This is actually the second blog post of mine to have that title. The first was in 2004 when I said Thunderbird needs a similar effort. A little more than 4 years later, I’m really glad to see it finally become a reality.
As a side note, a lot of my old blog posts are becoming a reality these days. I find that to be rewarding.
It’s always good to read about sites that are updating to add support for Firefox. It’s about time. I’m sure BOA customers are glad to see their annoyance is finally going to get fixed.
Opera is said to be sending evangelism emails to websites that have compatibility problems with their browser. What’s interesting is that they are customizing the emails with actual fixes for the problems. This is pretty clever. In theory it will improve the problems regarding compatibility and make the web more standards compliant (which is where Opera excels).
One thing I do question is if webmasters will read it, at least where it matters. Most large companies have a contact form, or an email address, but it’s often forwarded to customer support, or sometimes just into a giant bin where a handful get processed. Will the information get to the people who need it? I suspect it will for small companies who read all the email they get from the web. For large companies, I doubt it, and that’s where I think it matters the most. The bigger sites that the majority of the web visit.
Regardless, it’s interesting to see, for me in particular since I wrote reporter. I suspect the best efforts are still to encourage the industry as a whole to adopt best practice. Considering the move to go mobile, and be more flexible on the front-end, using standards is just becoming more of a requirement. I think that will ultimately end up being the winning effort. It’s already winning as newer sites are generally pretty good when it comes to standards. The old ones will take time.
With Safari 3 and Opera 9.5 out, Firefox 3 taking off, IE 8 coming soon, it’s pretty obvious that standards are the future.