Visit Our Blog
When 100 Million People Think Your Site is Broken
Have you seen any ugly pages lately? Perhaps they’re just not Firefox-friendly or they break in another browser.
I stumbled upon WalMart.com this afternoon while searching for Wii video game specials when this page rendered.
It looked fine in Safari on my Mac, but horribly broken in Firefox. This could hurt sales. Hopefully someone from Wal-Mart is reading and can get it fixed soon.
Is someone in your organization responsible for helping your site speak to multiple browsers?
About the author
Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark and Always Be Testing. Bryan is available as a professional speaker. You can friend him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter (@TheGrok).
More articles from Bryan Eisenberg
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
For More, Subscribe To Grok!
- Capterra: The Conference Sept 13-15, Wash., DC
- "Recession Marketing: From Pre-click to Post-click" (webinar) Sept 16, 12pm EDT / 9am PDT
- "Securing the Sale: Turn Your Site's Browsers Into Buyers" (webinar) Sept 17, 2pm EDT / 11am PDT
- Excellence and Innovation conference Sept 28-30, Orlando
- The SEM Conference
Sept 23-24, Oslo, Norway - eConsultancy Peer Summit Oct 8, New York City
- The Bolo Conference Oct 12-14, Scotsdale, AZ
- Google GAAC/WOAC annual meetings
Oct 13-16, Googleplex California - eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit Oct 19-23, Wash., DC
December 18th, 2007
10:25 pm
Ouch. No reason for cross-browser mistakes like this anymore. I test my site at work on multiple browsers regularly — no reason why the big guys shouldn’t be doing the same.
December 19th, 2007
3:14 am
Amazing how the simple things get you. Where is testing and QA??
December 19th, 2007
9:35 am
Good reminder to always do basics
December 19th, 2007
11:24 am
Broken in Firefox, but working for Safari? Sounds like the PC-centric Wal Mart has its priorities all screwy!
December 19th, 2007
2:22 pm
Wonder how long it will take them to realize it?
December 19th, 2007
2:30 pm
25 hours later and they still haven’t fixed it. I have been keeping an eye out for it.
December 20th, 2007
8:52 am
Will they ever fix it? I think it will take atleast more than couple of months for them to spot it.
December 20th, 2007
11:25 am
Looks fine to me in Firefox on my Vista PC. Is this a Mac+Firefox-only issue or have they fixed it?
Since Mac only has about 4-7% market share, and Firefox overall has about 20-30% of the browser market share, I would say 100 million is a bit overstated.
However, there’s no excuse for Wal-Mart to have cross-browser or cross-OS issues of any kind.
December 21st, 2007
1:36 pm
[...] it can happen to Wal-Mart, it can happen to you. GrokDotCom reminds us why testing your site across different browsers is important, perhaps more than ever now [...]
December 24th, 2007
12:04 pm
It looks fine to me in Firefox on XP. What’s the problem everyone sees?
December 24th, 2007
12:05 pm
David, you can click on the thumbnail above to see the issue.
December 24th, 2007
12:07 pm
I once told the CEO of a client that their website was not rendering properly, and their IT guy refused to believe it until I sent screenshots. This year a very successful company sent out a good follow up email for gift deals that were still available. I tested it on multiple browsers on multiple machines. Some worked, some didn’t. I called them twice to let them know and it never got corrected.
December 24th, 2007
12:34 pm
Pitty i couldnt see the error. the problem you mention seems to have been fixed now.
December 24th, 2007
12:39 pm
Andy it is 6 days later and I am still seeing the same issue on my mac as well as several others using the firefox browser. Andy, what configuration are you using?
December 24th, 2007
4:03 pm
I’ve had issues like this – our website developer informs me of a text related rendering issue but I cannot duplicate it on any pc or any of our store’s pc’s using explorer or Firefox….strange. Guilty as charged- we havent fixed it.
December 25th, 2007
2:22 pm
It might be a problem with the version of Flash – I saw another site that had floating scroll bars with one version of Flash, but the bars were fine with the next version of Flash.
December 28th, 2007
2:47 pm
Not sure what this issue is, but 10 days later and it is still broken.
December 28th, 2007
4:41 pm
Considering that there are numerous browsers out there it’s valuable to check compatibility with all the common browsers on the market. It is also good to consider what kind of plug-ins that are needed to use your company web site. If you are using recently released plug-ins there are of course fewer web surfers who have them installed…
December 31st, 2007
11:41 am
People still using Mac?
December 31st, 2007
12:52 pm
I’m using firefox and not seeing that bar error.
January 28th, 2008
3:09 pm
This is actually not a Firefox problem but GTK/GUI Libs/Tiger (OS X 1.4.x) problem. It has to do with order of rendering elements on the page. Scrollbars are ALWAYS rendered last. Safari actually cheats/hacks around the problem so it is transparent to the user.
This seems to have been addressed in Leopard (current version of the OS). Or at least is no visible with the current browser/os combination.
Mozilla, it seems, will address this in version 3 of the browser, mozilla’s bug page: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187435
There is no clean way of getting around this, there are hacks, but the problem would re-surface once there is a redraw.