Riding the Bucking Browser Bronco!
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008Just to reiterate on a comment made in Dan’s recent post “the past few weeks have been typically eventful and interesting in the life of our little start-up Woosabi” - It sure has! Our great little product is now in Public Beta which effectively means its in the hands of ‘real people’.
My biggest concern as a designer is not the expected “Don’t break it!”, some may be surprised to learn that a good creative education teaches you not to be sentimental about your work. Great product design be it software or hardwrae is not about carving into a static block but about shaping a moving object. (If it helps just think how many generations of iPod we’ve seen, and still to come) And this is why we need this Public Beta so we can properly test and scale all aspect of the product so we get it as perfect as possible for each stage of it’s development.
“yeeHa!”
The largest hurdle for us as now is making sure our product is accessible to users with out asking them to migrate from their prefered web browser or install anything new. In a perfect world, yes, we’d all be using one browser and said browser would work with all the sites that we browse. The real world, however, is diametrically opposed to the perfect world. Divergent Web standards create compatibility problems with many site/browser combinations and it’s utterly frustrating to say the least.
We built Woosabi to work with what we consider to be one of the safest and more functional browsers; Firefox. However we don’t want to dictate anything to our users, it’s just not how we want to do things. So, we’re busy trying to make sure ‘browser preference’ doesn’t get in the way of you getting to experience and help shape Woosabi.
We’re not going to make a big ’song and dance’ about supporting a new browser but what we would “love” is forpeople to signup for their FREE Woosabi account and just tell us how they are getting on using their account with their chosen browser.
After trawling many sites to solve it the common solution, most of which use the CSS setting overflow: auto I found that the root of the problem seems to be this this:
