Fubra, an example of a company that doesn’t care about Mac’s

Editor’s note: This post was done a long, long time ago. Both myself and Fubra have grown up a lot since and Fubra now understand that Mac’s matter when it comes to developing websites.

Today Fubra became the third official mirror for php.net. A contact of mine works there so I quickly visited the site, only to see the site completely and utterly messed up in Safari – with minor bugs in Firefox and Opera. Naturally I point these out, since this is a company wanting to build ‘web 3.0′ and if they do they need to approach web 2.0 properly by meeting web standards first.

Here’s a view of what the site looks like in Safari at my normal browser size (which fits 1024×768 based sites with some extra padding either side):
fubra screenshot Fubra, an example of a company that doesnt care about Macs

So let’s get onto the vision:

Fubra is a ‘new media’ company. It’s our goal to create and publish great content and then to monetise that content through advertiser relationships.

We set ourselves apart from our competition by designing, building and managing our own infrastructure, which means the buck starts and stops here.

We are passionate about enabling relevant connections between our advertisers and the people who use our web sites every day.
- Brendan McLoughlin (Managing Director)

And my problem with the actions I just experienced with my contact/the guy sitting next to him who coded the site.

I mentioned the site bugs to which I received a ‘can we get a screenshot?’
‘sure, ‘.
A few seconds later.. ‘what version of Firefox is this in?’,
‘no that screenshot is in Safari’,
‘oh this is on a Mac then? Cause if it is, he doesn’t care’, (referring to the person next to him, who coded the site)
‘yeah it is, in Safari’,
‘Safari sucks ass’
… and they go on to say they won’t fix it.

The ‘contact’ of mine is now blocked from Instant Messaging as a stand off for web standards. And I’m disappointed to say that this continues through several of their websites.

For the companies without Mac’s, here’s how your company can allow itself to be cross-browser compatible

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Comments:

  1. Not very many people know what Web 2.0 means anymore!
    Web 2.0 is a website that is user-driven, meaning it’s up to the users to make the site last.

    Shame about that site, but not very many people use Mac’s :)

  2. true not many people use mac’s but you should always make your site so it works to the most obscure users as well as the common ones.

    Darius

  3. Hi Jamie,

    Our company does care about macs. Just because a site partially doesn’t render in Safari on a mac it doesn’t suggest that we are a mac unfriendly company or that we don’t care about them. I really like my MacBook and I run the company so your post is pretty badly researched to say the least.

    A more accurate statement would be Jamie Huskission hasn’t heard about the tort of injurious falsehood.

    Nevertheless you make a good point and I am disappointed that you got the response you did having made a suggestion to us that we should try and be compatible with as many browsers as possible. I can say our focus internally is on Firefox and then IE and then if we get any spare time or complaints like this then we have a look at other browsers like Safari.

    You might know, if you know someone who works for our company, that we run quite a few web sites 57 in total so making sure they are all working in every permutation of browser and OS is quite a large task and one that is secondary to the development and implementation of new features especially if the browser concerned represents a low percentage of the market and our visitors and when there is another option (firefox on the mac) that works perfectly well.

    Brendan

  4. Brendon – this post wasn’t about an in depth analysis of your company (and that’s pretty clear by how short it is), so whether you use a MacBook or not is completely irrevelevant.

    This post was about the 2-3 employees of Fubra that I experienced basically telling me to f-off because I was reporting Safari based errors accross your network of sites.

    The argument of ‘our audience doesn’t use that browser’ is mostly void to the fact that they can’t use the websites in the browser in the first place, so they’d probably be leaving the sites rather than trying to work around it themselves. I’d also like to point out here I mentioned Opera and FireFox bugs too which where also pretty bad – so this isn’t solely about Safari.

    I’d also like to note that FireFox on the Mac is not considered that great an option by most.

  5. I notice you deleted my comment on your site not actually validating as xhtml compliant, and it still doesnt.

  6. Noticed it Ben don’t worry. Deleted it because I’m getting ready to release a new version of the site today/tomorrow – which is totally valid.

    So didn’t see the point in approving a comment that would only be valid for a day or so. I have however approved your second comment so I can explain why I didn’t approve your first.

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