Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:09:15 -0500
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Livingood, Jason" <Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com> Date: November 19, 2008 5:45:15 PM EST To: <dave () farber net>, "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>, <mo () ccr org>Subject: RE: [IP] Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsersexactly how one is supposed to run Internet Exploiter (of whateverversion) on a Mac is rather unclear since MS terminated development efforts several years ago and MacOS X has evolved significantly since then.When I get back to my office (I'm at IETF 73 this week) I am converting over to a Macbook. (I converted my home machine to a Mac years ago.) Iplan to run VMware so that I can run selected Windows apps whennecessary. That's obviously a great feature of the Intel-based Macs ofthe past few years. But that's not really the point of your question, it merely demonstrates the nice flexibility of Mac OSX... ;-)an answer of the form "your platform's market share means you don'tmatter enough" only further demonstrates theanti-competitive nature of this market.We have well documented FAQs for customers, which apply to a variety of OSes and clients. I believe the original poster was asking about a fix to change their POP client to use port 587 instead of port 25 for SMTP.We have FAQs that describe how to do this generally. Those FAQs are accessible to a wide array of browsers. For example, here is the FAQfor configuring Thunderbird to use port 587, and I just accessed it via the Chrome browser, as well as Firefox and IE8 beta (Safari should worktoo): http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Configuring-Thunderbird-to-use-port- 587-for-sending-email So the FAQs are widely accessible to major browsers IMHO. Several years ago, we developed one-click fixes to try to go above andbeyond basic FAQs, for customers who wanted us to make the fix for them automatically (not all customers are comfortable with this). I believethese mainly use ActiveX and other IE-specific functions to enable themajority of our customers to have an automatic fix. I'm confident thatmany web sites have similarly used such IE-specific functions like ActiveX in the past, as one of the other posters just noted. That being said, the browser and OS market continues to evolve (particularly in browsers), and we're sensitive to that. The small number of one-click fixes may currently be only for IE, but I am not sure it is reasonable to conclude based on that that we're saying customers using other browsers or OSes don't matter enough. In any case, we're doing a level of effort now for converting these one-clickfixes to an alternate method that would work for more browsers and OSes.Regards Jason
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Current thread:
- Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers David Farber (Nov 19)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers David Farber (Nov 19)
- Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers David Farber (Nov 19)
- Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers David Farber (Nov 19)
- Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers David Farber (Nov 19)
- Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers David Farber (Nov 19)
- Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers David Farber (Nov 19)