TV Licence Online - Unsupported Browser
March 13th, 2008
Via Brendan Kehoe on the Irish Internet Users Group on the Irish TVLicence.ie website:
The TV Licence Online system supports Internet Explorer 6 or Version 7 for Windows only at this time.
We have detected that you are using another browser. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t use the TV Licence Online service at this time.
Don’t these people realise that Firefox has a 38.6% market share in Ireland and growth rate of 55%? Those were the statistics from last summer anyway, but even if they’re inaccurate now it makes no difference.
TG4 site has been discussed several times on ILUG recently due to its lack of Linux support. TG4 can be used with Firefox, or on a Mac, and at least they have some excuse based on the fact that they are streaming video, which is a bit more difficult than clicking a few buttons to “renew my licence”.
I’ve sent a mail to tvlicence.web at anpost.ie; not to “register my desire to use another browser”, but to register my disgust that it is unsupported for absolutely no good reason. Whoever developed this TV Licence part of the An Post website has forgot about rule no. 2 of web application development:
- Rule Number 1: no animated gifs or smileys that talk to you.
- Rule number 2: if you’re going to actively exclude a huge chunk of your users, you better have a very good reason.
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March 13th, 2008 at 13:14 pm
[...] Found on James Galvin’s awesome blag. [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 19:55 pm
Yeah, noticed this alright. Made a post about it over on Boards.ie about it last week.
You think it’s bad that only Internet Explorer on Windows is supported? The people using Mac’s have no alternative - Safari, Opera, Firefox. Camino - none work (except using the Firefox plugin ‘User Agent Switcher‘ seemed to trick the User Agent sent in the header.)
Bit of a joke alright and I’d expect a standard response from them of “Thank you for your comment. We are working on adding support for other browsers”.
March 13th, 2008 at 20:01 pm
I’m on a Mac myself, 80% Mac, Linux 20% of the time. Actually got a reply saying they’re going to be testing a new version of the site that supports firefox next week, and that they hope to support Firefox in April. Will check back next month.
June 7th, 2008 at 8:42 am
it is absolutely ridiculous that a website such as anpost.ie does not support mac osx- it’d be llike an airline not allowing a mac user to not book online. if anpost.ie was a non-semi-state, this would simply NOT be allowed to happen.. also how difficult can it be for a website developer to develop for Macs, especially when far more obscure websites do.