I work for a medium sized marketing company, and we have an Agile environment. Well, when I say Agile, some would say we do “ScrumBut” as coined by the excellent Scrum Trainer Jimi Fosdick. To this end, if we have good reason for implementing change, then the business are quite happy to take on this change if they can see the benefit.

The internal line-of-business application is a web-based reporting suite and set of tools. We’ve written this in a mixture of CodeIgniter and Zend Framework (I’ll be blogging about these later, since we have an unusual setup). The appplication heavily uses jQuery & AJAX, and we’ve spent a lot of time working on improving performance in IE7. However, it soon became aware that being an internal application, the easisest and cheapest way to combat this problem in the short term was to get the business to use a better browser.

We rolled out Firefox 3.5 as the default browser for the business – we have no requirements for Internet Explorer – I dont think I would want to work somewhere where they were still uses 3rd world browsers like IE6. I know there has even been talk of Orange fining employees for installing Firefox.

I am therefore currently developing some mockups using XHTML5 and CSS3 – and I only need to test them in one browser for now. It’s turned developing into a joy again; writing fully-compliant code for a (mostly) fully-compliant browser and it rendering exactly as you would expect it to. If only all front-end development could be as easy as this.