So I'm looking for a dining room table. Hmm Index Living Mall is a big furniture shop here - let's have a look at their website in Firefox.

Hmm.. let's see Products in the menu at the top. Put my mouse pointer over that and a submenu appears - this look promising.

OH WAIT A MINUTE !! THE SUBMENU DISAPPEARS if I try to mouse over any of the items.

Try the same site in Internet Explorer and it works fine.

How can a big retailer like this create a broken navigation menu for a good 10% of potential customers ? Do Thai web developers even know about the existence of browsers other than IE .. what is going on.

There are probably some. But probably not the ones that website used..

Do Thai web developers even know about the existence of browsers other than IE .. what is going on.

You will find that most Thai websites – and many outside Thailand – are very badly coded. Many of the web developers probably don’t even know the meaning of HTML or W3C; they just use a developing tool that writes code using the proprietary standards of Microsoft and don’t even know that it is not standard.

--

Maestro

Is Firefox 10% now? It sounds a little high. Anyway that might be worldwide, I doubt if it 1 or 2 % of Thai users, and if the furniture store is in Thailand so I don't think it's so irresponsible to not bother testing in Firefox. Afterall a mouse over is pretty basic stuff so perhaps the bug is firefox ? Do you have java script disabled in yr firefox ?

Wasn't long ago you coudn't use the BBC sites without IE. BBC webmasters were always bad for designing pages so that only those with the newest features in their software could use it very well. That seems to have changed in the past few years fortunately.

I'm finding that sites I run are having about 30% of the visitors using something other than IE with Firefox/Mozilla/Epiphany/Netscape being the majority of it, some Safari or Konqueror hits. Hardly any from Opera anymore.

I had this discussion with the manager of a fairly respectable commercial Thai site recently. They said that Firefox does not handle Thai script that well (something to do with the wrapping and lack of spaces), so not a lot of Thai use it, so they 'don't bother' making their site Firefox friendly.

I don't agree with them by the way (since being Firefox friendly just means following the rules!) but...that's what they said.

The Nation's Corruption Watch Probe falls apart in Firefox. No Thaiscript on that page!

Better still was when they had that annoying Flash popup on the main page that rendered as a big square rectangle in Firefox. You couldn't remove it as the close button wasn't visible.

There are good Thai web designers out there - I've used a few. I guess the reason these big corporations are not using them is because they don't know any better themselves.

Yeah, you can spend 4k baht for a website by a high school kid or 20k by a professional that knows his/her sh**. But, most people don't know the difference and don't want to pay top money, this happens everywhere in the world. Sad for tech guys like me. I have been in the web development business for about 8 years and we always test our products using at least one more browser other than IE. Anything other than straight HTML will usually have some sort of browser incompatibility issues.

So I'm looking for a dining room table. Hmm Index Living Mall is a big furniture shop here - let's have a look at their website in Firefox.

Hmm.. let's see Products in the menu at the top. Put my mouse pointer over that and a submenu appears - this look promising.

OH WAIT A MINUTE !! THE SUBMENU DISAPPEARS if I try to mouse over any of the items.

Try the same site in Internet Explorer and it works fine.

How can a big retailer like this create a broken navigation menu for a good 10% of potential customers ? Do Thai web developers even know about the existence of browsers other than IE .. what is going on.

Script kiddies are taking over the world ...

Pay peanuts, get monkeys.

There are good Thai web designers out there - I've used a few. I guess the reason these big corporations are not using them is because they don't know any better themselves.

Actually the designers for the website/company I mentioned are technically excellent. The thing is that they run a massive site and going back and making their current and legacy content standards compliant would cost a bomb. So the manager was basically saying that it didn't make economic sense to them as a business.

Nothing cost a bomb in Thailand, certainly not web design - and if the site is designed properly it should be quite simple to modify templates and include files and have most of the site work in any browser.

It's a problem with piracy here. Basically you go into a shop and Linux and MS Windows are the same price. All software, including the MS development tools are available for next to nothing (pirated of course).

What that means is that the Thais just use the tools and don't do real 'development' work.

If Microsoft stuff was only readily available at full price, then people would start using OpenSource and Linux. Until then, it's likely to be more of the same.