Sveinbjorn Thordarson

| Hello,
|
| my name is Klaus Goelker from Munich, Germany. 
| I think, it´s too hard (not to say outrageous) to drive 
| people to use Firefox, just to see your website
| http://www.sveinbjorn.org/ of course it can be displayed 
| with IE.  By the way, I was also redirected to the 
| Firefox-downloadpage using Firefox.
| Sincerely
|
| Klaus Goelker

Hello Klaus,

Thank you for your email, Klaus.  Your opinion is noted 
(although why you find this outrageous is beyond me 
-- I've had to deal with IE-only websites for years).  
I wish to point out, however, that Firefox is not required 
to visit my website.  What is required is a reasonably W3C 
standards compliant browser (e.g. Safari, Firefox,
Opera, OmniWeb, Mozilla, Konqueror).  Microsoft's Internet 
Explorer is for all practical purposes an obsolete browser -- 
it doesn't support CSS1 properly, and has virtually no 
support for CSS2 and CSS3, trailing many years behind 
the competition.  From what I've seen of the upcoming IE7,
it looks to be no improvement in this regard.  Furthermore, 
my website does not currently render properly
with Internet Explorer, due to bugs in IE's rendering model 
(e.g. the box model bug, incorrect behaviour in the 
float attribute, etc.), while it renders correctly in *all other* 
major browsers .

Now, I am aware that a lot of people use this third-rate 
browser -- it is my wish to push for improvement in their 
browsing habits.  I have no vested interest in making my 
website accessible to IE users -- and, as far as I'm concerned, 
market share does not justify catering to sloppy and 
incompetent technology implementations, never mind 
obsolete ones.

I am surprised at your claim that Firefox, too, is redirected.  
The redirection mechanism was extensively tested on 
multiple browsers on several different platforms, without fail. 
The only way that Firefox ends up being redirected to the 
Firefox download page is if you configure it to fake the 
MSIE user agent string, which is where I detect the browser 
being used.

Sincerely,
Sveinbjorn Thordarson