[conspire] We don't support Mozilla

[Bill Moseley]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2005 at 12:21:27PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Basically, you've hit a brick wall because the situation's been
> deliberately set up so your complaint and advice will reach _only_
> people powerfully motivated to drop it in the oubliette, make
> double-sure Alice never hears it, and "thanks for your feedback".

I agree.  But, I have also been in organizations with a large customer
base (cable TV) where in board meetings someone would talk about some
individual customer complaint or comment and that made a difference.
So I think it helps to be a squeaky wheel in general.  And try not to
sound like they think a Linux nut might sound... ;)  The more times
they hear it the better.

I'm sure everyone has stories much more crazy than this, but not too
long ago I did a site redesign where the boss had selected a
design firm based on one of their friend's recommendations.  They
designed in IE and put up HTML for review.  I begged and begged for
screen shots but they said that the browser was the way to go.  I
implemented and they went crazy because things didn't look right.  Of
course, besides designing with IE, they had their default font size
set to "large".

And this has been my other humorous discussion with a site's tech
support:

  http://www.paytrust.com/

(nice Netscape favicon!).  But, check out this:

  http://paytrust.com/

It's been like that for over a year.  That's their *brand* fur gawd's
sake! And it's *blank*!!  I would love to hear their IT or Site manager's
reason for that.  I can't believe they don't know it.  I shouldn't
care, but when I see something like that why would I trust them with
managing my money?  (Well, I guess you could ask me why I still do...)
Not to mention the site is almost completely driven by javascript
links.

> > I also grip about fonts (as my eyes get worse with age....). 

Does the Bank of America site have small fonts on your screen?  I have
to wonder what they were thinking to use 65% fonts.

> You know, there are ways to specify your own CSS style sheet to apply to
> pages you're browsing.  I don't have anything about that in front of me.

I used to have a minimum font set in Mozilla and Firefox for just this
reason.  And yes, I know about user style sheets.  BoA's response
about the fonts was to set my browser to use larger fonts -- but why
not let people make them smaller if they want, not larger?  What
percent of users know how to make their fonts show larger?  Oh, it's
so painful to watch my eighty-year-old dad "use" the web.  Remember
the computer screens in the movie Brazil?  Nice external magnifying
glass.  (Hey, and idea to rush out and patent!)

BTW -- within the last few months there was an article in (I think)
one of the Linux magazines (LJ??) that had a Mozilla utility where you
could click on text and it would show what the browser had selected
for the font and font size based on CSS.  Anyone see that and remember
where it was?

I've got this installed, btw:

  http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org