August 2nd, 2006
by NathanI hate Internet Explorer, part 1 of an ongoing lifelong series
Some of you IE users may have noticed that when you try to use the browser bookmarklet button “Add to Newshutch” directly on an XML (or RSS, or Atom, etc…) feed, the bookmarklet fails.
For some reason, IE doesn’t like javascript bookmarklets when the page in the view port is XML. It just fails silently. I tried using the bookmarklet on images and even local files and IE would at least make the submission to Newshutch.
Perhaps we’ll be able to fix this by using a referrer or something, but I’d much rather browbeat every Windows user into switching to Firefox.
Fortunately this problem only effects 10% of Newshutch users:
| Firefox | 77% |
| Internet Explorer | 10% |
| Safari | 9% |
| Camino | 2% |
| Opera | <1% |
| Mozilla | <1% |
Sheesh, I can’t believe I spent all that time figuring out why Opera wouldn’t render feeds at full opacity 
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Couldn’t you just find out how Bloglines does it and use similar code?
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:54 pm
The Bloglines bookmarklet has the same problem.
It looks like IE needs a third party IE toolbar or application like this one to be able to add xml directly.
August 3rd, 2006 at 6:19 am
IE is the biggest hold-up in web development. I sometimes feel like it’s being deliberately incompetent - like an angry waiter that spits in your food.
I look forward to the day that IE6 will no longer need to be supported; Lets just hope that IE7 gets it (at least partially) right.
August 10th, 2006 at 10:25 am
You know what really blew me away by this post? Not the fact that something doesn’t work in IE, but the remarkable imbalance in the % of Firefox vs. IE Users. It pretty much turns the market on its head. I wonder if many of your initial Newshutch users are coming from a programming background (RoR specifically?) and have a penchant for FF? I’m a .NET developer but have recently started to do all of my interface design using CSS and plain old HTML rather than server controls, and Firefox is now my preferred starting point.
I guess I should also add that I heard about Newshutch through Signal vs. Noise and am now a happy “customer”.
August 10th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Dylan, I’m sure most of our early users come from a background that predisposes them to non IE usage. These days it would be insane not to use Firefox for development because of developer-centric extensions like the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug.
August 11th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
If it helps for profiling, I’m that description too, also found this via SvN. In general, however, I’d imagine most people that know how/why to use RSS/XML also choose not to use IE unless on a corporate environment, even though they may not be programmers per se. And I’d imagine the 10% that do use IE are most likely internet-savvy, but neither do web development work nor otherwise see the need to use FF over IE. I was an avid IE user until I had to start working with CSS, and wanted something that actually followed standards.
Definitely interesting stats though, it certainly shows the intelligence of your user base.
August 19th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Note that Opera 8.5 and older identifies it self as Internet Explorer by default. So some of the IE users in that chart might be Opera users.