Internet Explorer required

Last week, I moderated a Web cast using On24’s service. It went well enough, but On24 dealt me a surprise coming into the conference: Its conference coordinator informed me that the participants would have to use Internet Explorer on Windows.

I told On24 that I live on a Mac and that I considered an IE/Windows-only policy not only impractical for me, but not a great idea for their business. The On24 coordinator replied, with no attitude about it, that if IE/Windows gave me a problem, I could skip using the Web client at all, dial into the voice conference and give verbal cues to have my slides advanced. Fly Windows or fly blind.

That’s a bit dark ages, isn’t it? Surely an outfit of On24’s stature wouldn’t take the low road with its browser-based client.

I want to establish that I’m not ragging on On24 (see the end of this post to understand why I let them off the hook). Rather, I’m using this to illustrate what I consider to be a serious issue: Users of browser-based applications and services cannot allow the reemergence of the proprietary, platform-bound approach to Web apps that caused the failure of prior efforts in that direction.

As you can imagine, On24’s insistence on IE/Windows pushed so many of my buttons that I had to choose between going off and letting it go. I chose the latter course with my desire for continued employment being my primary motivator. For me, Windows is an occupational inevitability. Since Apple treats Windows the same way, I feel no sense of guilt about giving in.

Now we arrive at the twist in this plot: It turns out that On24’s client interface does support OS X, and Linux, too. On24 should be bragging about that since such flexibility is lacking in most of its competitors’ services. Finding no collateral expressing On24’s system requirements, I located On24’s compatibility test and I’ll use that as the last word on the issue. When I ran the test on a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro using OS X 10.4.8 and Apple’s Safari browser, the test fails. I expected that; Safari is rarely a validation target for commercial browser front-ends. However, the OS portion of On24’s test reported “Passed,” and offered some helpful advice:

When I ran the same test using Firefox 2.0 on OS X, I got green lights across the board:

Instead of hand-validating against all the OS/browser/media player combinations I could imagine, I looked into the Javascript code that validates the user’s environment. Here’s On24’s OS test:

if ( is_win2k || is_winxp || is_winvista || is_macosx3 || (is_linuxredhat9 && (paramObj[“linux”]+””==”true”))) os_ok=true;

That’s reasonable. Solaris is missing, but On24 lists Sun Microsystems among its VIP clients. If Sun’s okay with that, I am. Later in the source, there’s this:

if (is_ie5_5up || is_nav71up || is_fx) browser_ok=true;

If On24’s HTML, DOM, XML and Javascript code targets the overlap among FireFix (“fx”), Mozilla/Navigator and IE 5–Microsoft’s least ick-laden browser–then the major rules are respected.

if(is_fx) windowsplayer_ok=false; //for firefox, don't show windows media

Bonus points.

Most companies brag about doing the right thing. On24’s conference coordinator told me that his employer doesn’t. There are lots of possible explanations. Maybe InfoWorld used Windows Media content; it’s canned before I see it. Perhaps the On24 coordinator just laid out IE/Windows as a requirement to avoid having to nursemaid the non-savvy through their connections.

Whatever the case, eschewing platform-specific implementations in favor of standards is a differentiator for services. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. If you marry your Web app to a browser or OS, your clock is ticking.