Walmart Rejects Firefox and Safari 555
babooo404 writes "Last week, Walmart launched their online video download service. Immediately there were posts that the service did not work with the Firefox or Safari browsers. There was a collective, "WTF" when this happened as this is 2007, not 1997. Now it appears that reports are out that Walmart has completely turned off the ability to get into the application at all by Firefox, Safari or any other browser it does not like."
The old alliance parter program (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Big whoop... (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems obvious to me (Score:1, Interesting)
(2) On the other hand the sort of people who hack DRM systems are most likely nerds who have a religious antipathy to IE, so won't be able to get onto to site in order to work out how to hack it.
(3) So, by restricting access to IE they have achieved the following:
(a) delayed, possibly by as much as many days, the hacking of the DRM system, thus protecting their business model for long enough for them to actually make a little money
(b) lost exactly $0.00 in business that they wouldn't have got from the slashweenies anyway.
Sounds like a good decision.
born dead (Score:5, Interesting)
The movies are probably the altered (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Of course they wouldn't use Firefox or Safari (Score:3, Interesting)
it's not just the video service (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.walmartbenefits.com/ [walmartbenefits.com]
Re:User-Agent (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course they wouldn't use Firefox or Safari (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is Microshaft... pure and simple. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of course they wouldn't use Firefox or Safari (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seems reasonable to me (Score:4, Interesting)
the DRM software in version 10 is probably not included automagically in all regular windows xp sp2 installations, meaning that if you want to use the store with your dial-up modem (as many people would- not trying to troll here), you would have to first upgrade all your MS stuff via Windows update, probably not knowing to uncheck the windows genuine advantage box, and downloading and instaling that.
Some of the patches are great, some not so much. If I patch my computer over a 768kbps connection or lower and something breaks all because I wanted to use walmart's video store, I am a totally pissed off consumer.
One wonders if MS didn't have a hand in this...
Re:Pushing people back to IE (Score:5, Interesting)
She doesn't immediately switch back to IE.
She places the blame for the broken site on the proper entity
She avoids sites that are IE only, as she perceives them as dangerous and broken
She can still go to the sites that are IE only if it is really important to her.
If it is a site that she is going to go to anyway, you can set the plug in to automatically load in IE, and grandma care for that site.
Re:Of course they wouldn't use Firefox or Safari (Score:4, Interesting)
Macintel (Score:3, Interesting)
Praising a WalMart employee may not be a favor ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Two theories
(1) Such quality service may be the expected day-to-day norm, so management may have put the employee in the "meeting expectations" bucket and hence warranted no attention. As opposed to the "needs improvement" bucket which does warrant attention.
(2) Providing "too much" service to a single customer is a negative in management's eyes and you did the employee no favor with your praise. When a store's strategy is price leadership cost cutting may rule customer interaction. Employees may be expected to always be exceptionally friendly and polite but offer little more than telling you what isle to find something on. More expensive retailers that focus on customer service would be more appreciative of your call. Say a Macy's sales rep in a clothing department spending 5 minutes with you picking matching shirts and ties. In short, "good" varies with corporate strategy.
E-Commerce in General & Flash... (Score:3, Interesting)
I still expect that when I attempt Ecommerce on the web that I'll likely have to use IE 6 or better at some point. I have been pleasantly surprised as of late that most of the companies I've delt with on the web allowed me to complete transactions in Opera and/or Mozilla/Firefox. One of the ironies I've encountered is that it is often the bigger companies which make it impossible to use IE & not the smaller shops. Sometimes you come across a poorly coded site on a small shop, but the large companies try to add everything under the sun to allegedly make the experience better and it ends up breaking things. Larger companies tend to set up more roadblocks of endless forms to fill out as well, and forced registration..etc I've abandoned more purchases due to if I can't complete my transaction in two screens (and really only want one) then its not worth my time to buy there. If it takes 20 minutes to checkout, to hell with them -- my time isn't free. Amazon.com will *never* have me as a customer due to their checkout. I don't care if I only have to fill it out once. If it takes longer on the web to order than calling the place on the phone, I'm not going to do business with them -- and if I have to use flash to complete the transaction, I'm likely not going to do business with them either as many of the applications written for it break in other browsers without reporting an error despite the touts of many developers that "flash makes everything display and work the same".
Re:This is Microshaft... pure and simple. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not this one [walmart.com].
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just for fun, yes I have. When I use straight Safari I got the message that Walmart only supports IE, but when I told Safari to lie (debug mode) and tell their site that I am using IE, with Windows, it worked fine. Of course I didn't attempt to download anything which i would never do anyway. After all, I like old movies and have gotten some from Walmart at $5.50 or so outa of their bargain bin. Eventually I suppose the expensive downloads on the site will sell for that price or less also.
It seems they are deliberately doing this as a matter of policy. It has nothing to do with programming incompatibility.
Thank god for plugins (Score:3, Interesting)
Typical lazy programming. If the ID-10-T's designing this sight had done any studying at all since about 2000 they would know you don't need to build browser specific sites if you bother to code to standards. Even IE will work.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://pipct.net/temp/malwart.gif [pipct.net]
So their site also depends rather heavily on Javascript.
Same problem with Air Canada (Score:3, Interesting)
Unsupported Browser Warning. We have detected that the browser you are using is not able to view some of the more advanced elements of our >website, and may prevent you from completing your booking.
To view supported and tested configurations, pleaseclick here
I wrote to them to complain, saying that there is no reason why they can't make a web site that works with any modern browser. They wrote back to me and "helpfully" suggested this as a solution to "MY" problem:
We have been made aware that some of our customers encounter at times difficulties in using their MAC computer when trying to use the Air Canada Web Site. Even though we are working to improve our web site, these following quick steps have proven to be quite useful for most of our clients to enable debug functionality on Mac. To enable this functionality :
(1) Go to and download OnyX
(2). Open OnyX and select the "APPEARANCE" tab and then select the "Misc." tab, far right
(3) Enable the "Safari Debug menu" option.
(4) Quit OnyX and then open Safari.
(5)You will now see a "Debug" menu on the far right-navigate down to "User Agent" on this menu and select "Windows MSIE 6.0"
(6) Safari is now behaving like Windows IE version 6.
So the "solution" is to pretend that I am using Explorer to make the warning go away. If anyone thinks that this is a viable solution then perhaps 'faking' Explorer will work for Walmart as well.
Is there any site out there that we can direct companies like Walmart or Air Canada to to explain why they should make a standards compliant web site?