April 01, 2004

Annoyed by the MSN-affiliated, animation-laden, Zubaz-inspired ESPN.com? There's a lite version.

posted by trharlan to general at 02:14 PM - 9 comments

Or just get a halfway-decent popup blocker. (Or better yet, a browser like Mozilla or FireFox)

posted by blarp at 02:21 PM on April 01, 2004

God bless you, trharlan. I was enjoying FireFox until it abruptly crashed and removed itself from my machine.

posted by jeffmshaw at 02:49 PM on April 01, 2004

Bookmark duly updated with lite version. Thanks!

posted by trox at 03:36 PM on April 01, 2004

I can't get any of the sub-pages to work in Firefox. Namely the NHL lite page. I get a blank page. Sigh.

posted by Succa at 03:57 PM on April 01, 2004

Blarp I am with you on the browsers, but ESPN is a bunch of bastards when it comes to the web. They say on the lite page that one is redirected for not having a "standards-compliant browser," but, in truth, to them that means MSIE (which is far from standards-compliant). I know this because I emailed them to complain about how their site was displaying (or in my case not displaying) and their answer was that they ONLY support MSIE. Granted the site has gotten better at displaying in Safari and Mozilla and Firebird, but I still canceled my "Insider" account after nearly 8 years due to ESPN's arrogance and insistance on all that Flash crap they put up mostly just to display their bandwidth-hogging advertisements that are 10x as big as anyone elses.

posted by scully at 09:03 AM on April 02, 2004

I've had no serious problems with ESPN's site, the flash is gratuitous, but I've been using it in mozilla or a mozilla variant for... 6-7 years now, without huge issues. They canceled my insider account, unfortunately. I'd had it since 1996 but only paid once. They finally caught on a couple weeks ago. :)

posted by tieguy at 09:12 AM on April 02, 2004

There were times when the site would render in Safari and Mozilla as this weird static page where no links worked (meaning they weren't even clickable) and everything "below the fold" was missing. It was after weeks of this that I complained and was told to switch to MSIE. I told them where they could put MSIE, and canceled my Insider account. Since then it is rare that I have issues. Perhaps they actually got sick of the hatemail and looked into the problem? ;)

posted by scully at 10:16 AM on April 02, 2004

This is great, thanks trharlan! Have any of you checked out the WAP (cell phone) site? It's great for sports junkies needing a "score." terrapin, have patience. MSIE is dominant now, but people are figuring out that Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, et al are much better browsers. With Dreamweaver now making standards-compliant pages easy to create, I expect the majority of sites will be compliant in two or three years.

posted by dusted at 11:41 AM on April 02, 2004

Um, thanks, Dusted. I am a web designer/developer and have been for 10 years :) I am quite familiar with MSIE's unwarranted place in the browser wars :) Persoanlly I completely disagree with your assessment about the future of the Web. It is my opinion that Flash and video are the unfortunate future of the Web. As more and more people get broadband, and more and more advertisers/marketers/capitalists get involved, the more and more the web will look just like tee vee. And that doesn't bode well for standards OR accessibility, despite Section 508. *sigh* Just my $.02

posted by scully at 12:10 PM on April 02, 2004

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