Launched supporting Firefox

Adam Kinney — Sat, 06 May 2006 07:26:00 GMT

Scoble brought up the issue of Firefox support not always making it as a requirement for the launch of Microsoft websites. He even suggests automatic low review scores for teams that ship without it. Luckily with 10 we cleared the bar and launched with Firefox support (on the Mac as well), so hopefully no bad recommendations from Scoble :)

But this isn't just a "hey, we're cool too" post. I feel lucky to have joined Microsoft around this time, when they have started saying "We care about standards and the web." I came as a Firefox guy, but now IE7 has taken its place as my browser of choice. I feel very lucky to be on a team where standards and working n the web is valued. When we were planning goals for the 10 launch a few big ones were XHTML validation, same browsing experience in IE and Firefox the same media offered in different formats (shelling out mp4s as well as wmvs, mp3s and wmas). This is mirrored across Microsoft with the Windows Live efforts to compatibility, the release of ASP.NET 2.0 (much better html output and css support), MIX06 and the IE7 update. The ideas are catching on though, what's that Scoble said before? Its a like an aircraft carrier turning. Not sure if its applicable, but I'll be watching.

window.attachEvent and FireFox

Adam Kinney — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 01:00:00 GMT

After reading Rumen Stankov's entry on telerik controls running on ie7 it reminded me of an interesting feature of Atlas. He brought up the Object detection method of deciphering what Browser is running your script.

// Good - the Object Detection Way. This is how it should be done.
if (window.attachEvent)
{
window.attachEvent('onunload', dispose);
}

// Bad. This is the most common IE client-side detection though.
if (document.all)
{
window.attachEvent('onunload', dispose);
}

What's interesting is, that if Atlas detects that you are running browsers other than IE it will include an additional file for compatibility. This .js file than adds a function to the window object called attachEvent which than wraps addEventListener.

This is great because now to attach events all you need to do is use the attachEvent function. But if you are using Atlas with your site, window.attachEvent is no longer IE only and therefore not useful as a function to be checked against for general browser detection. Something to think about, especially if you are planning on selling web controls.

Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'firefox'

Launched supporting Firefox

window.attachEvent and FireFox