
Have no fear, Firefox to the rescue! That's right, I was able to navigate microsoft.com/uk with firefox, when I couldn't with i.e., and download i.e.6 setup files.
I can now see microsoft.com/uk with i.e.6 (with ecustomeropinions.com now coming up as a rogue cookie), but I'm sure many corporate users are still on i.e.5 for various reasons, and the idea that even a small percentage of i.e. users can't see microsoft's own site is worth a chuckle or two.

Anonymous said...

Stillwater.fnismls (and subsequent pages inside) does not work properly with Firefox, Safari, or even IE for Mac

Anonymous said...

Sony are about to launch their new gadget Sony Reader. Downloadable e-books can be purchased by their Connect store (which I think is similar to ipod/itunes) at

http://www.connect.com/non_ie.html

This store is currently only supported by IE 5.5 or higher, with their apologies.

Anonymous said...

This site: http://www.sportsclubs.com/ does not work in Firefox 1.5. The grey line with "ENROLL CLUBS PREMIER SERVICES JUST FOR MEMBERS FITNESS JOBS" - all are drop down menus that do not work with Firefox. I have contacted the webmaster, but they haven't changed it.

Anonymous said...

http://walmart.pnimedia.com/home.aspx

Only users of Internet Explorer are able to upload multiple photos to WalMart for printing due to the use of an ActiveX plug-in. When using Firefox, users must upload each picture individually (which is an utter waste of time). I'm going to email WalMart to provide them some browser stats in hopes they'll make their site more Firefox friendly.

Anonymous said...

The high-speed provider Comcast has Javascripts incompatible with Firefox, particularly in its Account Management area.

Anonymous said...

the miami herald has never worked right in Firefox. One big problem, when you click on thr back button, it takes you back to the top of the last page.

Anonymous said...

On Techweb TechEncyclopedia, they have a glowing review of Firefox. It starts out "An innovative and highly praised open source Web browser...", "received rave reviews...". (See http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml?term=Firefox&x=&y=).

But if you're actually using Firefox, their site doesn't display properly. The Screen Shots overlap the sidebar material, making them really hard to read. But it works OK in IE.

Kinda makes you question the 'technical expertise' of TechWeb, doesn't it?

Anonymous said...

http://www.tampaport.com/index.asp

You have to look at in IE to see how bad it really is in FF.

Anonymous said...

My kids are addicted to maplestory. Check out http://www.mapleglobal.com using Firefox...

Anonymous said...

Amazon.com. Can't get it to open all the time. Get a string of numbers in the address bar and a blank page when I try to go to their home page.

Anonymous said...

State Farm Insurance Online Bill Pay doesn't work. Must use IE. Button to click for submit payment does nothing.

Anonymous said...

http://interact10ways.com/usa/information_interactive.htm does not work with Firefox. But it is very cool.

Anonymous said...

i suppose indiatimes mail also is not supported by firefox

Anonymous said...

Online bill payment site for Coastal Federal Credit Union has stopped working with Firefox on Linux. I've been using it for years, but it just recently stopped working.

Anonymous said...

Wicks Aircraft supply doesn't work with Firefox. www.wicksaircraft.com

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

I've been trying for 4 years to get Mozilla to fix a bug, that broke the replies on certian HTML streaming chat areas. Mozilla leaders refuse to even try.

Anonymous said...

My website ASVP Group doesn't render correctly in Firefox (or Opera) but works fine in IE6 & IE7.

Any suggestions will be gladly taken on board...

Anonymous said...

Funny to see that you're talking about sites that doesn't obey the W3C standards while you're using a colored scrollbar which is not officialy part of that standard. It was introduced by Microsoft and it only works on IE (and not on Firefox)

Anonymous said...

If Firefox ever implements scroll bar colours I will be really annoyed, they are one of the worst concepts ever conceived, next IE will be allowing web sites to change the browser menus, but why stop there how about operating system settings.

