Excuse me while I get on my high horse for a moment. Microsoft have just done something not all that out of line with their dated line of thinking when it comes to the web, but it still deserves to be aired here. They recently sponsored a climate change education site called Carbon Grove, but there is just one small problem.

As you can clearly see, Microsoft don't give a flying toss about the 37% of people using Firefox and 4.6% using other browsers. This really winds me up for many reasons, but the craziest part is that conforming to web standards is no fricking big deal. It's piss easy. It's so easy in fact that even Microsoft can do it, so it can only mean they are more interested in getting people onto Internet Exploiter than they are interested in, you know, making a web site accessible by the largest number of people possible for their client. If I were the client (I suspect they probably aren't even aware of this) I would be super pissed to learn that Microsoft have deliberately excluded over 40% of my market. This also means that every Mac OS user is excluded - all of them. Ouch.

Anyway, here's the real kicker. It turns out the site will run fine on Firefox after all, it's just that Microsoft made the web site check for Inferior Explorer and throw the error message if it can't find it. But, if you spoof your user-agent with this Firefox add-on (trick web pages into thinking you are Using Internet Explorer even though you are using Firefox) the Carbon Grove site works fine.

Thank you Microsoft for being anti-competitive w*nkers again. The rest of the world works together to make the web more accessible by conforming to standardised practices, but you still prefer the 'dark-ages' approach of putting your own agenda before your client and your audience. And this is precisely why no reputable web developer on the face of the Earth has any respect for you when it comes to web standards.