Reading Andy’s post on mixed feelings for Firefox, and continuing my attempt to loosen Micro$oft’s hold on me…
I’m leaving one bank because its internet banking doesn’t support Firefox. Their response to my request for Firefox support was “use IE6”. This, to me, is typical of their attitude to customer support.
Smile, on the other hand, have a site which I have run without trouble under Firefox. Not only is their interface great (if you like pink) but their customer service rocks too. So I will be sticking with them, and plugging them to all my Firefox-loving friends (and anyone who reads this).
Andy – can your client afford to lose my custom? Or 2% of the market? Or 5%? At what point does Firefox support become good business sense?
Why not encourage people to use Firefox, and steal everyone else’s customers as they slowly migrate to your way of thinking?
Liz Keogh, lunivore 
Hi Elizabeth,
No, my client cannot afford to lose your custom and we do support browsers based on the Gecko engine, Safari and, of course, the ubiquitous IE. The problem is that mandating such support implies an almost computationally explosive increase in testing because there is no such thing as standard JavaScript support in the browser space.
Perhaps I miscommunicated my issues with a new player in the market. It’s not that I don’t encourage people to use Firefox (or any alternative to IE for that matter), it’s just that I cannot stand the onerous testing and hoops you have to jump through to ensure everything works correctly across n browsers * m versions/browser * x operating systems * y versions/operating system. I’m blowing things a twee bit out of proportion here, but you get the general idea.
— Andy
I do get the idea. Just frustrated with the number of people not supporting Firefox atm. Let alone Linux.
If Firefox becomes the “alternative” standard to IE – i.e. Firefox and IE cover 99% of the market between them, with Firefox having >20% of the share – would it make sense to support it then?