Filing a case for discrimination
As a Mac user, it is not uncommon for me to encounter various forms of discrimination on the web. I am not saying that only Mac users are barred, it’s just more obvious to Mac users because we tend to have a more diversified choice of browsers, in short, we do not always use IE.
There are sites that pop up a javascript window saying “Please use Internet Explorer to view this site” upon entry (like Netvigator) but I could click and continue to surf around. There are sites that clearly not supporting anything but IE/Win (like HSBC and HangSeng eBanking) and sites that completely fail on Mac even they advertised themselves using a stylish Mac on TV or magazine (like ESDLife). But the most irritating cases are sites that never tell you that something on their sites won’t work on other browsers until you discover that you must use it. I don’t know whether the people who developed these sites have no ideas that there *are* users not using IE/Win on this earth or they just didn’t bother to test their sites thoroughly.
This is the problem, if you don’t use IE, you are like travelling to a country without a VISA. When I surfed to U.S. Consulate General to make an appointment for a VISA application interview, I felt discriminated again. There was a very simple form that I had to fill in, the first field was “Date”, pretty obvious, I tried to type in the date in the suggested form YYYY/MM/DD, oops! It wouldn’t let you type. So you must push the button “Date” besides and choose a date in a pop-up. Cool, I clicked a date, oops! It didn’t respond at all, I tried every available day on the calendar and still it didn’t work! I was using Firefox, then I tried Safari, Mozilla, IE for Mac… all didn’t work!! I gave up, I turned on my PC and surfed to the same page using IE 6 on Windows, it just worked. Damn!
I am going to compile a list of popular websites that don’t support Mac (I am sure someone has done this before) to cool down myself - because it would take so long to compile.
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27. July 2004 at 15:37
HSBC works well in Mozilla and ESDLife & PPS partly works with Netscape 7.02.
27. July 2004 at 18:44
Sorry Larry, I actually meant HSBC and Hang Seng Bank Business Accounts. So far I don’t have any problem using both of their Personal Accounts on Safari/Mac or other browsers. I suppose they have a different authentication system for Business Account. Correct me if I am wrong again.
I once had PPS work using a certain version of Mozilla. For ESDLife, no luck yet.
31. October 2004 at 00:39
The form worked like a charm with Opera, and identified as Opera.
But i can understand your frustration. Gov sites are usualy set up as a pain in the … A lot even insist on developers to develop a site with CSS for only NN 4 browsers… go figure!