Browser Hell

Interesting stats Bob. What does the bounce rate refer to?

I find the IE/FF split interesting. There's a meme out there that IT-savvy and IE usage are inversely related. IE usage in the general population is around 70%. At 60%, COPA users are apparently techier than average. On the other hand, tech-oriented web sites sometimes see a 50-50 split. So we aren't true geeks.

As for Safari - its adoption across demographics seems to hold at 2% or so. Obviously, it's wildly over-represented on COPA 2.0. Perhaps because some of the implementation team are Mac users.

Bob,

Thanks for analysis and explanation. It is interesting but only from academic point of view. Your recommendations are great “Use latest version of the software”, upgrade if you want to play at COPA. May be it is time to dumb down CS (Which I know is not practical). Again strictly from academic point of view, it would be interesting to know if this was anticipated during the months of development or is it a unexpected fall out of poor understanding of the technology and  consequences.

Although intentions are good the outcome is painful. There is some fundamental functionality that was completely overlooked during the development and testing. Considering this, I think Jeppesen may be a world class company after all and Bendrix was defending defenseless.

I have not seen on the COPA forum any calls for testers, so it looks like testers were carefully selected and that might of significantly skewed results of preparedness for the switch over. And now we found a perfect culprit “The COPA user”  who did not switch to the latest and greatest web browser. I wonder if people who worked on this understand requirements of www.w3.org or was the CS taken at is face value because someone used it and decided that it was a deliverance for COPA.

I submit to you that “The COPA user” is a victim (may be too strong of a word) not the perpetrator. I can understand every one of the users who agonized while trying to get “connected” and now must update. UPDATE, I heard this word so many times in the past, and then something stops working and there is no one to help to resolve it. “Oh why Oh why I did not take the red pill” keeps playing in my mind.

Imagine a company deploying their web site and then proclaiming “It is only good if you have the latest version of web browser” – of course they can later blame poor sales on economy.

Well, enough of drama :) it is time to roll up sleeves and get back to making things work. Any feedback on the progress would be hugely appreciated.

And I have no right to complain because I'm using IE7 - and I have to switch to Firefox if I am going to comment on the new website.

Oh well, that's the price of being un-savvy and non techie.

Probably should buy a mac or at least a pc with 10 or 11 processors . . .

Maybe I should buy a dedicated computer for the COPA website?

I'm just the customer and it's my fault.

Bob, I know how hard you and all the guys/gals are working to get the new site running but being patted on the head does not feel so good.

Dave - I understand your annoyance at "being patted on the head". But let me point out that browser incompatibilities are not as uncommon as all that, even today. For instance, until recently I used to use Siebel CRM on my job, and it wouldn't let me use Firefox or IE 7. IT told us we have to use IE 6.

Now, having not played a core role in the development of COPA 2.0, I cannot speak to the quality of testing. However, to me, many of the complaints appear to be entirely legitimate. Yet I cannot help but reflect that in such serious upgrade efforts - at least in my corporate experience - a certain level of disruption and angst is inevitable. The key is to manage users' expectation and not to be perceived as blaming them for hiccups.

IE 6.026-- very bad, big pause for every page to load, some of the graphics on the top of each web page do not render correctly and overlap.

I can't upgrade due to corporate IT control.

Firefox 3.03 works great.

Since Community Server is based on .Net technology and is backed by MSFT I would think more effort would have been make to support IE, even old versions.

Of course MS has not always been behind browser standards. Apple won't even let you use IE to access their new MobileMe website.

Adam