I heard the hype about AjaxWrite, and decided I must investigate. Alas, when I clicked the AjaxWrite icon, I was greeted with this error message:
I can’t decide whether this is a work of brilliant satire or just a boneheaded move. Either way it’s hilarious.
Update: In the comments, Pete quotes a post from “ajaxbrian” that says, “YES, we are GOING to support I.E.” No link, so I can’t check it out more fully.
Update #2: AjaxWrite might need a better spell-checker. Look carefully at the screen snippet I posted here. Hint: It’s worth waiting for.
Ed Bott 
Hi Ed,
Interesting?
Yes, we do NOT support I.E. YES, we are GOING to support I.E. 🙂
ajaxbrian Posted: 23.03.2006, 17:28
registered: Mar. 2006
Posts: 24
Status: offline
last visit: 23.03.06 Just a sticky note to let everyone know that we ARE going to support both Internet Explorer and Safari when we release the final version, even though we currently only support Firefox.
Firefox is much more Ajax-friendly, and it has been much easier to prototype for it. Also, some of our code requires XUL, which is Firefox-only; we’re having to devise work-arounds for other browsers, and those aren’t ready yet.
Thanks again for all your input and suggestions on this and other topics. I’m putting this note here so there’s no confusion; yes — we ARE going to support the most popular browser on the Internet, eventually. 😛
Thanks for that clarification, Pete. Don’t you think it would be easy to put something on that error page that says “We’re sorry, but this early release of AjaxWrite requires Firefox… Don’t worry, we plan to support all popular browsers, including IE and Safari, eventually.”
The current error message is a big middle finger to the majority of their visitors.
Why do you find this surprising? Most of the Web 2.0 projects these days start off with Firefox support, simply because it’s the easiest to design for. It’s in the middle of the 3 biggies (those being Safari, FF and IE). Safari is on the standards-compliance high end, coming with it all the caveats of an imperfect set of standards. IE is on the standards-compliance low end, coming with it all the hacks and workarounds Microsoft has forced web developers to go through to get things to render correctly in their proprietary system.
It’s only logical that one would release a preview as easily and quickly as possible. Once you have all your bugs worked out in the first release, you start expanding that release to other browsers. Get the basics down, then work on the workarounds to get things supported everywhere.
This is by no means a first (and I could spout off several projects I’ve used that have done a FF-only beta period). I doubt they ever thought about adding a “Just hang in there, IE users” because most people who would be interested in using their service at this point would be geeks who are using FF anyway, and who also hate IE because it’s IE and from Microsoft.
You gonna get upset when it only supports IE6 too?
First of all, who says I’m upset? I said it’s hilarious.
I am certainly not going to use this from any work PC I have, since I have Office or something equivalent installed on all of them. I might be tempted to use it from a PC at a home or office where I’m visiting, or a public Internet terminal. In none of those cases do I have the option to install a new browser.
In Michael Robertson’s comments at Dwight Silverman’s blog, he says, “Microsoft isn’t evil, but they are ruthless, dishonest, make marginal quality software and charge too much. They need competition and anything I can do to help bring that about is positive.”
A statement that explains their IE strategy shows respect for visitors. The current approach drives away precisely the people who might otherwise be attracted to Firefox and other Microsoft alternatives. It might feel good to “stick it to the man,” but it’s a bad business decision, IMO.