Enterprise Websites, Firefox, and Mucho Resentment
Riddle me this, Batman: why in the world does any enterprise website use ASP at all?
Now, I’m a Firefox user, for reasons too numerous to describe here and now. I’m on the web constantly. I design for it, and I explore it for business and leisure. Most particularly for business, and here’s where I absolutely cannot fathom business websites that insist on utilizing a website framework that does not work on a significant portion of their user’s browsers.
You know if a site was developed using ASP by looking at the end of the URL on any of the internal pages: if the page name ends in “.asp” then you know you’ve got an ASP site on your hands. ASP is buggy and yucky on anything but Internet Explorer. It works — or doesn’t — in fits and starts, and too often crashes the browser entirely.
The two most egregious examples of late are Costco and, of all companies, Dell.
Costco is otherwise one of my favorite businesses out there. They do ever so many things right. But this morning I tried to use their website to make a business purchase of several hundred dollars, and I just couldn’t do it.
Pages wouldn’t load, searches wouldn’t run, and then I could not for the life of me log in. When I finally logged in and tried to modify my account settings — another error message. Finally I thought to look at the URL bar: aha! ASP! I opened up IE7 and had no problem.
Same thing happened with Dell a few weeks ago. I couldn’t even browse the site in Firefox without it crashing my browser entirely. Dell! They sell computers! Why wouldn’t they want everyone on any computer and any browser to be able to access their site?
I understand why Microsoft uses ASP — hegemony and all that. But any other self-respecting business ought to put their web team to work converting ASP-based sites into… well, anything else. JSP, PHP, RoR, I don’t care. I just want to be able to surf your sites from my browser of choice.
Maureen McQ said,
November 3, 2007 @ 4:05 pm
This is really enlightening. I don’t much pay attention–when something crashes Firefox or won’t accept my Log In or won’t let me click to the next page, sometimes I think to try it in Explorer. You know, if I really really want to look or buy or read. But usually I just assume that it’s a problem with the site. I usually just assume it’s just not working. I usually just leave. And don’t come back.
beth said,
November 10, 2007 @ 2:55 pm
Yes, I have to be *motivated* in order to keep surfing a misbehaving site, and even then I grind my teeth. GoDaddy.com is the latest culprit — 1 out 4 of my domain searches in Firefox simply don’t go through. Stupid ASP.
David Bellamy said,
November 20, 2007 @ 1:37 pm
Interesting. Firefox crashes for me from time to time; it never occured to me that it could be the website that I was on that caused it. Seamonkey never crashes, however, in my experience.
beth said,
November 21, 2007 @ 10:21 am
Good to know. I’ll have to look more into Seamonkey… it’s interesting that it seems to be more stable, since as far as I know it’s built on essentially the same engine as Firefox. If you ever explore either of the sites I mention above, I’d be curious how Seamonkey handles them.
And of course, not all ASP sites are created equal — some work fine in Firefox, but too many sites (and especially sites that should perform better) are IE-centric.
Mike said,
January 23, 2008 @ 3:24 pm
I got a new dell xps It has “Internet Expler powered by dell” and sometimes when I goto godaddy and enter a domain to look up it crashes my pc and it shuts down