Windows update, do you notice it is called WINDOWS update which implies updating the windows operating system, it is not called Windows update for users of Internet Explorer only - too bad if you do not use Internet Explorer. Firefox Themes is called FIREFOX themes which implies, well, Firefox.

By the way, a web site that tells you you need a browser greater than version x, when you have a version greater than x is poorly coded, any good developer will tell you that you should test for functionality not browser version.

Many of your gripes are really feature requests, get some support in the development community, or maybe get into development yourself and get those features added.

Anonymous said...

Citibank's main website www.citi.com will not allow Firefox users to log in. Apparently, they have modified their website to specifically exclude Firefox. It was possible to access Citi just last month (May 2007). You can still log in using Firefox on their credit card website(www.citicards.com).

Anonymous said...

http://www.citicards.com/cards/wv/showSearchResults.do?category=CC_REWARDS

Doesnt load. Its loads fine with IE.

Anonymous said...

I tried a couple of your refs. Fedex, Mercora and Burrelles work fine in Opera 9 - don't know if they've been updated for FX or if Opera is simply better at rendering them. BTW, you site works as properly (ie. the scrollbar) in Opera as well. I don't get the blue scrollbar bkgnd in IE 6.

FX is a good browser but for me, Opera is faster, smoother and has built-in features that one has to add on to FX. I have a feeling that when I upgrade to FX3, half of them will break.

Your gripes are more reasoned & balanced than most of the FX comments one finds which (like much Linux material) is more like a religious rant :-)

Anonymous said...

Firefox would not work with Office Depot web site to see their weekly specials when they did not run a local or it REFERRED TO MORE SALE ITEMS ON THE SITE. Their reply to my query was that they do not support Firefox, no bones about it. I even told them they were losing sales they could have had either at their local store or on the web, but that seemed to make no difference. Go figure. I guess some people just don't get it.

Anonymous said...

citicards.com does not now work with Firefox. Everything appears and then goes to blank page. Has been up until this month. Called them and they said they only support IE.

Anonymous said...

Another site that doesn't play well with Firefox, is http://www.crucial.com
If you need to use their "Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool", you better fire up IE.

Under your problem sites, December 15, 2004, you mentioned a Knowledge Base article that requires horizontal scrolling in Firefox.
Another problem with some Microsoft pages, is that the whole page doesn't render, sometimes.
It gets cut off, at the bottom, or there is an overlap of text.
I don't know why, or how it works, but there is a workaround for this.
Go to an empty part of the page, and using the mouse wheel, center-click.
This will cause the rest of the page, to render properly.
Here's a couple of images to show what I'm talking about.
The URL for this page, is http://support.microsoft.com/
Before center-click:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v367/tg1911/Before.jpg
After center-click:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v367/tg1911/After.jpg

If you don't clear your cache, the page will render properly every time you visit it, after center-clicking.

Anonymous said...

&tIt seems that European Parliament sites, for example http://www.europarl.europa.eu/eplive/vod/seance_e
n.htm?Date=20070905, have been designed only for IE.
The given site requires ActiveX and lists under ;Today's Speakers" and "Today's Topics" will only appear when using IE. This site is not functional when using Firefox, Safari or Opera. Site designers for the EU only seem to develop and test for IE and are not responsive to appeals to take into consideration other browsers. Strange.

Unknown said...

You can use citicards website with firefox. It loads and then goes to a blank screen. With clever-timing use of the 'stop' button of firefox, you can catch the page and login fine =)

Note that this is using firefox (gentoo linux) version 2.0.0.3

LeidBack said...

I have never converted to firefox because for my university email I use "Microsoft Outlook Web Access" and when using this in firefox, the small magnifying glass is not in the tool bar, this is the icon for the search function. I am converting now because after installing Office 2007, remote word, excel, ppt files wont open properly in IE. Well tonight I saw a website with screenshots where this magnifying glass CAN be seen by someone using firefox. Any suggestions would be appreciated, hopefully then I will be a proud, happy firefox user. The website is http://www.ctsfw.edu/it/webmail.php
The icon can be seen in the second picture in step 4. It is directly above the "Subject" line of the emails.

