Web app quality assurance

[mtbc]

I had mentioned how Firefox 51 pops up file chooser dialogs that more than fill my entire screen. This makes it difficult to use some websites. For example, with advertising items on the popular sales website Preloved, I cannot use Firefox for uploading photographs. However, their pull-down-menu multi-select options do not work with Chromium. Using a combination of the two browsers, neither of which is obscure, I can actually post an advertisement. I strongly suspect that were they using simpler HTML, CSS, JavaScript, less ambitiously featureful and themed, then everything would work just fine even on Internet Explorer 6. However, over here in the real world, many interactive websites seem to be essentially unusable in some popular browsers. It is not as if I have a panoply of unusual plugins and add-ons installed.

I perhaps also mentioned how the website of Ecotricity, our energy supplier, wrongly forces Firefox into the mobile version once I log in as a customer, making some aspects of it very difficult to use, for instance by offering no means of scrolling vertically. I had interacted with them about this, provided user agent strings, etc., but to no avail. In contrast, I must offer kudos to Cinema Paradiso, from whom we rent DVDs by mail, who adjusted part of their site to become more mobile-friendly and far less usable for me. They took on board a number of my criticisms, promptly addressed one of the greater ones and another, and are apparently soon to address a further point. While I would prefer to live in a world in which this responsiveness to constructive criticism would not have come as a surprise, it is nonetheless pleasantly agreeable. Excellently, I have also discovered that, at least for the meantime, with a slight manual adjustment to a URL I can get back to the old less-mobile-friendly version of the page.

Comments

[goldibehr]

Yes, I've noticed this trend of web designers assuming at least a 1280x720 pixel display. On a smaller screen, sometimes the column layout gets wacky, and other times controls are unreachable. Very annoying.

[mtbc]

Absolutely - and it's not that hard to have one's top menu bar or whatever compress its spacing somewhat with the window. Rather than, say, the main body of the content disappearing far below under a sidebar. Ecotricity's pretty bad: a tall thin display with, even in a wider browser window, enormous empty side margins. Often the webpage isn't all of what I'm doing: I have notes at the side and chats going on and whatever so I really do not want it so dominating the screen space.

The worst thing about unreachable controls is that if I can't see them I don't necessarily even realize that they're there. (-: