I happened to notice this message when I got my beta invitation to socialthing, a new identity aggregator that right now looks a lot like Plaxo Pulse and other sites, but maybe there’s more to it. Check this out:
Just head to the link below and you’ll get right in! Before you do,
make sure you’re using Safari or Firefox. We haven’t built in Internet
Explorer support just yet, but it’s coming! Lastly, before you get in,
if you think you’ve stumbled across a bug, first refresh your page
(just in case), and if that doesn’t work, refer to the last paragraph.
Have you seen that before, with sites optimizing for Firefox before Internet Explorer? It clearly makes sense for the geek audience Socialthing will attract. I wonder how far that’ll spread though.
Update: Social thing is planning a slew of differentiating updates ahead. They are one to keep an eye on.
Update 2: Be sure to read Socialthing Founder & CEO Matt Galligan’s response in the comments.
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Show comments Hide commentsWow. That’s a strange strategy. Maybe the idea is appeal to the Web 2.0 insider crowd and appear to be even more exclusive by only supporting the “cool” browsers. Funny.
The VortexDNA plugin is only available for Firefox. That’s not because it’s the business model of the future, though. I’m no programmer, but I suspect it’s just easier to start with Mozilla.
I figured I’d toss you a comment on here to explain why we went the direction we did.
We’ve been tracking the types of browsers that have been coming to our site on a regular basis.
Firefox: 56% of traffic
Safari: 24% of traffic
IE: 16% of traffic
Rather than spend a ton of time working on hacks and workarounds to make IE functional, we figured we would build for the majority of visitors to our site, and then build in IE support later. Because of some of the things that we’re doing with our CSS and Javascript, it will require a pretty big amount of work to get IE compatibility, but we’re actively working on it. We understand that we will miss people with this, but it’s the compromise we had to make to be sure we can at least get it out there and in peoples’ hands…
I’m used to seeing Firefox-only plug-ins. I can’t recall seeing that so explicit of Firefox-before-IE for the websites themselves.