Yahoo waters down Firefox pledge

Yahoo said on Friday afternoon that a statement from the company's Australian office on Tuesday, which claimed that all future products would be compatible with both the Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) browsers, was inaccurate.

In February, Yahoo launched a search toolbar for Firefox, but users of the open source browser were forced to switch back to IE when accessing some Yahoo services. Following communications between Yahoo and ZDNet Australia , Yahoo issued a statement saying the company would not launch any new products or services in the future without ensuring they work on both IE and Firefox.

However, on Friday, a Yahoo representative from the US admitted that the original statement was 'factually incorrect' because, although Yahoo realises that Firefox-compatibility is important, it is not in a position to promise all future products would be both Internet Explorer and Firefox compatible.

"In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology. I'm not saying we are not going to be developing and exploring other areas -- we are. But there are so many different products on the Yahoo network that there may be some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser," the representative said.

The representative confirmed that Yahoo Messenger's Avatar customisation service is definitely being extended to Firefox, but could not provide a firm launch date.

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1. New Technology? The standards followed by Firefox (not to mention Opera and Safari) but largely ignored by MSIE date back to 1998-2000. Other sites have managed to employ them years ago. Anonymous -- 19/03/05

   New Technology?
   The standards followed by Firefox (not to mention Opera and Safari) but largely ignored by MSIE date back to 1998-2000. Other sites have managed to employ them years ago.

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2. Sounds like a very polite way of saying that there are some activex monitoring extensions (spyware that the customers accepts voluntarily) on IE that won't be available or desirable for firefox (for fear of the expected back lash). It also sounds like the Anonymous -- 19/03/05

   Sounds like a very polite way of saying that there are some activex monitoring extensions (spyware that the customers accepts voluntarily) on IE that won't be available or desirable for firefox (for fear of the expected back lash). It also sounds like they will be doing some things on firefox that they won't be doing for IE.

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3. I created a petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?YahooFFX to get Yahoo! to change their mind and do what the Aussies said they were going to do - fully support Firefox. And its a mistake for Yahoo! not to support it because they w Anonymous -- 20/03/05

   I created a petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?YahooFFX to get Yahoo! to change their mind and do what the Aussies said they were going to do - fully support Firefox. And its a mistake for Yahoo! not to support it because they will just lose customers as more people switch away from IE and Windows.

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4. Yahoo...who is a Very Big Company should use the "The W3C Markup Standard" and there would be NO Problems...im Very dissapointed in this "POOR SUPPORT" from such a big company(and from many of the IE made web sites...They just do not C Anonymous -- 21/03/05

   Yahoo...who is a Very Big Company should use the "The W3C Markup Standard" and there would be NO Problems...im Very dissapointed in this "POOR SUPPORT" from such a big company(and from many of the IE made web sites...They just do not CARE about the standard)

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