Proprietary web applications kill openess and standards development

At work, I use Flock like I do at home and before Flock I was using Firefox since I have a basic disdain for IE.  This is fine for my basic needs, but frequently – and I mean frequently I am forced to switch over the IE in order to use our world-wide extranet which is based on SharePoint.

It’s not worth reading a rant on SharePoint (I can assure you it would be long) but what I don’t get – is why (for legitimate reasons) I need to use IE.  If this is the era of Web 2.0 the browser of your choise (assuming it supports standards) should be more than acceptable for any mission you choose.  Instead, what I find is that browsers do not work, or don’t work well with quite a few sites.

CNet recently ran a story talking about job seekers running into company job application sites which won’t work on the Mac, again based on only working on Windows IE.  This would not only frustrate me (I ran into this myself in my last round of job seeking), but I just find it ignorant more than anything.

To me, and I’m not a developer, this is just laziness.  If I choose to login to my company webmail from home on one on my Macs, I have to enter my credentials at least 3 times sometimes 4 to have them accepted by Exchange.  If I use IE for Mac, it works on the first time.  Our time entry system is the same thing… if you use anything but IE, you don’t even see some of the menus – assuming you can successfully login.

I’m certainly not switching to IE for my main use, but find that I run it as if it’s Word or Excel in order to access certain things… instead of just opening another tab in my existing browser.  Gotta love how this forces addditional system resources to be deployed for a rather limited purpose.  I’d yet to run the task manager to compare, my dell crap-top certainly feels the pain when I start opening a second browser adding to it’s burden of trying to keep up with me.

I’d love to boycott systems and companies that force this type of usage, but instead it’s the developing community that needs the wake up.  This type of limiting work is a dead end in what should be the new, new world of Web 2.0.  The browser is a conduit and with simple standards, it would be accessible to anyone.  Let’s not mess that up more than we already have now.

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