Liveleak and platform dependence

[updated] Liveleak staff support proved to be quite helpful. The issue may be less of a platform dependence as I had presumed, and more of a flash and (format/video) coding issue. [update 2] Looks like it may have been a problem in the player for flash8 video. They fixed it, within about 3 hours of my reporting it. That is the sort of service we like to deliver to our customers. I appreciate this.

Liveleak does not work on firefox. Or opera. Only IE under windows. Its competitors have no trouble in firefox and opera. On Linux as well as windows. I sent them a note requesting they fix their client so that it does work under firefox and opera, and do testing under Linux as well. I am not hopeful, as there are fairly large segments of developers out there that believe that IE is the only browser, activeX the only rich application interface, and that firefox (at something like 20+% and growing of the browser market) is in the noise. I had a discussion with a business bank recently that sent shivers up my spine. They have an online presence. They believe their site to be secure, and the IE dependence isn’t an issue in their minds. IE. Secure. Ok. Our stuff has to run on any platform our customers wish. So our web interface (DragonFly) has to run from PDAs through large client desktops. Thats the beauty of the web, as we write to standards, and it has a fighting chance of doing this. We fix the corner cases, and test relentlessly, and we can make sure it does work. Using smart cross platform ajax and CSS libraries, we can hide away the gnarly broken IE bits, and have one code running on all clients. Nice, eh. We do this as we don’t want to limit our user audience. We don’t want to tie them to one platform. Because platforms change over time. So do standards, but you have a fighting chance of doing something correct when you write to a standard which is supported across platforms. Hopefully Liveleak will fix their client, though I anticipate that we will get a note of the flavor of “huh? why doncha use a supported platform …” . Youtube works. Pretty much everywhere. If we get this response back from Liveleak (or no response), I’ll just ask the friends whom have been using it to stop, and go to one of the services that work. Why would I patronize a platform that does not work? In the era of business models that depend upon page views and increasing customer base, pissing off a sizable fraction of your potential base is not a wise move.