“I have been among the developers and observers who have praised Yahoo for the technical strength of their recently launched User Interface Library. In my tests for the Ajax/DHTML Scorecard project in March, Yahoo’s library was a clear ‘A’ in its cross-browser credentials, and I was very impressed with Yahoo’s development team, which published clear and exacting browser standards for their library. According to Yahoo’s own Graded Browser Support table, Safari is an A-graded browser, meaning it achieves the highest level of support possible with the Yahoo interface library,” Leland Scott writes for Musings from Mars. “Clearly, the thought that went into this table is impressive, and the authors conclude the explanation that precedes the table itself with an appropriate quote from Tim Berners-Lee on the importance of cross-browser support.”
“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.” – Tim Berners-Lee
“It is therefore highly disappointing and disillusioning to discover tonight that Yahoo has released a preview of its new, Ajax-enabled home page with support only for Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 1.5. The only logic one can use to justify such a move is based on a totally PC-centric viewpoint, which argues that only Windows users are worth troubling with, since they comprise the vast majority of potential viewers. But this is precisely the viewpoint that must cease if Web 2.0 is to become the fertile melting ground for truly cross-platform interdependence that it wants to be. It’s simply not the viewpoint of any company that really cares about Berners-Lee’s vision or about the millions of users on platforms other than the virus- and malware-riddled mess that is Microsoft Windows today,” Scott writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Based on our site stats, quite a strong sample of Mac users, Safari is used by the large majority of Mac users today. It is the strong number three browser on all the Web after IE and Firefox – despite being a Mac-only browser. Yahoo, and any other company that does a poor job of supporting everyone, is a disappointment, and we Mac users – a group proven to have above average discretionary income and the willingness to spend it (at least on quality products and services) – should remember companies that fail to include all users. We will remember.
We respect our customers above all else and never forget that they come to us by choice. We share a personal responsibility to maintain our customers’ loyalty and trust. We listen and respond to our customers and seek to exceed their expectations. – Yahoo! – What We Value
It’s not just Yahoo’s preview site that won’t work correctly; Yahoo games and other services frequently don’t work or work well on anything but Windows Internet Explorer. It’s been like this for years. It takes virtually no extra effort to code a site to work for all users when that is one of your goals at the outset. Those companies that ignore us should be ignored by us until they wise up and include all users. Do the right and smart thing, Yahoo. Please use Yahoo’s simple web contact form to request that they make their services fully available to all here: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/support/contacts/ideas.html
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IF YOU SEND FEEDBACK TO YAHOO —BE NICE!!!!!—–
Yahoo can go to hell for all I care!
Personally I would have thought any big company like yahoo who has anything to do with search would want their sites to be cross browser and use standards. Purely because if they use it, it in turn then promotes the use of good markup etc throughout the web. Surely this must then make it easier for them to crawl sites and make their results more accurate.
If you think regular search results are inaccurate just try an image search. The stuff you get back is crap because nothing is labelled/named properly, no decent metadata and so on.
Do you Yahoo? Why? I don’t.
Google is my home page. (Sorry Apple.)
who cares… yahoo (as the name implies) is an also ran.
Thankfully IDGAD about Yahoo, and if there was going to ever be a chance that I would, its now gone – I’m not even curious enough to go look, and I’ve pretty much written it off as a place to explore in the future.
So YAHOO!
I haven’t given Yahoo (anything) the time of day since about five years ago.
It encapsulates most of what I hate about some websites – too busy, over-engineered and designed to attract teenagers.
Good luck to ’em.
I don’t quite see the point. Firefox is available for OS X after all, and it’s free. Besides, this is a preview, this is a beta; I just visited the site with Opera, and it says something like:
“Unfortunately you are using a browser we are not supporting today — check back in a few weeks.”
So, again, what’s the point?
I have never understood the point of Yahoo. What is it they do exactly apart from having a web page?
Don’t get you knickers in a twist. According to the site, they plan to support additional browser soon. I’m guessing that means Safari, dontcha think? I mean, are they going to support Opera before Safari? I don’t think so.
Didn’t Yahoo just get in bed with Microsoft.
Of course you can switch your user-agent on Safari to “Windows MSIE 6.0” and check it out.
OK … I was nice.
I even told them my Yahoo! email address – though I foolishly signed up for the beta, which means I have to switch to Firefox to read mail sent to that address. My history with Yahoo! goes back a lot of years. It’s been mostly good, but I don’t count on them any more.
I do well over 90% of my personal browsing with Safari, maybe half of the rest with Firefox. I don’t get to my Yahoo! mail nearly as often as I used to.
Yahoo doesn’t attract the same kind of traffic it did in the late ’90s. Google has replaced them as the search engine of choice, and frankly all of the services offered by Yahoo can be found other places.
