Forums | MacLife

The Canada Revenue Agency (that's the IRS, in U.S. terms) website still tells me to "Upgrade your browser to Firefox 2.0, Safari 3.0, or IE 6.0 in order to continue", whether I'm using Firefox on a PC, or Firefox/Safari on Mac. Solution: I use IE 6 via VMWare. I don't know how many times I've told them that their browser detection script needs to be updated or removed.

This has been going on now for two or three years.

Progress and efficiency at the speed of government....

http://www.maclife.com/forums/forum/2

SomeOneOrOther wrote:

mrreet2001 wrote:

Have you tried switching the "user agent" under the develop menu in safari?

There's a Firefox extension for changing the user agent as well, but it's beside the point, you know what I mean? I don't like putting a band aid on a problem that should really be fixed by a (lazy or negligent) webmaster.

In some cases, that's not an option, such as websites that use IE-specific ActiveX technology and the aforementioned WMV-DRM.

Also, some browser sniffers can be overzealous: I switched the user agent in Safari to IE7 on a survey I got once from osMoz.com (a great website for fans of my other passion besides the Mac, fragrances). They normally send out Mac-friendly surveys done in-house, and even have an iPhone app. Their system needed work, so they temporarily used a survey by Sensory Testing Systems. It still detected it as Safari, and told me to "download the latest Internet Explorer Browser". I later tried it in Firefox under a user agent switcher with the user agent set to IE7, and the message didn't pop up, but the survey crashed. (osMoz apologized for the Mac-unfriendliness of the STS survey and sent me a flash drive.)

Other sites, such as RBS WorldPay's Visa/MasterCard gift card websites (cards issued by RBS Citizens) say that IE "is required to use this site", but a quick user agent change to IE6 or IE7 in Safari does the trick, and the website then works fine. Same goes for the Staples site (MarkTheWorld) to create banners and custom business cards, though they've been promising better browser support and Staples.com integration for what seems like eons now. I guess there's no "easy button" for old code...

On a side note, many banks here in the US up until the early 2000s were notorious for requiring Windows/IE/ActiveX with special plugins for online banking. This was until the gaping security flaws of ActiveX became apparent, and you can bet that the banks would have continued using ActiveX and shackling customers to Windows and IE if the technology's security holes weren't big enough to fly a 747 through. (South Korean banks still require Windows/IE/ActiveX, but it's because of a special Korea-only algorithm known as SEED and the fact that NPAPI SEED support was dropped many years ago.)

Last edited by MFfan310 (2009-08-21 5:06 pm)

Ugh, ActiveX, yes, let's not overlook that. You're quite right, I can think of at least one site (MLXchange http://www.mlxchange.com) that makes exclusive use of it for their real estate listings. You can't go beyond the welcome page if you're not using IE.

Last edited by SomeOneOrOther (2009-08-23 10:41 pm)

True enough.

Tack on ESPN's web-based Poker play.  No Mac support, and when I sent in an email asking when Mac support was going to be developed, I didn't receive a response.