A recent update on Facebook has rendered various bits of the site unusable in Konqueror, including the ‘Add to friends’ link. Since this is a pretty crucial part of Facebook, I think I am justified in the overblown title to this post.

(For the interested, Konqueror reports this error: Error: http://static.ak.facebook.com/js/base.js?12:56066: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: eval )

Of course, I could file a bug report with them. I’m not going to bother, because I already did so for one bug, and the response I got back included this:

Please note that we only support the browsers listed below and strongly recommend that you update your browser to the newest version available.

The browsers listed were:

Internet Explorer 6.0 Internet Explorer 7.0 Safari Firefox 1.5 for PCs Firefox 1.5 for Macs Firefox 2.0 for PCs Firefox 2.0 for Macs

This kind of thing gets old pretty fast (I had a similar problem with my online bank just the other day). Konqueror is an absolutely great browser, and being told to get a newer browser is the last thing I want to hear. Konqueror integrates brilliantly into the rest of my KDE system (think KWallet for all my passwords, kioslaves for just about everything,…) and I’m not going to change for Facebook. It is just such a pain in the neck that Konqueror has such a low market share (I can’t wait for Konqueror to use WebKit).

At the end of the day, contrary to what many web developers and browser writers would like you to believe, quality and standards compliance mean nothing — Konqueror is easily as good as Firefox, but people don’t design to standards, they design to what the major browsers can do. De facto standards rule the roost, and the only thing that matters is market share.

The only reason I’m bothering to post this is I figure I might actually generate more attention this way than filing a bug report.