SciVisum finds website standards lacking

Web-testing firm SciVisum assessed 100 leading consumer websites and found that 10% of them did not work correctly on the Firefox web browser, including government website Jobcentreplus.gov.uk.

Firefox, which was launched in November 2004, is an open source alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Although most people still use Internet Explorer, Firefox, created by Mozilla, is gaining in popularity. Its share of the browser market increased to 8% in May, compared with 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications. Internet Explorer’s share of the market dropped to 87.23% in May, compared to 90.31% in January.

SciVisum found that of the websites it tested, 3% turned away non Internet Explorer (IE) users and 7% included non-standard code recognised only by Internet Explorer.

Deri Jones, chief executive of SciVisum said “web developers are used to testing their sites just using IE rather than so-called standards-compliant browsers, which only use code ratified by the World Wide Web consortium.

“There is a certain business logic to this as IE is the most widely used browser”.

The success of Firefox has prompted Microsoft to start developing a new version of IE.

Sites which meet World Wide Web consortium standards are easier for disabled people to use. Mr Jones said “Over time developers have begun to misuse the original standards created for the web to create websites that look great to you and I, but are confusing to a disabled person using a screen reader which needs to make sense of the content”.

However, even the SciVisum site was later found to not be W3C compliant.