From: Eric Jarvis 
Newsgroups: uk.finance uk.misc
Subject: Re: Co-operative Bank withdraws Internet service for non-Windows business customers
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 16:42:44 -0000

usenet@isbd.co.uk usenet@isbd.co.uk wrote:
> In uk.finance JF  wrote:
> > 
> > The browser 'Opera' can be tweaked to emulate any presentation face that 
> > the cruel outside world demands. It can even talk its way into HSBC's 
> > on-line services.               ?Jf?
> 
> Mozilla works fine wih HSBC without a 'change of character'.  While
> tweaking a browser to make it pretend to be another is sometimes a
> useful fix it doesn't address the fundamental problem of badly
> written, non-standards-conforming web pages.  Ultimately it could lead
> to web designers believing that everybody uses IE when in fact a large
> proportion don't use IE but have their browsers set up to pretned to
> be IE.
> 

This has already happened. The various web authoring/design newsgroups are 
full of people justifying their decision to design only for IE on the 
grounds that almost all the users shown in their site logs are using IE.

Yes, I realise this is extremely stupid. Especially since my site logs 
generally show the various flavours of IE as being under 80% of the users, 
but what would I know? After all I haven't got any web sites designed to 
only work with IE like they have.

If a few large ISPs or computer distributors took it into their head to 
distribute Opera or Mozilla as the standard browser there would be chaos. 
I look forward to it, I'll be getting plenty of work when it happens.

-- 
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
all these years I've waited for the revolution 
and all we end up getting is spin