It’s not that I enjoy criticizing Microsoft, it’s that they make it so easy to do. Reading through the buzz of the Microsoft Live Shopping, it was pretty obvious that the tech and blogger community was pretty upset about not being able to use their FireFox Browser to check out the new service. The standards community is equally upset about a brand new site developed ingoring any standards.
This is painfully obvious of the misunderstanding of accessibility. At its core, accessibility means that your site should be viewable and understandable to anyone, regardless of device, disability, PDA, WAP, or browser. Simply excluding an entire browser technology is shameful.
Yes, even Opera and Safari users got the FireFox error message as well. Not even a different error message for those users. I guess you have to have a 9% market share or more to be exluded by name from a Microsoft site.
There is a strange irony of using the word ‘live’ for a site that, in this case. is all but dead.
Comment by Ian Lloyd — May 3, 2006 @ 7:47 am
“Yes, even Opera and Safari users got the FireFox error message as well. Not even a different error message for those users.”
A true testament to the stupidity of some of their programmers. Just because the visitor is not using Internet Explorer, they think we’re all most certainly using Firefox? Don’t they care that this makes the site look like some amateurish late 90’s-era javascript browser detection routine?
Comment by Massage Therapy Products — May 7, 2006 @ 3:15 pm