Organisations refusing to embrace web standards

There are a few reasons why companies choose to avoid web standards. Some decided to stay with old or proprietary technology (Flash, Windows Media plug-in) because it gives them an illusion of greater copyright protection, others fell into a proprietary technology trap when developing their Web business model, and now do not have the resources to convert their outdated processes to keep up with the evolving Web standards. It is understandable for a company to use IE6 optimised website for its internal processes, if all employees are expected to use IE6. It is a totally different situation if a company has an Internet facing website, yet it decides to mandate obsolete technology for all of its customers. Below are just a few examples of organisations that have plenty of resources to support newer web standards, yet continue to force their visitors to use buggy and insecure web browsers and outdated operating systems.

  • GE Health - They have an obnoxious list of requirements. Their browser test page looks for a specific user-agent string, and accepts only IE with Java, Flash, and WMP installed.
  • TurboTax Intuit - Tells you to "Download a supported browser and/or use a supported operating system". Linux is of course not on the list, however they are happy to accept an unpatched Windows XP.
  • BlackBoard - Their supported browsers and operating systems page lists browsers that were released more than 3 years ago. Somehow Firefox 3.0 and Safari 2 are deemed acceptable, while Chrome is not even on the list.
  • QuickBooks Intuit - They recommend Windows Vista for an operating system. This is cruel, as they obviously do not care about their customers. None of the alternative browsers or operating systems are listed on their system requirements page.
  • FAFSA - U.S. Government agencies are hopelessly behind in terms of keeping up with the current technologies. FAFSA online application supports AOL 8.0 and IE 6.0 for Windows XP and Vista, yet I see an incompatible browser page while using Firefox 9.0 or Chrome 14.
  • USPTO - United States Patent and Trademark Office has a website that is really quite useless. They allow you to view patent documents only after you have installed a third-party TIFF viewer plug-in. They decided to stick with a proprietary Adobe TIFF format that has not been updated since 1992. In order to view patent documents it is recommended to avoid 3rd party plug-ins all together by using http://www.pat2pdf.org/
  • Microsoft - On the surface they have embraced HTML5. IE Browser and Windows Phone platform includes support for the latest HTML standards as evidenced in their browser test suite. Unofficially, MS is still trying to fight the standards by pushing their own proprietary SilverLight plug-in in Bing Maps Streetside, which by the way is a miserable failure.

    • One common approach for bypassing user agent compatibility checkpoints is to send them exactly what they expect. It can be done with little effort in Firefox by simply typing about:config in the address bar, typing in the filter box general.useragent.override. If no such key exists, simply create a new "string" entry and pick any user-agent string from this list. You can also try the "User Agent Switcher" extension for Firefox.

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