Re: Comcast web support only for IE users; ignores 20% of users using Firefox, other browsers

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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 browsers
>
> > exactly how one is supposed to run Internet Exploiter (of whatever
> version) 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.)  I
> plan to run VMware so that I can run selected Windows apps when
> necessary.  That's obviously a great feature of the Intel-based Macs  
> of
> the 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't
> matter enough" only further demonstrates the
> > anti-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 FAQ
> for configuring Thunderbird to use port 587, and I just accessed it  
> via
> the Chrome browser, as well as Firefox and IE8 beta (Safari should  
> work
> too):
> 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 and
> beyond basic FAQs, for customers who wanted us to make the fix for  
> them
> automatically (not all customers are comfortable with this).  I  
> believe
> these mainly use ActiveX and other IE-specific functions to enable the
> majority of our customers to have an automatic fix.  I'm confident  
> that
> many 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-click
> fixes to an alternate method that would work for more browsers and  
> OSes.
>
> Regards
> Jason




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