discrimination

[volvoguy]

On 7/13/05, Norman Silverstone <norman at littletank.org> wrote:

> I had the need to register a piece of domestic equipment and tried to
> use the offered web site only to find that it would not work correctly
> for me. There was a warning saying that the combination of browser and
> OS that I was using could prevent certain parts of the site not working
> correctly and they were right. A further message read:- 'This site is
> best viewed with the latest version of Internet Explorer'.
> 
> I sent them an email protesting at this discrimination and I would like
> to hear if anyone else has come across sites with anything like this.

Hi Norman,

This is a pretty common occurrence on this little world wide web of
ours, although in general the trend seems to be declining. As a web
developer myself, I think I'm allowed to say that the primary reason
for this situation is web designers that aren't very knowledgeable.
Web standards like (x)HTML and CSS were designed to make life easier
for everyone, but in the wrong hands they can be disastrous. Instead
of taking the time to design a site with style sheets that will work
in all browsers, designers use JavaScript to *try* to determine what
browser a visitor is using. These "browser sniffers" are only so smart
though - as are the browser makers who don't identify their browser
properly or try to disguise themselves as another browser. (for
instance Opera is set to identify itself as Internet Explorer I
believe).

My bank (actually a little local credit union) does the same silly
thing you're describing - and they recommend on their log on page that
you use IE or Netscape 4 "or better" - and then disallow Firefox (or
Firefox on particular platforms like Linux). There's an extension for
Firefox that allows you to change your browser identification so these
sites will let you in, but like you, I usually prefer to let them know
that they're doing something not very nice. I do think it's better
though to present the technical side of the issue to them in hopes
they'll forward it to someone more knowledgeable than to yell
discrimination. For some web applications, right or wrong, it would be
a huge undertaking to make a "minority" browser display their site
properly. Luckily in the case of my bank, they were due to upgrade
their 1998-era web software anyway and the browser identification
problem got fixed in the process.

I'm pretty sure they've stopped their actual "campaign" for getting
people to upgrade websites and browsers, but you can probably glean
some information still from the webstandards.org website if you want
to send a more technical email to the offending website. Most likely
though, they either don't know how to fix the problem or they simply
don't care because of the relatively small userbase of non-IE
browsers.

Hope that sheds a little light.

-- 
Aaron

Ubuntu SVG Artwork - www.volvoguy.net/ubuntu
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