Design for Firefox first, Internet Explorer second

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Today good got better because Mozilla released a new version of its browser — Firefox 1.5. The new version does automatic updates, allows you to rearrange tabs by dragging and dropping, and has better support for Mac OS X. It also supports the latest web standards like CSS2, CSS3, and SVG. (For an example of SVG, if you have a Facebook account, download Firefox 1.5 and click Visualize My Friends. You’ll see an impressive diagram of how you and your friends are connected.)

Also today, MarketingSherpa has an excellent article on redesigning web sites for Firefox. In fact, Sherpa recommends designing websites first for Firefox, then for Internet Explorer. The reasons for designing a website for Firefox are several. Firefox has been downloaded 100 million times in the past year and its usage has grown to 11% world wide, 14% in the U.S., and as high as 35% on tech savvy or cutting edge sites.

But making websites Firefox-friendly isn’t just about catering to a new, growing market segment. It’s about using web standards — the openly published standards for creating websites — which Firefox handles very well and Internet Explorer so-so. In the past it hasn’t mattered that IE has mediocre support for web standards because of its monopoly position — web designers coded to that mediocrity — but that is changing. Sherpa lists 6 benefits of using web standards, which is a side effect of creating web sites for Firefox:

  • Increased search engine optimization
  • Proper content presentation
  • Decreased development and maintenance costs
  • Lower bandwidth usage
  • Faster download times
  • Web viewing beyond the computer (your site on wireless devices & RSS)

Source: Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox Now (Yes Firefox)

Increased accessibility for disabled users is another benefit of web standards that wasn’t emphasized.

I’m glad to see support for a great product, especially an underdog, but I’m even more in favor of doing the right thing for the web.

8 thoughts on “Design for Firefox first, Internet Explorer second”

  1. Pingback: » Get Firefox - Russell Page

  2. I just don’t buy the argument. Sherpa’s list there seems fallacious and unfounded. And your numbers of 11% penetration for Firefox are higher than I see anywhere else (not that those numbers could ever be accurate anyway). Designing for Firefox first and IE second is the same thinking behind the ADA. Personally, I’d rather not focus my efforts on wheelchair ramps. If I’m printing a book, I don’t publish it in Braille first. Besides.. how big do you really think Firefox market will really get? You think Joe Consumer really has the wherewithal to replace IE as the default browser on his Wintel PC? Get real. Current FUD techniques are powering the growth of Firefox among the fairly tech savvy (they’ve never heard of ActiveX – but they have heard that Microsoft is evil). So, live up the standards compliance. I still think that whatever 90% of the world is doing is a more powerful statement than some third party powerless standards making body.
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  3. To Anonymous: That’s great if you want to be a Microsoft fan boy, but the truth is that it’s super easy to install Firefox, you ignored all the other reasons for coding with web standards, and there’s no future in supporting a crusty browser from a monopolist.
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  4. I love Firefox. It has always annoyed me that tables used for layout don’t display properly in IE unless you remove all spaces between all table code. It already looks fine in Firefox but it’ll show up broken in IE if there are spaces or returns between trs and tds. If you fix it so it looks good in IE as well, it makes it much harder to read and organize your source code.
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  5. Richard,

    Glad to see that you’ve designed a website that looks best in firefox. It looks better in my firefox. Also the RSS feeds (visible in firefox) makes the perfect touch for an old friend to keep up on the happenings of the man they called “slick” Keep it up.

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  7. Pingback: FluidZen » Blog Archive » The Best Browser For Your Website

  8. I actually stumbled here because I was looking for a “designed for firefox” logo.

    It is now 2010, and IE still sucks. I like to follow standards so I go straight to w3c documents and start coding and when firefox came things just worked. IE never does things right. Chrome is really good as well, but I can understand that for large companies like Google it is beneficial to have control of making sure that browsers support the features you went.

    I don’t do crazy things with browsers. I use javascript, svg, xml, xhtml and firefox/chrome are the best. Opera is nice but has issues too but Firefox is still king of the hill.

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