MDN Word: Couldn’t
“Couldn’t care if Yahoo supports Safari or not”
Now as a former lawwyerr, I have one thing to say bout this, I don’t use no Yahoo around here! Unh unh!
I never use Yahoo’s site. Ajax this!
Bob,
Bad Idea!
OK, you can do this … and it will work. It also confuses most of the less-sophisticated tracking software into reporting that you are using IE6 … on a Mac? If they even check the platform information. This tells them it’s OK to continue to ignore Safari because – according to their stats – nobody uses Safari.
Please don’t do this except where you absolutely must.
It seems to me that it is more work to exclude any particular browser. So what exactly is the point in not allowing all browsers?
Am I wrong?
Anyway so long Yahoo – until then – you have been deleted.
you don’t need to send feedback or anything like that, just use google. yahoo, if they haven’t already, will get the point.
Yahoo’s VIDEOS don’t work for Mac users either!
I’ve just visited the page in question with Safari and received the ‘Unsupported browser’ message but by simply setting the user agent to MSIE 6 I could access all the Ajax driven content with no problems. So not sure I can see what Yahoo are worried about – apart from the fact the interface sucks anyway.
This is not surprising. Yahoo’s Messenger client for Mac is distinctly second-rate — it looks and feels like it was coded by a bunch of Windows people who had seen an OS 9 Mac a couple of times. It’s shameful that open-source volunteer efforts like Fire and Adium can do a significantly better job than Yahoo can.
There are a lot of stupid project managers out there who opt for supporting 85% of the market when they could be supporting 98-99% with no greater effort. It isn’t harder to support multiple browsers, but it takes a willingness to do things the right way, adhere to web standards, and test in all browsers, and those things take a manager with a sufficient amount of vision. Yahoo apparently doesn’t have that.
And the new Yahoo! Tech portal publishes nothing but PC-centric info and articles. I complained in the comments section of articles for a while, then gave up.
Especially as a distant #2 in their areas of competition, Yahoo! should address the growing Mac user base.
How idiotic is it to say, “Yahoo sucks. I haven’t looked at it in years!”? This is the internet, folks; things change. Everyone would flip out if someone were to say “Macs suck! I haven’t looked at one in years!”
Just one example: Look at Yahoo’s new map system. It is better than Google’s.
Bob
What’s a user-agent and how do you do it? Does this allow you to open pages in Safari that would not otherwise work?
Don’t bother!
Yahoo is just catering to Microsoft hoping for a eventual buyout because Google has gotten so strong.
Yahoo has turned over Chinese democratic internet users to the communist China government.
Just forget Yahoo, they are evil.
Yahoo is going to be getting a lot of e-MAIL TODAY!
I’M PERSONALLY SICK AND TIRED OF THERE LACK OF SUPPORT FOR OSX (10.4) TIGER AND FORWARD – AND THEN THERE’S THEIR LONG TAGS ONE HAS TO DEAL WITH EVERYDAY (I.E @SBCGLOBAL.NET) AND WE MOST LIKLY ARE FACEING A NAME CHANGE SOMETIME SOON – SUCH AS AT&TGLOBAL;.NET…!
I’M STARTING TO SPOP FOR A NEW DIRECTION – ANY IDEALS DOE HOME AND BUSINESS?
I visited Yahoo for the first time in years last night. It’ll probably be years before I visit it again (assuming it’s still around).
I struggle to get my stupid little personal page showing up properly in both Mozilla and IE and it ticks me off that a huge company like Yahoo! can’t afford the same courtesy.
Dennis:
Are you joking? Yahoo Maps is no where NEAR as cool or intuitive as Google Maps. No satellite view, no hybrid view. You can’t even grab and drag the map. Lame.
Yahoo, who are they?
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Once Apple added Google search to Safari I had no need to visit Yahoo which up to then always came to mind to do my searches with. Of course that’s no excuse if they choose to ignore a large segment of the interenet population.
MDN: “Kind”: Apple kind of brought it on themselves so to speak.
Email to Yahoo today:
Dear Sirs,
(I gave them my .Mac email address for return mail… I id’d my Yahoo address at the beginning of my email, just to remind them of a little competition… I pay for .Mac. I don’t pay for Yahoo’s “premium” services.)
“I have been advised that Yahoo has marginalized the Mac community again by not supporting the A-rated Safari browser.
This is ridiculous, and it must change. That Yahoo does not support the world’s most standards-compliant browser is unacceptable.
You are alienating millions of Mac users, most of whom use Safari as their main browser by choice. Most of us do not like Firefox for it’s Windows-like interface.
Mac users statistically have higher IQs and more purchasing clout than the average PC user.
Remember, you have stiff competition from Google. You can not afford to Ignore millions of very astute customers.
