Re: [Hampshire] Website Compatibility

>> I remain convinced that some are designed with bloody-mindedness
>> as well.
>
> and I take the equally bloody minded view that if I cannot access a
> website with opera or as a last resort iceweasel then I'll not bother
> with the site.

As much as I hate to defend IE only sites...

Mostly for big companies this comes down to testing and support. The
reason that they make an "IE only" statement despite the fact that it
works fine in other browers (and sometimes enforce this) is because it
costs cold hard cash to say anything different.

If you want to "support" anything other than IE you need to train your
support people, you need to maintain more software in your support centre
all of this costs money to do.

Your test team also have to repeat all their testing on other browsers and
other operating systems to make sure it all works. Some companies just
don't want to finance that and make a business decision that it is more
effective to lose a small % of customers who won't use IE/Windows than
spend the cash to do it.

Even if they don't support and test it would be nice if sites didn't
require IE and you are just stuck if it breaks, but some companies are not
prepared to take the risk, especially if they are American based and don't
want to risk being sued if it fails to work :)

Hopefully as Mac and Linux take more % of the market, and as Firefox
continues to take IE's market share then companies will look at the
business decision differently as there won't be a small percent they lose
by not supporting things other than IE & Windows.

The best thing you can do is complain, if they get enough complaints this
will influence any decision the company might make regarding future
support. Stopping using a site if they don't provide the service you want
is the best thing to do, but make sure you tell them that too! Otherwise
they never know and cannot change.

Often a great way to get things moving is to write to customer support and
tell them that you were going to use their site to purchase X (works best
with a high value product!), but decided to go to their competitor instead
because they supported Firefox / Linux.