It's interesting that this is generally not frowned upon from the hacker community, even though only supporting Webkit is clearly the same fragmentation issue we've all been upset about for so many years.

I imagine if it was "Sorry, we only support IE9" you'd get a different reaction.

IE9 is not available on OS X and most Linux distros. Not the same :)

Exactly.

The reason that there's so much focus on web standards is because Microsoft used their browser to force platform lock-in.

I don't see going webkit only as being a problem: Chrome is available on the three major PC operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux), it's free and it's not owned by a PC OS vendor.

Now if it was Safari-only or IE-only, then that would be a problem.

No, Chrome is owned by an internet monopolist. But hey, that's better than a small OS vendor, right?

The Chrome trademark is owned by Google. Webkit is BSD and LGPL [1], and Chromium is GPLv2 [2] and virtually identical to Chrome except for branding and some proprietary plugins Google doesn't control the licenses for [3].

So yeah, while you're technically correct by your wording alone, I'd argue you're wrong in spirit.

[1] http://www.webkit.org/ (see bottom left) [2] http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/licenses [3] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoog...

Can either Apple or Microsoft really be accurately described as 'small'?

Actually, Chrome is not the same on all three systems. I can't remember the site, but a while ago someone wanted to share with me a site using advanced CSS3 transitions and it didn't work as expected on my Chrome on Linux (the latest beta version at the time). Only after switching to Windows and using Chrome there (the latest beta version too) I was able to see it.

It's free, unlike those other, costly browsers.

I would say that we don't mind because we understand that there are many features on "modern browsers" that are not available on IE 9 and below, but yet are web standards (ok, not all the time). Hackers also tend not to use IE, so that also helps explain it.

It really only sucks for general consumer-facing apps to not support a large variety of browsers. Otherwise, for specific apps with more tech-savvy users, just supporting a couple of modern browsers is just fine IMO.

The problem is that this is the same argument about why we had the "only supports ie6" way back in the day (and ie5.5 before that).

While I don't think that webkit will stagnate the way ie did, it's really amusing to see the webdev community repeating the exact same arguments supporting webkit-only sites that we were about ie5-only sites 12 years ago.

Sorry to disappoint on the firefox front, we'd love to support it and we will as soon as we can, but we're a small startup and sometimes we need to make tough decisions about where we spend our time and resources. We'll get to it!

You could at least let me look at the site with a warning that my browser is unsupported rather than blocking me.

I can understand the view that this would make you look worse, but my personal response is that I don't want to give your tool a second chance because of the annoyance (if everyone says it is the best thing since vim, of course, I'll get over myself and look :P).

If it was truly broken in Firefox I would've been curious enough to try it in Chrome. Sorry.

Fair points.

It takes 10 seconds do add a little message saying:

"We currently do not support Firefox but are working on it; for the moment proceed at your own risk, it may not work 100%".

Wasn't there an article recently about not treating early adopters like idiots. At least give us the benefit of the doubt.

Blocking outright just frustrates those of us who know better.

So.. What are the challenges?

Right now, being blocked like this, I'm assuming by default

- You sniff the UserAgent (didn't test) instead of using feature detection

- You're basing a product on non-standard web technologies and will, like Google does, later provide 'Please UPGRADE to Google Chrome' (emphasis mine) links all over the site, as on this FF landing page.

Worse: There's no introduction to the site at all. So the topic says 'Mobile Mockups', but I don't even see an about page, some introduction stories, images or whatnot. I end up with a bullshit message that tells me to install a different browser for a product that I cannot check out without doing just that.

There's not much room to present a product less favorable.

Please please please don't require a user of some sort to submit feedback - I don't need another set of credentials for this and you don't want more friction for users who want to help you out.

Also, please add tooltips for various icons - they aren't all self-explanatory.

Thanks for that - we wish anonymous feedback was an option - we use Get Satisfaction, it's a great service but it does require some form of sign in. We will keep your feedback in mind and maybe there are other things we can do.

I get that you don't have time to support all browsers, but you should at least allow users to try the app.

I'm using Opera, but I have a suspicion that it will work well with your app

Tough decision, nonsense. This is a total cop-out!

Edit: Toned it down a bit, but I hate this kind of thing.

Eh, small teams have to have focus. Of course they'll get around to fixing it in Firefox, but maybe they needed to work on something else first.

Thanks for that follow up - we do understand the annoyance of FF users - we will put that right ASAP.

Thanks, Ian

Wow, what a turn off.

Just asked one of the developers, they are working on it. There is nothing that stops the web site from working on FF other than additional testing and small fixes, which simply should be done, and is underway.

Turn off that it doesn't state anything else about the project, or what it offers.

Just tells me no, you're not a fit for it.

...

I was looking for an new UI mockup tool, too. Looks like I'll keep looking.

We are really sorry that you are annoyed by the lack of FF support. We will get to it as soon as we can - hope you might give Fluid UI a try at that point.

I can't believe that demo can't support firefox, it doesn't make anything that special :s

I think that google did a good job of providing chrome for almost all platforms, so I see it as a good cross platform deployment environment, now better than Java.

For most developers who will use such a tool it's not a problem to install a webkit browser.