Ignore us at your peril, Yahoo, because we are a growing component of the Internet community.
Regards,
Melanie “MacSmiley”
Ya-Google!
Yahoo!’s New Look Not For Safari’s Eyes
we have a pic of the error page for those not using Safari.
The funny thing is that Safari handles the Yahoo! Beta Preview page perfectly… if you set the Safari’s User Agent to “Windows MSIE 6.0” in the debug menu… which means that Safari is perfectly capable of handling what Yahoo! is throwing at us EXCEPT for their test to see what browser is being used.
“The funny thing is that Safari handles the Yahoo! Beta Preview page perfectly… if you set the Safari’s User Agent to “Windows MSIE 6.0″ in the debug menu… which means that Safari is perfectly capable of handling what Yahoo! is throwing at us EXCEPT for their test to see what browser is being used.”
This is exactly what bothers me about some websites. They tell you your browser won’t work BEFORE they even try. Every time some POS site uses Javascript to tell me to update my browser and it works under debug, I always send an email.
This is TOTALLY irresponsible and just plain laziness. Or intentional.
“fertile melting ground”
I lost a good pair of shoes walking through that. The smell was almost unbearable.
“Why does Yahoo exclude Mac Safari users?”
Because they can?
MacSmiley:
More than likely, your message would be taken more seriously if you had written it is grammatically correct English.
” Most of us do not like Firefox for it’s Windows-like interface. “
iMacazine is the dumbest name for a site EVAR.
Now watch, someone will say it’s a fine name, and it will be posted from Mr. iMacazine himself.
MacSmiley I think your letter was arrogant and will make people are yahoo less willing to support mac users. Thanks for perpetuating the steretype that all mac users are elitists who want everything catered to them, and for speaking for my reasons for not using firefox. You truly represent us all.
Changing gears, I agree with the people on here saying “Yahoo? They’re still around?” I hear about them in the news but I don’t use a single one of their services. Their site is too busy and complicated. I view yahoo in the same way that I view AOL. A great tool for bringing the masses into the internet, but its time has past. When I see someone with a yahoo or aol account, I immediately think “what a noob” or “that’s cute” when the person is a 70 year old lady which is honestly the only yahoo account that I’ve written to in the past 3 years.
Maybe I’m missing something but yahoo seems totally irrelevent to me. Cringely listed it among the 4 most important companies shaping the internet right now, but I don’t see it. The other three were MS, Intel, and Google. I hope MS, yahoo, and intel die, leaving an apple/google/IBM complex to rule over technology.
“I never use Yahoo’s site. Ajax this!
It states it’s a PREVIEW VERSION. Nothing to cry about until it is officially released. THEN see if it works. And BTW, AJAX is the (current)future of Web design. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), is redefining what a web “page” can be. In fact it’s killing the idea of a “page” altogether. What AJAX is doing is creating Web “pages” that are more like APPLICATIONS than a “flat” page. Google Maps is a good example.
Quite ironic that Jay protests against MacSmiley “perpetuating the steretype that all mac users are elitists who want everything catered to them” then turns around and says ‘When I see someone with a yahoo or aol account, I immediately think “what a noob” or “that’s cute”‘.
Way to go, Jay. Thanks for perpetuating the stereotype that all mac users are elitists. You truly represent us all.
I dropped my Yahoo account a few months ago after I realized that Yahoo only cares about Windows users. I was a Yahoo user (and advocate at one time) for years.
It’s all Google for me now
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And Mac users are a profitable demographic to advertise to.
Yahoo is just shooting themselves in the foot.
Safari(and Konqueror) suck, why is anyone using it?
>Mac users statistically have higher IQs and more purchasing clout than the average PC user.
Yahoo doesn’t care. It can make more money out of the masses with less purchasing clout and less internet savvy. Yahoo’s support for Macs has always sucked.
Ampar says:
“Why does Yahoo exclude Mac Safari users?”
Because they can?
No. Because they’re assholes.
Any mac user that is familiar with Yahoo knows you get second class citizenship treatment from them. Yahoo Messenger anybody?
Who uses Safari? Why haven’t you switched to something a little less archaic yet?
Yahoo. Good for a junk mail account but little else.
Why isn’t the slant on this story “Yet another online company must devote extra resources to coding for Safari in order to support the last 2% of their audience. Shame on Apple for releasing such a shoddy, poorly implemented web browser.”
If you’re a Mac fan, send a message to Apple – demand they deliver you a computer with pre-installed software that is compatible with current web standards. By forcing everyone on the web to write workarounds to support their product, they’re inflicting economic harm on everyone. Fix the problem at the source.
From what I’ve heard, Safari is much more difficult to write AJAX things for at the outset. Gmail, GCalendar, Google Maps, AJAXWrite, and many of the extremely advanced AJAX apps on the next weren’t Safari friendly at first either.