Anonymous said...

Check out the first page of secondlife.com in both FF and IE. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of each page to see the differences.

Catprog said...

http://www.bunnings.com.au

Can not get pass the find nearest store page

Anonymous said...

www.toledohauntedoccurrencesresearch.com seems to have issues with the audio files. There is a song on the title page that will vanish if you go to any of the other pages and then go back to the title page. Also the EVP's sometimes will work, sometimes they won't. If you refresh, the icons that start the audio files will completely disappear. Works fine in IE.

Anonymous said...

All my bookmarks vanished today! XP sp1 firefox 2.0.0.11 . Norton found 0 virus ,had to reinstall firefox. System Restore did not help .

Anonymous said...

Shaun says :

There is a good Firefox extension called IE Tab, which can render web pages the way that IE would do.

Get it from Firefox, Add-Ons

Anonymous said...

Office Depot BSD website used to work on Firefox. Now it doesn't. You can pull it up just fine on Internet Explorer right now but not on Firefox. What's up with that? Is there any way to fix it? I even tried to upgrade to Firefox 3 from version 2 and that still did not work. Anyone who has an idea what is wrong and how to fix it, please post an answer here. Thanks.

https://bsd.officedepot.com/index.do

Anonymous said...

I was wrong about citi.com. The support staff at citi got me up and running with FireFox. It turns out that my profile got corrupted.

All is well now and it turns out that this was not really related to Citibank dissing FireFox.

Anonymous said...

I'm a teacher in the Central Bucks School District. The main school website www.cbsd.org loads in seconds in IE with all pop-out menus working, but in Firefox it loads the main images but none of the menus work. At least a minute goes by waiting for something to load/process before the menus eventually work. CBSD uses SharePoint (2003, I think).

I have 768k DSL, Firefox 2 and 3, and IE 7. This happens on both desktops and the laptop at home.

Anonymous said...

Oddly, some of the cbsd websites (www.cbsd.org) use the Sharepoint webpart called slideshow. The slideshow *doesn't* work correctly in IE, but works perfectly in Firefox :-)

Anonymous said...

I feel no need to redo my entire website just so firefox can get through when most people use IE! Just my two cents!

Gary Winnick said...

The plain online refreshment through Pokemon, www.pokemoncenter.com, seems to reckon on problems with ordering power Firefox further divergent Mozilla-based browsers.Hank Freid

Unknown said...

Web site works on FireFox WinXP, but doesn't work correctly using FireFox Linux Ubuntu.

http://www.afl.com.au/ladder%20predictor/tabid/13046/default.aspx

Anonymous said...

Another site firefox can't handle:
http://www.duclaw.com/locations.aspx

quinnjm said...

Two of the 4 links in mexicocitycollege.com do not open correctly. Both links worked prior to updating. Site works in IE and Chrome.

quinnjm said...

After updating first 2 links in mexicocitycollege.com, they no longer render correctly in Firefox 3.5.7. (Window 7) Site is correct in IE and Chrome.

themanyone said...

Washington business license application continue button does not work / not safe for firefox (NSFF) as of Tue Feb 02 2010 https://fortress.wa.gov/dol/mls/ (JavaScript error)

Anonymous said...

I found this article quite interesting as it shows how the web has evolved. Sites use to design and test only using IE, but now its a reverse battle. Many sites are coded and tested primarily in Firefox, and struggle to get IE to display things properly rather then the reverse. Nice post.

Anonymous said...

Not sure if this helps you, but I created a website in MS Publisher and it worked in Internet Explorer, but not in Firefox, and after several weeks of trying to find help and fix the prob, I came across this website that helped me a great deal: http://www.mspublishernotworkinginfirefox.com

I was able to fix my site and it now works in IE and Firefox. Good luck!