You people need to stop making claims without understanding the underlying issues of implimentation. I’d be surprised if Yahoo didn’t have another beta where Safari was supported.
Give it time.
stop complaining… other than you folks here… nobody uses macs
Maybe it would help if Safari supported interception of the back and forward buttons for AJAX/DHTML apps.
http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/09/safari-no-dhtml-history-possible.html
Ya Who? Ironic that Safari included them as a default on the bookmarks bar. I think that shifting hierarchies and site preferences ultimately render this issue a non sequiter.
Pardon, “non sequitur”. Sister Agnes Eugene can stop rolling over now.
Please remember that this page is only a preview. Yahoo would be unwise to release it as their default homepage until Safari is updated. Also, Apple deserves slack for failing to upgrade their browser. Safari is outdated, outmoded, and painful to use. Given Apple’s highly advanced desktop enhancements, the current state of Safari is a shame to the company.
Rather than contributing back to the open source movement from which they have taken so much, Apple is probably waiting for the wonderful folks at KDE to fix Konqueror so that they can just steal the fixes.
*SLAP* Firefox RUNS on Mac OS X!
Funny, as I just read this the other day. It had my head nodding, too bad they don’t take their own advice.
http://com1.devnet.scd.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/gbs.html
How bout before everyone gets all over Yahoo for not supporting Macs, how bout Safari start supporting windows???? eh….
stop complaining… other than you folks here… nobody uses macs
Hmmm… nobody huh?! Yeah, Apple sells millions upon millions of Macs each year to nobody and we all hang out here to be entertained by your fruitless humor
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How bout before everyone gets all over Yahoo for not supporting Macs, how bout Safari start supporting windows???? eh….
Well since Konqueror (and its KHTML rendering engine also found in Safari who is cousin to the former) can run on Windows, getting the source code for Safari and porting it to Windows is definitely possible.
http://www.danka.de/printpro/NX.html
And I guess my question would be: why does Safari need to run on Windows anyways? Doesn’t Microsoft already have a web browser of its own???
The main point above in regards to Yahoo is that Yahoo needs to adhere to web standards, which obviously is not happening ATM!
sorry bro ..safari is crap
you should use firefox, it is available for mac too you know, not just pc
It’s entertaining to watch people bash Yahoo! that have no idea what they’re talking about…
Yet in the end Yahoo! still generates the most traffic more than any other site.
Google is 6th… behind MySpace I might add.
Aside from stats however, we all need to remember that the new Yahoo! preview homepage is in its early infancy. The Yahoo! Standards declare that Safari is an ‘A’ grade browser so expect to see those standards implemented soon. The purpose of the release is to get an early audience feedback before the extra effort gets put in.
But no, folks don’t see that. It’s better to whine and complain than saying anything constructive these days.
> Mac users statistically have higher IQs and more purchasing clout than the average PC user.
Wow… just wow… That is the entire reason I dislike macs compressed into one sentence. Thanks for the reminder.
btw, 83.5% of all statistics are made up at the spur of the moment to try to prove something that is an opinion. (just like that one)
What is a user-agent and how do you do it?
@iMe “What is a user-agent and how do you do it?”
A UA (user agent) is the information your browser passes on to a website you are visiting telling them what browser and version you are using.
If you are using Safari, you need to enable the Debug menu which requires going into terminal or using a script to do it for you. Go into terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1. Quit Safari and then restart it. You will then see a debug menu and you can change the UA from there. If you don’t like using terminal, you can use a freeware utility like OnyX available here:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/
One thing – if you want more site developers to support Safari, ALWAYS go to the site first with your user agent set to Safari. THEN change it and reload. This will let the administrators know that people are trying to access their site using Safari and may change accordingly. You can also contact them and request this as well.
On a related note:
Websites today should NOT be UA “sniffing” (reading/detecting). They should be sniffing for the RENDERING ENGINE being used (for example ALL Mozilla based browsers use a version of the Gecko rendering engine ). This requires no extra effort on the part of the site designer. If a site sniffed for the rendering engine instead of the UA it would find Gecko V x and ALL Gecko based browsers (Camino, Firefox etc. etc.) would be covered. Instead, if you are using a browser that has very little user base but still uses he Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, and the site sniffs your UA, it may not allow you to access it – EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE USING THE EXACT SAME RENDERING ENGINE AS FIREFOX. That’s why UA sniffing is bad and RE sniffing is good. More info here:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Sardisson/Gecko_is_Gecko
According to my investigation, thousands of persons all over the world get the personal loans at different creditors. Therefore, there’s good chances to receive a secured loan in any country.
Wow, I have had my Yahoo mail since they started and now I cannot get into see my mail. Furious! What kind of company have they become?